Author: Kelson Vibber

Checking to see if the local camera shop offers repair service (camera’s not recognizing one of the lenses). They don’t, but …

Checking to see if the local camera shop offers repair service (camera’s not recognizing one of the lenses). They don’t, but they do offer cleaning services, with this description:

Do you have one of those cameras the government has been trying to quarantine? Every time you take a picture of the sky it capture the little “UFO” specs in the sky?
Well, if that UFO is at the same place in every picture, chances are you have a USSDRA: Unidentified Stationary Speck of Dust that’s Really Annoying.

None of the articles I’ve seen on the “large crowd” of hundreds of “youths” or “juveniles” at the Del Amo mall last week that…

None of the articles I’ve seen on the “large crowd” of hundreds of “youths” or “juveniles” at the Del Amo mall last week that prompted a multi-agency police response that shut down the mall and surrounding streets for several hours and resulted in a grand total of — (checks notes) 5 arrests, two minor injuries, and no looting or vandalism — have said anything about what the “unruly behavior” or “disruptive behavior” was that the police were responding to, which makes me wonder if it was a bunch of teenagers partying loudly in the parking lot who got angry when the cops showed up to confront them and things escalated from there.

The most I found was that police had broken up a fight at the mall several hours earlier.

It’s getting wrapped in with the exaggerated “flash mob looters!” narrative, but again: no looting or vandalism.

Was there any actual crime, or were they just making shoppers nervous by being loud?

For comparison, the articles about the guy who was robbed on the way out of the same mall a day or two before Christmas and jumped into the thieves’ car as they led the police on a chase because he didn’t want to lose the hundreds of dollars worth of Christmas presents he’d just bought were considerably more specific about what happened, and what the suspects were alleged to have done.

Rats

Or maybe mice, or squirrels.

In any case, you don’t want them in your car, chewing on the wiring.

—

Fortunately they only actually chewed through the control wires for the high beams. Still going to be expensive to fix (and of course acts of rodent aren’t covered by warranty).

Going to need to inspect the garage, though, in case that’s where they came from.

—

We spent a chunk of the afternoon cleaning out the garage. Apparently something got into our backup emergency food and water and was trying to make nests out of bits of old stuffed animals. And silica gel. And old unbuilt model kits.

Katie’s going to do a second round of bleaching on the floor while I go pick up the car. And tomorrow we tackle the upper storage compartment, just in case the reason we didn’t find any actual rodents is that they’re up there.

And then get the bikes and everything that wasn’t contaminated or can be disinfected back in before it rains this weekend.

My take on Threads is a bit of a paradox:1. I want the *technical* implementation to be fully compatible with as many Fediv…

My take on Threads is a bit of a paradox:

  1. I want the technical implementation to be fully compatible with as many Fediverse platforms as possible, to reduce the risk of the “extend and extinguish” part of EEE.

  2. I don’t trust Facebook. At all. And I suspect the part of the Fediverse that decides to block Threads is going to be better off than the part that decides to let them connect.

Linode/Akamai now has a datacenter geographically closer to me than the one I’ve been using.Migrated my least-critical nano…

Linode/Akamai now has a datacenter geographically closer to me than the one I’ve been using.

Migrated my least-critical nanode. It went painlessly.

Guess I’ll start working my way up until I have time to set aside in case anything goes wrong migrating Nextcloud…and it’ll finally be in a datacenter that also offers object storage, so I’ll be able to add more storage without adding another trip across the internet.

Kinda ridiculous that my to-do list flies across half the state every time it syncs.

Now, do I want to migrate this GTS instance, or just leave it here and wait until I spin up my “permanent” instance at a subdomain of my main site? Decisions, decisions…

Still thinking in the back of my head it would be better to host Nextcloud on-site, but then you get into opening ports, setting up a DMZ, etc.

Latency

Regarding this aside in https://www.theverge.com/23655762/l4s-internet-apple-comcast-latency-speed-bandwidth : “I invite anyone who’s used dial-up to tell me how soft I am and to reminisce about the days when every website took 10 seconds to load, uphill in the snow both ways”

Naah, the snow was only in December when people added those scripts to display falling snow on their web pages.

Oh, the rest of it? Oh, yeah. And of course stats, tracking, ads, and JS frameworks have been using up the gains in network speed ever since.

On Wandering.shop

Your reminder that when a right-winger complains about antisemitism, they're talking about criticism of …

Your reminder that when a right-winger complains about antisemitism, they're talking about criticism of Israel, while when left-wingers complain about antisemitism, we're talking about prejudice against Jewish people.

It should be pretty obvious that these are not the same thing.

