RoabeArt [he/him]

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  • 6 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: October 13th, 2020

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  • I need to get back into OSM. Pokemon Go was the reason I initially started contributing. The game uses (used?) OSM map data, and certain Pokemons will spawn near certain biomes (water, woods, etc).

    My little cousin played the hell out of PG around 2017-2018, and they mostly played it around the big park in our town. At the time, the park appeared on OSM (and by extension PG) as a featureless green polygon with a few roads and footpaths. In reality it has a bunch of woods, streams, a pond, playground, public pool etc. So I did a quick readup on how to add stuff to OSM and I gave the park a digital makeover. I even walked around the footpaths with my phone and marked them out with the GPS so that they would appear in the map more accurately.

    Unfortunately it was quite a while before Pokemon Go updated its OSM database, and my cousin lost interest in the game by then. But I kept at contributing for quite a few years, adding random stuff in spurts and stopping for a month or two


  • They did this in a park by my house. It used to have a long paved path that meandered through some woods. Engineers with the city noticed the shortcut that people were cutting through, and realized that most people didn’t care for the long path. Apparently some anonymous person or several had been dumping gravel along the shortcut for traction and to make it less muddy. So the city paved the shortcut, and removed the long path so that nature would reclaim it.

    Democracy in action.

    It was kind of sad though to lose the long path because I liked walking through there, especially during the fall, but if it means having less maintenance machines going in there every week to pollute the place (lawnmowers, asphalt patching, etc) then so be it.




  • I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

    But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.


  • Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

    Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn’t work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

    First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.