Allen but one of the good ones

https://mastodon.monoceros.co.za/@uastronomer

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Fediverse hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, #admin of systems, just wants to help.

#SouthAfrica

Space stuff: https://www.urban-astronomer.com
Work Stuff: https://www.monoceros.co.za
Age: Middle
This space: for rent

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uastronomer_at_mastodon.monoceros.co.za@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2026-04-19 15:04:08 UTC

Asking more out of curiosity than any intention to actually implement, but... if I were to put Linux on an M4 macbook, how difficult it be to undo that, remove Linux and restore the original operating system?
In other words, just how tightly do Apple lock down their laptops?

2026-03-27 07:20:44 UTC

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I don't think it will fit though. They're going to have to make bigger bank notes.

2026-02-03 07:17:48 UTC

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My VERY personal opinion here, that I know a lot of people disagree with, is that the film adaptations are all very bland. But the stage adaptations I've seen are fantastic!

2026-01-31 07:31:13 UTC

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yeah, there are a lot of recurring characters that make cameos. Best to start with the early books.
But unless you're a connoisseur of 60s and 70s fantasy (I'm not, might have gotten the decades wrong even!), dont rush to read the very first two because those are just a series of vignettes pastiching a bunch of novels I've never read or heard of. Also some Lovecraft. Funny, but confusing.

2026-01-29 13:39:44 UTC

Well well well, if it isn't exactly what privacy nerds have been warning about forever! https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/27/ice_data_advertising_tech_firms/

2026-01-26 18:07:52 UTC

"History will not look kindly on..." dude, we aren't looking kindly either, and we're in the here and now.

2025-12-06 18:56:47 UTC

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It's true, we even have a secret handshake!
@npub1ne6…hhrn I'm in the same boat - wasn't brave enough to do my bastille jails today!

2025-11-21 06:52:12 UTC

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I think that's the most annoying thing, to me: You can't debloat Linux because the package management tools forbid it.
Cups is pretty damn good, I have nothing against the project, it's *way* better at just working than any print stack in the commercial operating systems, but if I'm not printing then I should be able to remove it from my computer that I own in my own house.
Try it, though, and literally *everything* vanishes, because apparently you can't watch a video without ffmpeg (in case you need to transcode it for streaming), and ffmpeg can't work without imagemagick (in case you're tired of actual video formats and wanted to animate a series of .jpg files) and imagemagick can't work without the inline documentation system (in case you can't just google the actually readable online documentation in 2025), and the documentation system can't work without ghostscript (in case you wanted to convert your man pages to PDF for printing in a big binder on your desk in the year 2025), and ghostscript can't work without cups in case you wanted to convert your PDF to PS and the only reason you would want a postscript file is to pipe it directly to your laser printer that's enterprise enough to still have a postscript interpreter.

2025-11-21 06:45:16 UTC

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Also, on the same laptop: apt upgrade ALWAYS fails, always, unless I first run dpkg --configure -a and nobody can tell me why so now I have an hourly cronjob to run dpkg --configure -a
Why ca-certificates-java won't stay configured is a question I haven't even bothered asking.

2025-11-21 06:40:19 UTC

One thing I miss about old-timey "user unfriendly" linux was the way it wasn't bloated with every possible feature, tool and library that tried to cater for every hypothetical future user's potential needs.
Like, unpacking and building a tarball was annoying and time consuming, but it meant that you could install a PDF parser on a headless server without automatically pulling in a window manager, a print stack, several gigs of UI widgets.
Old days: "You will need 2MB of disk space, plus another 150KB for the compiled executable. It will take an hour to build, and you're gonna have to repeat the process if we release any updates that you feel you need"
Now: "You will need 15GB of disk space to install all the dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies, and now you have to check for updates every 6 hours because we just added 1150 packages __that you don't even know what they do__ and they all have published CVEs but you haven't read any of them because nobody has that's too many CVEs to worry about, and if you try to remove any of them the entire stack auto-uninstalls to protect you from accidentally clicking 'print' on a subdependency that you didn't know was there and then it won't print"
Anyway, I'm just annoyed that today's must-fix patch is for 28 different packages all with "cupsd" in their name on a laptop that has never installed a printer and never will.