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Nightmare Before Christmas – inspired mosaic made from pumpkins and squash sets Guinness World Record …

Nightmare Before Christmas – inspired mosaic made from pumpkins and squash sets Guinness World Record
https://www.hampshirelive.news/news/hampshire-news/southampton-farms-tim-burton-inspired-8849950

#halloween #NightmareBeforeChristmas #mosaic #pumpkins

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Need to look up whether there’s a way in Android to keep a rarely-used app on pause as its default, so I can keep it installe…

Need to look up whether there’s a way in Android to keep a rarely-used app on pause as its default, so I can keep it installed and up to date for when I need it, but not worry about it doing anything behind my back or sending me notifications I don’t want.

This would be ideal for things like ride-hailing apps, where every once in a while I need it to track my location and send me a zillion notifications, preferably without downloading and installing a fresh copy, but the rest of the time I don’t want it running at all.

—

I know how to pause an app for the rest of the day, but it turns right back on in the morning. And I know the system will remove permissions from apps that haven’t been used in months (for some definition of “used,” anyway), but that’s an extra 3 months of the app still doing whatever it’s built to do in the background

—

Sigh…99% of search results are about disabling preinstalled apps.

But this app looks like the kind of thing I’m looking for:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/superfreeze.tool.android/

I’d forgotten about the old task-killer/battery-management category. As several articles pointed out when I followed up on superfreeze, most of the use cases for them have been resolved over the years as batteries and Android’s background-process management have gotten better.

But this use case isn’t one that’s been resolved by the OS, and as long as the app doesn’t interfere with the built-in power management, it might do the trick.

A lot of cloud-based, client-server applications really should be client applications with some kind of sync solution.I don…

A lot of cloud-based, client-server applications really should be client applications with some kind of sync solution.

I don’t need my shopping list to be reachable at any time from anywhere in the world. I need it to be on a handful of phones and maybe a laptop/desktop, and for changes on one device to show up on the others. That can be done with a web-based application, or a mobile app with its own backend. It can send updates halfway across the country to a dedicated central server so they can come back and reach the family member who’s at the store right now…

…but it can also be done by syncing changes peer-to-peer, or via a cloud-based relay, or building on a more general sync service like Dropbox or Nextcloud.

The web and cloud services have made the client-server model really easy to build for. As long as you know the client is always going to have a good network connection.

(Flashback to grocery shopping before they installed a new cell tower near the supermarket and we couldn’t even text each other “hey, I just remembered we need ___!” unless the one shopping was at the front of the store where the signal was just strong enough that an SMS message might show up. Obviously this would delay syncing too, but it’s another reason to keep a copy of the current data locally on the device.)

A related example where client-server makes more sense: actual shopping (whether arranging store pickup or buying something to be shipped). You need to know what’s available, what’s in stock, what the prices are…and so do all the store’s other customers.

The model for how people use it is a star: one central point (the store) and a bunch of rays connecting to it (the customers) and not to each other – so it matches a client-server structure.

Compared to the shopping list, where it might be built as a star, with the central server running it and lots of people connecting to it, but the actual use model is a small mesh: A handful of people and their devices sharing something among themselves.

“No one is sure why, but in 1898 Rufus T. Owens of Central City, Colorado …

“No one is sure why, but in 1898 Rufus T. Owens of Central City, Colorado (elevation 9,000 feet) decided to build a submarine, which he named the Nautilus. He and a few friends launched it on nearby Missouri Lake. They ballasted it with three tons of rocks. Owens intended to captain the maiden voyage himself, but fortunately for him, the submarine sank before he had a chance to climb inside.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-mountain-submarine

#submarine #weird

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I love how this shiny new business email layout renders on everything except (checks notes) Outlook for Windows.😠

I love how this shiny new business email layout renders on everything except (checks notes) Outlook for Windows.

😠

I’m beginning to suspect my “Outlook eventually became useful” perspective is because I’ve been using it on macOS

(And when I say it renders on everything except Outlook/Win, I mean it actually appears on everything else, but it’s BLANK on Outlook.)

…

Figured that part out, and spent over an hour triyng to figure out why one box wasn’t filling the background all the way to the edge. Only Outlook for Windows.

Finally started looking up quirks and found this:

Outlook Email Rendering Issues and How to Solve Them

Outlook 2007-2019
These are the Windows desktop versions of Outlook. These use Word as the rendering engine, which made sense at a time when email was like writing letters. (Ah, simpler times.)

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Not Blink or Trident. But WORD.

According to this page, even Outlook 365’s Windows Desktop client uses Word’s rendering engine!

The Mac version uses Webkit. The “New Outlook” on Windows uses Blink. The web version uses whatever browser it’s running in. But that’s only been released this year.

Was this some shortcut back in 2007 to prevent Outlook from executing JavaScript or something?

Re: DS9 and Comedy

Yes! I’m in the middle of rewatching the series and just watched an episode where Odo and Quark are stranded on an uninhabited planet with nothing edible and have to climb a mountain for days to get a distress signal through the atmosphere. Heavy premise. But their constant bickering is hilarious!

TNG I think was always trying too hard to prove itself as Serious Television Despite Being Sci Fi. Their comedy episodes never rose to the level of DS9 or even TOS’ funny episodes. #