Checking in on the Snac/Dillo combination again.

Checking in on the Snac/Dillo combination again. Dillo displays public Snac profies just fine, and since Snac only uses HTTP authentication, it’s able to log into an account. If you see this, it means I’m able to post through Snac using Dillo. Which I think I remember being able to do back when I read about the relaunch. But I didn’t do a thorough study at the time.
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OK, so posting, replying, editing and deleting all work on Snac through Dillo!

The UI is a bit clunky because the browser doesn’t support the HTML5 Details element, so all the forms and buttons and fields are visible all the time. But it works!

Finally updated my handle to use my main domain name.I figured it would be …

Finally updated my handle to use my main domain name.

I figured it would be more complicated, but it’s literally just 2 steps:
1. Add a DNS record with the value Bluesky gives you.
2. Confirm it in Bluesky.

The hard part is #1, if you’re not already familiar with your web/domain host’s custom DNS. #

That’s probably a major sticking point for most people: Even the ones who *have* a domain name, a lot of them aren’t familiar enough with DNS to (a) know where to look and (b) feel comfortable modifying it.

I assume part of Bluesky’s own DNS registration is that they’ll handle the settings for you.

“Sway” too long

Spent way too long last night trying to get #Sway set up on my #PineTab2 because:

1. The Arch dependencies for some of the optional components were broken (wmenu requires dmenu, but the package didn’t say so).
2. The Arch documentation for Sway is out of date and sends you to AUR for just about everything.
3. The documents I found didn’t make it clear that key bindings are the only way to launch things unless you explicitly add some other kind of launcher that’s not in the sample config. Or what to expect when changing the menu config. Or what the menus are supposed to look like.
4. Because of the broken dependencies, even when I tried to use the keybinds, they failed silently. For a while I wasn’t even sure it was reading my config file.

And now I’m like…why did I go to all that trouble? All I wanted was to make sure I had all the prerequisites to run a basic Wayland session on something lighter than Plasma. I’m just going to switch back to LXQt.

I miss the days when #Linux seemed to actually run deterministically. When I could see what was breaking easily and fix it easily.

I don’t miss all the extra fiddling and trial and error just to get something functional.

Sure, I like tinkering. When I want to. I don’t like to have to.

Helix Comics

comment left at Comics Worth Reading’s post, The Helix Titles That Live On; Time Breakers Crowdfunding

Interesting: I think Sheva’s War and The Dome: Ground Zero were the only ones I picked up at the time. I might even still have Sheva’s War in a box somewhere, though I don’t remember anything at all about The Dome.

I read Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse as a TPB, but I’m not sure what imprint it was by that time. Transmet, of course, I discovered after it moved to Vertigo.

Of the rest, only Cyberella rings a bell, but when I read about the Time Breakers collection, I immediately thought 2 things: “Why didn’t I notice this when it was new?” And “I have to buy it now!”

In retrospect, it’s weird to me that I skipped most of the Helix line. But I think I was still mostly reading superhero comics at the time.

I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech

I think we might have had an Itanium box at Unitech, but then we had something like 15-20 various HP, Sun and other commercial Unix systems running different OS versions for building and QA. Though the IBM PowerPC was the last major box we added. Generally we all developed on Windows and would telnet into whatever arch/OS combo we needed. I do remember we had “the Vista box” and a couple other Windows workstations that were shared on an as-needed basis, and if we did have an Itanium, it would have been one of those.

Virtualization makes things so much easier!

Car shop found more extensive damage when they dismantled the front bumper assembly. Need to wait for parts. Insurance alre…

Car shop found more extensive damage when they dismantled the front bumper assembly. Need to wait for parts.

Insurance already approved the original estimate. Here’s hoping they approve the update, because it’s a lot more.

I already returned the SUV we rented to haul stuff over the weekend. Sticking to walking and biking distance, and I can rent something smaller (maybe even electric?) for just the days someone needs to go farther.

I wonder if short term car rentals like Zip are still a thing….

5D Chess

Kid found a “5D Chess” game where you can move pieces backward through time and branch off new timelines, and also move them across timelines. But still following their usual rules for moves (ex. Move the knight forward 2 and over 1 timeline)

Locked In

The last couple of years have really broken my suspension of belief for Scalzi’s “Lock In.”

Brain-interface full VR internet and remotely-pilotable robot bodies for people who suffer from lock-in syndrome? Sure!

A massive effort to actually accommodate people caught up in a mass disabling event?

Of course the wrangling to preserve those accommodations, the disparity between those who can afford a good VR environment and IRL caretakers vs. the ones who only afford a low-resolution home that shows them advertisements through their brain interface, etc. are still all too believable.

Image Descriptions

Reply to a thread on image descriptions. Most recent post suggested including what it is and what it looks like.

I usually try to describe what I want the image to convey.

In the waxwing case I’d definitely describe the bird, and probably add that it’s perched on a bare twig in front of a wide expanse of clear blue sky, and maybe add that only the blurred shape of the moon breaks the background.

Trying to get the mood across, since it looks like it’s intended to be an artistic photo.

On the other hand, if I was posting only to demonstrate the appearance of the bird itself, I would probably have cropped it further and would only describe the bird itself.

So I guess I use a combination of what it is, how it looks, and what it means.

The hard part there, of course, being that not everyone is going to agree on what it means, even when the context is the same.

And even when it’s a purely informational image, I might not notice, or decide not to include, let’s say a detail in the feathers that seems inconsequential to me, but someone else is using that feather shape to identify members of two different populations of waxwings, or something like that.

I’ve run into similar issues with iNaturalist with just the images, even before descriptions come into play. For example, several times I’ve taken photos of a plant, and when I posted them it turned out that the only way to tell which of two related species it is, is to look at a pattern on the lower part of the stem, or the bottom of the leaves, or some part I didn’t think to take a photo of in the first place!