2025-11-12 10:05:22 UTC

Thinking about all these repeated attempts to strip away privacy to make it easier for cops to catch bad guys.
And honestly, I get their point. Figuring out who dun the crime is really hard, there's a reason TV detectives are admired as such super-smart people.
But... I think it was Pratchett who wrote in one of his books that if it were up to the police, everybody in a city would be required to sit still in the open with their hands visible, to make their jobs easier. It would certainly reduce crime!
But the only reason they're asking for this, specifically, is because people don't really understand what strong encryption is really for. If they were to ask for similar access to our physical lives, the push-back would be much, much stronger.
"Criminals often conceal themselves, or 'Hide Out' in residential buildings. They make use of so-called 'Curtains' or 'Drapes' to ensure that they remain hidden. This is why we want all homes to be built without curtain rails, introduce a curtain license (biometric ID required on application), and all curtains are to be fitted with a remote control device allowing any officer to open it from the outside. To alleviate privacy concerns, no officer will be allowed to operate their standard-issue curtain remote control without a warrant."
"Police were unable to capture a wanted criminal last night when they were stymied by a black market door-locking device known as a 'dead-bolt'. These ominously-named devices are designed to secure a door against entry by police officers and anybody else the occupant may wish to exclude. Privacy advocates point out that there are many other legitimate uses for these dead-bolts"

2025-10-30 11:25:17 UTC

Something wrong with FreeBSD pkg?
Since last night, I haven't been able to update or upgrade. Browsing on https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/ I find some folders returning 403, including latest (the one I need) . Any ideas?
#sysadmin #freebsd

2025-10-23 15:30:54 UTC

Playing with Alpine Linux as a quick way to build, configure and test disposable VMs on proxmox
And I think I really like it. It's so old-school that when you have to learn its way of doing things that every distro does uniquely, it only takes a single search result to a) know what to do, and b) understand how so that you don't have to search again the next time you want to do it slightly differently.
Almost as elegant as FreeBSD!

2025-10-22 07:07:33 UTC

I'm at a weird transitional moment in the lifecycle of my Urban Astronomer podcast, where I've stopped making vague promises about how I'll release a new episode one day, out of guilt, and I'm starting to actually feel a faint fizz of excitement about future recordings, maybe a format change, like this could actually be fun again if I start recording.
It'll still be a while before I get over the jump of finding even 5 minutes in a 24 hour period when my home is quiet enough to actually make a recording that's not polluted with dogs barking, motorbikes revving, children bickering, dishes getting chipped by whoever's sulkily washing them, aircraft coming in to land, microwaves humming, vacuum cleaners and leaf blowers shrieking, wives having meetings on teams, though.
My home is the opposite of soundproof. It is a sound engineering nightmare. I used to record at 11pm, but the kids are teenagers now and they don't actually sleep anymore.
Still. I actually kinda feel like finding a way to overcome this, instead of just shrugging sadly and giving up.
#podcast

2025-10-20 18:14:16 UTC

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Yeah, they're a little different from the other cloud giants. It actually makes them more resilient - there's no common backplane to hack, so you never, ever get a service being down globally, but it also means that new services get rolled out in stages. Like how, for years, the newer regions got to use t3.micro instances on the free tier, while the us-* instances had to use t2.micro. Probably still like that, I haven't checked ;)
But it means you need to do a lot of homework before getting too excited about a new service, in case it's not yet available in the region where you decided to set up shop.
Also, the regions all have their own pricing. Some are up to 30%, even 40% more expensive than us-east-1.

2025-10-20 18:09:46 UTC

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And yet. I still like working on it. What a dope.

2025-10-20 18:07:25 UTC

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And the cheapest. Don't forget that anybody who's run on AWS long enough for their free tier to run out, and especially anybody who's used their various credit offerings to let their applications bloat up for free, is VERY cost aware. Once you've gotten used to the AWS sticker shock, us-east-1 seems the smartest choice.

2025-09-20 21:20:55 UTC

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amazingly yes! They continue the story to a natural conclusion, they are equally as good as each other, it is a perfect trilogy!

2025-09-04 16:41:27 UTC

So the new neighbours finally made good on their promise to install security lights.
And you know what this guy went and did?
He texted me to let me know that installation was happening today, and asked me to please let him know if they were too bright or causing us any irritation. Like a considerate human being.
So the sun goes down, I step outside, my skin starts bubbling and my shadow gets etched into the wall. I text back "Any chance you could aim it a little lower? Quite a lot of light is shining into the upstairs bedrooms and the kids might have trouble sleeping"
10 minutes later, he texts back to ask if it's any better. He's aimed his LED floodlight completely flat downwards, casting bright even shadow-free lighting in his own yard with not a single lumen spilling into my yard. Quite a bright glow reflecting off the wall directly beneath the light, but far less intrusive, minimal light trespass, minimal contribution to our already awful light pollution problem, it's a fantastic win-win result.
#LightPollution #GoodNeighbours

2025-08-19 09:47:35 UTC

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Yeah I don't know the history at all, so I just went with the oldest archaeological find on the wikipedia page of something that's definitely knitting (as opposed to the other things that I'd never heard of)!

