Asides

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.

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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. #

Re: DS9 as a B5 Knockoff

There are some loose similarities at the beginning and some oddly specific but otherwise superficial similarities later on. Plus the usual weird moments when both shows came up with similar ideas at the same time & found out about it when the other show’s episode aired. #

I eventually concluded I believe the people doing the show when they said it wasn’t a deliberate knockoff.

But I’m still not convinced there wasn’t someone in corporate who saw JMS’ pitch, decided they needed to get out in front of it, and suggested a station-based spinoff to the Trek people. #

There are two main types of cell phone buyers

Intriguing insight in this review of the Fairphone 5:

There are two main types of cell phone buyers – those who love checking out the new gadgets and getting a new phone, and those who “hate saying goodbye” to their old devices, who would rather not replace a phone for mere planned obsolescence because it still works *just fine* except for this one little thing that either can be worked around or *should* be fixable.

Fairphone is intended for the second group

https://www.theverge.com/23895548/fairphone-5-review-price-features

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I’d love to get a Fairphone for this reason. But I also don’t want to get a new phone right now, for the same reason.

Here’s hoping what I’ve got lasts long enough for this model (or the next) to reach the US.

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“Between hordes of scalpers and website outages, The Pokémon Company’s Van Gogh collab wound up being a big headache for coll…

“Between hordes of scalpers and website outages, The Pokémon Company’s Van Gogh collab wound up being a big headache for collectors”

Yes, they had a Pokemon event at the actual Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

https://www.theverge.com/23896251/pokemon-van-gogh-pikachu-sold-out-scalping-promos

Since the power plant was officially slated for decommissioning a few years back, the new local hot button political issue ha…

Since the power plant was officially slated for decommissioning a few years back, the new local hot button political issue has been where to route a planned Metro extension: along a major commercial street, or along the existing right of way through residential neighborhoods. Which would be cheaper and done sooner. But, again, routed through residential neighborhoods.

And, it turns out, a hidden WW2-era graveyard. 🤦‍♂️