Category: Wandering.Shop

Interesting: Because I follow my old @prismo account at @KelsonsLinks[@prismo.news], I can still see all of the stories I shared by looking at the profile here on Wandering Shop. But even though it has the title and preview image, it only links to the Prismo page (which is no longer available), not to the original articles.

If I really wanted to, I could reconstruct an archive of what I posted there, by searching for each of those articles.

Anyway, Prismo’s back on a new domain & I’m there at @KelsonsLinks[@prismo.xyz]

On Wandering.shop

*sigh* I suppose on the plus side, the crappy traffic meant that by the time I got to the last eastbound stretch of road, the sun was no longer positioned in the middle of all 3 mirrors.

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@andrhia Not sure, but if there is, I want to know if it also applies to the terror that you’ll drop your phone as you step into or out of an elevator and it’ll fall through the gap in the floor and tumble down to the bottom of the shaft.

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Finally figured out why I couldn’t get this third-party library to load its config!

Had to debug through a decompiled class…

It’s checking whether optional parameters are empty using foo.equalsIgnoreCase("") BEFORE checking whether foo != null.

So loading the config throws an NPE every time it tries to load the config. And it silently catches the exception, leaving the config object empty.

Easy enough to workaround, but a dumb error that was a pain to find.

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The worst part of starting to type and realizing it’s not going into the window you thought it was *isn’t* that you have to start over.

It’s wondering which other window picked up the keystrokes.

@thraeryn Have you read any Julie Czerneda? Her Species Imperative trilogy is my favorite.

One of the cool things about her writing is that she’s a biologist, so she comes up with all kinds of interesting aliens and how their biology impacts their societies and their ability to interact with other species. (ex. ship design for a species that communicates by scent.)

She’s also got several other sci-fi series and a fantasy duology that are absolutely worth checking out.

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@dansup The thing that most infuriates me when I’m on Instagram is when I have to set my phone down for 5 minutes, then when I pick it up again, it decides to automatically refresh my feed and jump to the top so I can’t find the cool photo I had glimpsed just as I’d set down the phone.

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@FiXato @sohkamyung Nice! I had never seen that! I wish it wasn’t buried under the GIF search that I never use, but now that I know it’s there, that’s going to be a huge help! Thank you!

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@FiXato Yeah, that’s what I usually end up doing. Even then it runs into the didn’t-tag-because-i-uploaded-my-entire-sd-card-and-who-has-time-to-label-all-that problem.

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@sohkamyung Google’s keyboard for Android doesn’t have arrow keys, unfortunately…but based on your comment I tried switching to the Samsung keyboard on my tablet. It has left & right arrow keys! And they work with shift for selecting! This is going to be a huge improvement! Thanks for the idea!

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Finding cosplay pictures of a character on Instagram: Good luck with that, because you can only search by one tag at a time, and people post so many screen grabs, scans, memes & spam that you can’t find the costumes.

Finding cosplay pictures of a character on Flickr: Good luck with that, because even though you can do a full-text search of the title, tags & description, people upload all 400 photos from the weekend as DSC8764.jpg to DSC9163.jpg and only tag them with the convention name.

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Also, it doesn’t help much to search for “Flash” on a photography site, particularly one where the people who *do* tag their pictures often add the settings they used for each photo.

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Argh. Editing text with a touchscreen keyboard is still a huge pain.

Typing new text has gotten a lot better over time (even as auto-correct, auto-complete & predictive text have introduced entirely new and fascinating classes of typos!), but trying to position the cursor with a fingertip tap, select exactly the right span of text that you want to replace or format or link, etc. is still SO. DAMN. CLUNKY.

Mouse-click. Shift+arrow keys. So much easier.

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@Wolthera I suppose it depends on whether basilisks or volcanoes are more common, right?

But yeah, Sauron certainly had a lot more experience to draw on!

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