2025-08-18 13:41:10 UTC

Knitting is some dark magic. It doesn't matter how carefully I watch, somehow those dancing needles manage to chain together a long sequence of loose self-untying knots into a sheet of durable fabric and I can see every step and I can see how the individual loops interlock, and I still just don't get how any of it works!
But you know what REALLY bakes my noodle? It's trying to imagine the medieval supergenius who invented it.

2025-08-13 07:29:01 UTC

Interesting chat with the doc yesterday. I said I'd noticed that every time they give my kids a sick note for school, they add strict instructions to avoid exercise or physical activity, which wasn't a thing when I was a kid. I wanted to know when Doctors had started saying this.
He sighed, said "Not as soon as they should have" and then explained how it was known that certain illnesses could lead to heart problems (apparently similarities between the pathogens and heart tissue could lead to the immune system attacking the heart), but it was only after covid struck and so many people developed heart conditions that they figured that it was not such an isolated problem and LOTS of viruses do this. He then shared a personal story of a colleague who was training for a marathon, and ended up needing a heart transplant. So now its standard practice to ban exercise when you're sick. Because although it's a low-probability event, the consequences are severe.

2025-08-12 09:37:47 UTC

How are we supposed to pronounce Forgejo?
My mouth wants to say "Forge Go" but that's clearly wrong.
"Four Joe"?
"Forge Joe"? (I hope not this one, that's a tongue twister. Four Juh-Joe)
"Forge Yo"?

2025-08-09 08:57:14 UTC

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I'm a professional computer toucher, cut my teeth on msdos, currently have a constant internal evaluation on which is better for my needs (Linux or FreeBSD) and despite all that, you've just described me.
I don't much care what the interface looks like, I just want it to be left alone.
My own experience: The most optimal interface (whether we're talking about placement of gui widgets or keyboard layouts) is the one that you're most practiced at. When people invest years into learning the quirks of anything at all, and train up their muscle memory to be able to use it by instinct, ANY "improvements" are just getting in their way.
Oh your research has shown that new users prefer a narrower scroll bar? Your research is bullshit because now I am wasting more time having to line up my mouse cursor with the 1 pixel wide activation region that makes the damn thing unhide itself.

2025-08-07 15:45:47 UTC

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People been reporting a possible find there forever. I'll be so excited if this is the final confirmation!

2025-08-05 08:14:50 UTC

"Self-hosting is not an option for most people, you elitist nerd"
Yeah well neither is a gym membership or home-cooking your own healthy meals. Doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage people to do it if they can.

2025-08-01 09:40:23 UTC

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I tried rural life for about 10 years. Family and I were very happy when that ended.
It has many positives, to be sure. It's so quiet. The air is clean. You're exposed to more nature than you ever wanted to know about (mostly in the form of tiny creatures that would've had you calling an exterminator in the city but that you soon learn to appreciate). You get more exercise, you become more self-sufficient (most services you might have used will now refuse to travel so far...). So much beauty, outside every window. The Sun seems to shine brighter, the stars are crisper.
But the downsides are many. No municipal services, so you have to pump your own water from underground (we had a river a kilometer away but it was extremely polluted, mostly with raw sewage).
When it breaks, or there's a drought, you have to take a long drive to somewhere that will sell you water, 5% of which is for drinking, 5% for washing with a cloth and a bowl, and 90% for flushing the toilet (if you didn't leave it too long and now it's clogged).
Power outages.
Snakes (nowhere near as bad a problem as you'd think at first, although the spitting cobras are no joke. More of a threat to your dogs than to you. Had a few neighbours lose beloved pets to puff adders)
When somebody gets sick, there's no ambulance service and it's a 45 minute drive to the nearest hospital. Same with dogs, although credit to rural vets who are pretty amazing.
Basic groceries, like break and milk, are a 20 minute drive (one way, highway speeds) to the filling station, at convenience-store prices (double the distance if you want a proper supermarket).
Terrible unmaintained gravel roads once you leave the highway. Doesn't matter whether you drive a little city bug or a big expensive 4WD, every car in the neighbourhood rattles to pieces within a few years.
Everything is much, much harder when you leave the city.

