Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.

9/11.

(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)

I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.

I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.

OK, that’s pretty bad.

I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.

But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.

eat the food that’s already in the fridge

That is such a perfect crystalline out-of-touch rich-person take that it has to be a bait. Right? …Right?

Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)

Photographer here. You’re pretty much spot on. The reason for why this happens has got to do with three reasons, two of which are pretty hard to overcome:

1. Wide angle lens, short focal length. You can’t fit a long focal length lens on a phone, because apparently no one wants a super thick phone these days. To get photos of the Moon with any reasonable detail you need a pretty decent telephoto lens (I get fairly good results with my 200 mm prime and so-so results with my cheapo 300 mm zoom)

2. Resolution. So not only can you only fit a small lens in the phone, you also just can’t physically fit a large sensor behind it either. You have a tiny lens which passes through a tiny image on a tiny sensor, so phone makers have long since hit the physical limits.

3. Control software. Photographing the Moon is a special occasion as far camera automatics is concerned. The Moon is a bright object. It reflects daylight, dammit. Robot brain cannot comprehend this. In the nighttime, camera automatics scream “Aah! High ISO! Long exposure! Wide aperture!” You need to be able to tell the camera you really want daylight ISO and daylight exposure time and daylight aperture. (usual rule of thumb: ISO 100, 1/100 seconds, f/11) Now, the software in phones tries to usually approach this by letting you specify scenarios, but even the vague “night mode” is hit and miss for me sometimes. Fortunately this is something that is usually easy to rectify, because it’s a software issue. (Open Camera for Android is pretty sweet, gives you full manual mode.)

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

I admit, I was speculating on the headline. However!

The pictured specimen is a captive one. Not really one subject to avoiding predators or being disturbed.

The ectotherms do a lot of strange things for thermoregulation.

Bonus speculative factoids:

• A pancake tortoise hatchling is called a Morsel
• A pancake tortoise adult is called a Flapjack
• A pancake tortoise group is called a Stack

I have no way of verifying this, of course. English language doesn’t have a governing body, after all.

Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)

large, easily readable font

Ah, but readable by whom? I have a bar code font here. If you can’t read it you’re clearly not nerd enough.

Also, putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms will only turn the kids into sarcastic, blasphemous little fellows. …I mean, more so than they already are.

I prefer this version: Wikihistory

Well, voting registration as it’s implemented in America isn’t exactly in vogue. As in “oh, you just need to get an ID to vote from now on.” And people without ID need to do some extra paperwork and the office is open 5 minutes every other week, just go through the door located behind the acid moat and bear traps.

Over here in Finland: Government has a comprehensive record of citizens, they know where everyone lives and who’s eligible to vote. So they send you a letter. “Here’s how to do the advance voting, here’s the polling location you need to go to on election day, Also here’s how to draw the numbers, so this will be less confusing. Just bring this notice card with you. And an ID. If you don’t have an ID, visit the police station and they’ll give you one for free.”

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”

Most common mouse problem I have is that grime gets in the wheel and it acts up or seizes up. (Cleaning wheels is also a huge headache with newer mice.) Buttons rarely quit working. …except on some of my Logitech mouses, sometimes the buttons just started going funky or died. My Microsoft wireless travel mouse has kept working for years. I have an Microsoft Intellimouse Optical from early 2000s that I still use with Raspberry Pi, no problems.

As it says on AdoptOpenJDK page, the project has rebranded to Adoptium.

I use Adoptium on Windows (dunno, seems to run Minecraft, OK, that’s good enough for me). On Linux I just use whatever OpenJDK is packaged in distro.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

To adapt an old joke: “If you see a raging dipshit driving like a lunatic in the middle of the road with their giant-ass car, you should contact the nearest police officer immediately. It’s possible they’re behind the wheel.”

The meme is from around 2000. Originally it was about downloading MP3s.