Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Here’s a weird one:
“Ship’s captains and outside monitoring firms have reported waves of GPS jamming around Shanghai’s ports, on a scale and of a severity never seen before”
“The most likely culprit in the mystery is sand smugglers, who are part of a global network of sand-thieves who have literally cratered whole cities and islands in their drive to obtain sand for concrete. “
Sand thieves believed to be behind epidemic of Chinese GPS jamming
#weird #gps #sand
Just realized I hit my two-year Mastodon anniversary last week!
(I’ve really been on here two years?)
Me 10 minutes ago: I have an umbrella! I can totally handle walking to lunch in the rain!
I hadn’t considered the utter shortfall of drainage along this street. I narrowly missed getting completely drenched with muddy gutter water by a full sized truck at this spot.
And the rain starts again just as I’m about to go get lunch.
Perfect timing.
Should’ve brought it today.
The Iron Zoo: 50 Coalinga oil wells painted as whimsical characters by artist Jean Dakessian in the 1970s. Some are still visible.
Trying out Dark Mode on my laptop again, seeing that there are still a lot of apps that hard-code a white background
Thinking about the old Windows 95 days when you could individually set every color in the desktop UI
And remembering how odd some applications looked because they used the system backgrounds and hard-coded foregrounds
#UI #Windows95 #DarkMode
Duolingo, teaching you the important phrases.
(I do remember a story a while back about a bear somewhere in the Pacific Northwest that broke into a campsite cooler, drank a bunch of beer and passed out. The best part is it apparently preferred the craft beer.)
It had not occurred to me that Perler beads are very close to the size of some AC adapter sockets.
🤦♂️
WTF… tried to renew my membership at a museum online. Had to scroll through multiple giant images just to find the membership page, which had multiple giant images to find the sign-in link, and when I finally got to the renewal page…it wouldn’t load the actual form.
I’m trying to give you money, stop throwing obstacles in my way!
Noticed DC is renumbering the Flash with Flash #750 next February. I did some quick math, not counting annuals and specials:
350 issues of Flash Comics & The Flash (Jay & Barry)
247 issues of The Flash (Wally)
13 issues of Flash: The Fastest Man Alive (Bart)
52 issues of Flash (New 52 Barry)
88 issues of Flash (DC Rebirth Barry)
It tracks.
I’m actually most surprised that they included Bart’s series.
Wait, no, that’s 750 issues inclusive. the next issue ought to be #751 in that case.
A key difference I’ve noticed between #PokemonGo & a couple of short sessions in #MinecraftEarth is that the world of MCE is a lot denser than PG.
With PG, you have fixed locations for supplies & combat. It’s all about getting you out to walk that distance & find Pokemon along the way.
With MCE, *everything* is randomly placed, closer together, & visible from farther away: resources, mobs, adventures. And you can use a build plate anywhere. It feels like you could play it in a smaller space.
Everyone uses spatial metaphors for time, but *which* spatial metaphors varies across cultures. Is the future ahead of us as we’re moving, or behind us because we can’t see it? Some use uphill/downhill. And then there’s the impact of writing direction.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-we-make-sense-of-time
The Lingthusiasm podcast episode on language and time is a good one too, and goes into even more issues of calendars, where the word “minute” came from, and so on.
https://lingthusiasm.com/post/168801498861/lingthusiasm-episode-15-talking-and-thinking
Apparently one server at a provider that relays SMS messages between carriers went offline on Feb. 14, and for some reason they didn’t bring it online until Nov. 7, at which point it started sending along all the queued messages.
So *what* happened makes sense, but the timeframe is… a little odd.
I really can’t come up with a *good* scenario for why they would wait 10 months to repair or reboot a server. *Best* case is they didn’t consider the queue at the time it failed, but also realized they could get by without the additional capacity until November, and instead of doing a clean install they just turned on the old spare.
You know that game UI thing where a glow or ring will highlight something you can (or should) interact with?
I just read a chapter of a book where a character’s visual migraine aura does that. It doesn’t seem to have happened before, but he just sort of takes it in stride.
(It would be nice if mine worked that way.)
By “takes it in stride,” of course, I mean he figures wow, that’s really useful, now I need to lie down until the flashing lights move out of view and I can actually see clearly again, instead of “WTF HOW IS MY VISUAL MIGRAINE TALKING TO ME?????”
In response to someone asking which book:
The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman. It’s the middle book in the sequel trilogy he’s writing to His Dark Materials. The character is one who was introduced in the previous book. He makes a comparison between the lights of the migraine aura and the lights of the Aurora borealis, which I expect is going to turn out to be important eventually.
At the time I read an article where Pullman mentions getting them himself, and decided to use the idea with one of his characters.
At the time the first book was out, I mean.
New round of #introductions for all the new people joining the Fediverse!
Hi, I’m Kelson (he/him), a computer programmer in the Los Angeles area. I talk about all kinds of things here: #scifi/#fantasy, #books, actual #science, #tech, #history, #linguistics, random day-to-day stuff, etc.
I also post photos – mostly cityscapes/landscapes, nature, random interesting stuff I’ve spotted IRL – on Pixelfed (@KelsonV) and more “serious” photos on photog.social (@kelsonv)
Best Buy has a demo unit of the Samsung Galaxy Fold under a cylindrical glass display case. It’s like the rose in Beauty and the Beast.
I was really surprised when the salesperson offered to unlock the case and let the kid try it out. 😬
Today in things I never thought I’d say before becoming a parent:
“Next time I’ll warn the Psyduck before I run the coffee grinder.”
The odd history of how the title “Blade Runner” made its way from a book about dystopian healthcare to the movie adaptation of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”
…and tabs to close before I sleep.
@emmadavidson The US has been phasing in new requirements for ID cards for domestic air travel. The deadline is coming up next year, and public awareness campaigns have just kicked off in the last couple of weeks.
It sounds like a lot of people who would ordinarily be waiting to renew their licenses as they expire have gotten the message and are going in to get the updated ID card, which of course needs to be applied for in person 😬