2025-07-02 07:39:21 UTC

search really is dead. I entered "Idioms about euphemism" - looking for stuff like putting lipstick on a pig, polishing a turd, that sort of thing.
The first 20 organic results were for "Idioms vs Euphemisms". Every single one of them.

2025-07-01 07:45:59 UTC

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I wonder if it's even necessarily the technology, or selection effects from people who are deliberately going to AI to create images? Like, they think it's cool that AI can create these images (and it IS very cool) and want to show that off so end up always picking the ones that look like stills from the Tintin movie?

2025-07-01 07:27:59 UTC

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There's a quality to them that I haven't been able to put my finger on.
Might be something to do with the smooth shading, like a really high-quality animation, or the colours which are always a little bit too... much?
Hmm. Maybe the combination of ultra-crisp edges and ultra-smooth contours?

2025-05-16 07:41:43 UTC

Starting to seem like "Obviously you have to double-check AI output" is just a way to scapegoat the operators. Sort of like self-driving cars that require a human driver to sit with their hands on the wheel and their feet near the brake pedal - you're not going to catch a lot of errors because the safety factor, the human, is not actually engaged in the process but instead sitting passively watching something else do the work for extended periods.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/15/anthopics_law_firm_blames_claude_hallucinations/

2025-05-05 08:46:50 UTC

I've told a lot of facebook horror stories to a lot of people, but this most recent one about pushing beauty ads to teenagers whenever they delete a selfie? Universal revulsion. Not one person has needed more than a few seconds to figure out why they're doing this, and not one person has failed to be appalled and disgusted.
Usually there's at least a little devils advocacy, a little "Well it's a business", somebody asking if we're not maybe reading too much into this. But not this time.
What a revolting company.

2025-04-24 05:00:40 UTC

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Oh that thing was impossible to miss! It was on every DVD (alongside the FBI warning), they showed it at movie theatres in the middle of the trailers, it was so hard to miss that I'm surprised it took so long for the parodies to start.
And it was actually kinda cool, the first few hundred times! The music, the fonts, the whole style of the thing was just so opposite from anything anybody had ever seen from the authorities before. FBI, MPAA, Blockbuster, record companies, all those big stiff corporate suit places, would NEVER! If pirating wasn't so good at letting me see the movies that they were refusing to distribute in small-market countries like mine (or at least, that we only got a year or two later) it might even have worked on me.

2025-04-01 09:35:17 UTC

Remember when April fools meant people in your life doing silly pranks like leaving a whoopie cushion on your chair or filling your office with balloons, and national newspapers would print Onion articles (very obvious jokes, provided you look past the journalist-speak veneer) and everybody was very excited to share which jokes they'd spotted and which had caught them out?
I miss those times.

2025-03-19 07:18:43 UTC

So if you ever wanted proof that quoting/repeating/screengrabbing posts that you disagree with is just a way to give free air to those views, consider how JKR just helped [@vagina_museum](https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum ) with her disapproving remarks on their fundraising efforts.
Half a million free eyeballs!
https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/17/vagina-museum-smashes-crowdfunding-target-following-jk-rowling-tweet/

2025-03-17 06:21:36 UTC

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Right?
Like, when you're 5, falling is fine because you don't weight anything and you're close to the ground. Much harder for adults!

2025-03-17 06:12:55 UTC

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Apparently the best way to learn to balance the thing is to remove the pedals and just use your feet to push yourself along? Once your body has learned to keep the thing upright (which is 90% of the skill), as in you can roll down a long hill in a straight line without letting your feet touch the ground, you can put the pedals back on.
You also probably won't fall this way!

2025-03-01 09:26:03 UTC

I just wanna say that we've had between 4 and 5 planets visible to the naked eye at the same time every year since before Covid.
Saturn and Jupiter don't move that fast relative to each other because they're really far from the Sun, and the inner planets move fast enough that they Line up* with those two at least once a year.
*Line Up is silly because they're always in a line. They all orbit the same Sun, they all move in the same direction, and their orbital planes are all pretty closely match so they can only ever be "aligned". Ask the astrologers: Planets are always in some starsign or other. The signs of the zodiac were chosen, and defined, because they're the 12 constellations that marked the ecliptic (the imaginary track across the sky that the Sun and planets move through, day after day, year after year, round and round and round).
But we will continue to see talk about planetary alignments, just like we'll see talk about supermoons and blood moons, for one simple reason: Some astrologer got famous, and invented new words for boring old things to sell a book.
#Astronomy

2025-02-26 10:18:45 UTC

Something that just struck me when launching an io-heavy task over ssh:
Computers used to be so much more tangible.
Like, in my first years as a Linux guy, I'd have the computer on my desk. It was a beige tower, with spinny disks and activity LEDs on the front. There was an optical drive which was needed to install the OS from the install CD.
And everything that you did had an observable effect. Like, this tarball I just extracted? The HDD light would've lit up, occasionally flickering when IO slowed. The hard disk would've audibly chuddered along, a series of gentle clicks every single time the read heads moved to a new track. A dull whooshing roar whenever something tried to read from the optical drive.
a clean, loud BEEP every time the console wanted to get my attention.
And underneath it all, the steady, unchanging drone of the PSU fan.

2025-01-22 09:07:01 UTC

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So "evil billionaire-proof" means "replace them with millionaires"?

2025-01-15 08:42:23 UTC

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I run multiple Mastodons on the same server (5 at the moment), and it's fine so long as you give each a unique schema in the database (DB_NAME in .env.properties) and its own namespace in Redis (REDIS_NAMESPACE in .env.properties). So what you're trying to do should be possible.
But... yeah, if lists are showing empty, it could be a conflict within redis. I know nothing at all about pixelfed, but maybe they have some common keys in redis that are overwriting each other? If it's anything to do with that, setting a unique namespace should help.

2025-01-10 08:46:10 UTC

Another LED ceiling light has failed. I'm getting really disillusioned with these things.
This home came with a bunch of weird or generally faulty light fittings, and as they've caused problems I've replaced them with permanent LED fixtures (As in, ones that don't take a replaceable bulb).
And every one has failed after a few years. They all have the same failure mode: they suddenly become extremely dim. There's enough light to indicate that it's turned on, but not enough to see by.
And it seems obvious that this is planned failure, which is as normal as it is annoying. But these aren't replacable light bulbs, they're permanent fixtures that I've had to build into the structure of my home. It's a big annoying messy job to rip them out and replace them, and if I can't find a new fitting in the same size then I've got to learn a new skill like plastering or something just to get it done.
This will never be fixed, unless somebody's got an in with legislators to implement and enforce some sort of regulations.
Can we repair these things? Assuming that the problem is the LED driver circuits, and I think I'm right about that, it should be simple enough to just replace the driver module. But when I've tried to buy them through the usual bulk online retailers (or lighting shops), they tend to be significantly more expensive than an entire new luminaire.
So! Maybe we can just make them? Anybody have some open source circuit diagrams for LED drivers, with different output levels? My kitchen light was a big one, supplying 40W, but most would be a lot less beefy than that.
Bonus points if I can build it on stripboard instead of having to make a PCB - I haven't done that since high school, and I don't want to wait weeks or months to have one manufactured and shipped, and I don't want to drive to another city to ask favours from my nearest makerspace.
#DIY #electronics #RightToRepair

2024-12-27 12:20:51 UTC

My problem with signal, summarized: I installed it 2 years ago. I have accumulated one(1) contact after all that time. I have sent one message, which never got a reply.
An app's value is in its utility. Privacy features aren't much use to me if I can't find anybody to talk to.

2024-12-22 20:21:08 UTC

Many years back, when I finally deleted my Facebook account, I was very worried about losing all that work. I'd written so many posts, comments, shared so many amazing articles and uploaded so many photos.
So I used the sacred menu option, the one that makes you wait a few days because it's a Big Serious Deal, and downloaded my data.
And I unpacked the zip file to an archive somewhere, and went ahead and deleted the account.
Many years later, when I finally deleted my Twitter account, I went through the exact same process. Actually, I went a step further, found a software that would go and retrieve all the attachments and image files and rewrite the downloaded archive into actually browsable HTML. And then I saved it into an archive somewhere, and finished the delete.
Anyway, even more years later, I have never once even glanced at those archives. I mean sometimes a photo from one of them surfaces in one of those cloud services "Today in 2014" image galleries they like to build, but I don't count that because I didn't actually choose to go there.
These experiences have taught me two things about your data on social media:
One, it's extremely valuable to the social media company, but it is of ZERO value to you. You think it's important, but the moment you have to actually lift more than one finger to access anything from that archived data, you don't bother because it's not worth the effort.
Two: There's no point in saving your old posts. It's all transient stuff. Nobody cares about it. You don't care, not really. You love the idea of this archive, all that hard work being out there as a legacy or something, but you almost never even think about it, let alone dredge it up, unless you've got a motive like it being part of your brand that you're working to promote, or something (valid, not judging, you're allowed to use this for something other than shitposting). I'd say that you're far MORE likely to have that archive used against you: If a bot network turns against you, or you end up in the public eye or some shitwad famous person thinks they need to discredit you because you said something mean about them... then they'll dig through that archive and find something you said a long time ago and use it to turn you into milkshake duck. Maybe you meant it at the time but are smarter and wiser. Maybe you were being sarcastic. Maybe it simply meant something entirely different, but shorn of context it can be made to sound really bad. Whatever, don't care.
So use the "Posts expire after..." feature. Without it, you're just filling somebody's hard drive with expired words.

2024-11-09 18:37:37 UTC

Hot take: If the rules of your sport aren't set up so that you mostly use your FOOT to control a BALL, then you need to find a name that isn't football.
Not that I have anything against the non-foot footballs out there, like Aussie rules and American, I just think that foreigners would give you less attitude if you'd picked names that make sense.

2024-10-27 06:39:27 UTC

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so share the links! Show us the papers! Be the source that you want to see!

2024-10-13 12:02:29 UTC

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My original reply, before I deleted, was a long rant about how retinas and camera sensors are completely different and how even visual light cameras shouldn't need the lighting that we do.
Lots of stuff informed by research on light pollution, talking about glare, about how the human eye needs almost half an hour to fully dark adapt because it's mostly a chemical process (iris dilation is only one part of the process), whereas electronic devices can adjust their gain almost instantly, about how sensitive modern sensors truly are... like I bet you could build a computer vision system that needs no external light at all, except possibly on moonless nights out in the country! And from what little I know from astrophotography, I bet it wouldn't even be that hard!

2024-10-13 11:48:55 UTC

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oh my word I have so many issues with this.

2024-10-13 11:16:24 UTC

Too many people longing for the old Internet that just worked and had human-curated indexes and wasn't so full of javascript and bloated browsers.
People, you're pining for the dot com era. It was a shit show. You're asking to replace the current disaster with a different and less sophisticated disaster that was just as VC funded as what we have today.

2024-10-13 10:57:45 UTC

So question about Elon's cyberbus robotaxi thing:
If there's no driver, no pedals, no steering wheel, no windscreen.. why does it need headlights?
There are legislative requirements, sure, but you can satisfy those with simple running lights surely? No more dazzling midnight sun high-beams dazzling the eyes of oncoming traffic, just simple low-powered LEDs on the corners (white for front, red for read) so that other road users at night would get the visual clues they're used to.

2024-10-11 08:28:36 UTC

Hey, it's #Comet day!
Today's the first chance of seeing C/2023 A3 in the evening sky, although to be clear I'm not hopeful. It's still very close to the sun, which is famous for being very bright, so odds are that it won't penetrate the glow of twilight. But you never know, so I'll be out this evening with binoculars and camera looking for it.
If we don't find it, we try again tomorrow, and the night after. It's moving through the sky rapidly enough that you'll need a fresh map each night, but those are easy to find online (search for "C/2023 A3 finder chart" or something), or just get an up-to-date app.
Here's a pair of charts for tonight, in Gauteng, South Africa, generated by Stellarium. First is daytime, so you can see where it is relative to the Sun, and the second is in evening twilight so you can compare it to stars and star-like objects (like Venus).
Note that the view from different continents will be rotated somewhat, so I recommend finding charts suitable for your one location
https://files.monoceros.co.za/media_attachments/files/113/287/794/189/987/786/original/4c4cd5d4aa4406e6.png
https://files.monoceros.co.za/media_attachments/files/113/287/822/932/787/112/original/a103799a9f88600b.png

2024-10-09 08:42:16 UTC

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I mean... at least a movie is over after an hour or two, you still get to talk to each other afterwards. Although maybe the reading is just an excuse to get comfortable next to each other and there will be more talking than reading. I guess it's worth finding out?

2024-10-07 11:17:55 UTC

That AI picture that won the art competition and whose prompter is now moaning about how he gets no copyright protections:
That odd thing with the dramatic lighting, and there's some architecture in the background but the Moon is embedded in it for some reason?
It's a classic example of how, while art rewards you the more you engage with it and gives more back the longer you look at it, AI pictures are the opposite. The more you look at this thing, the more you study the details, the more it falls apart.
First impression is "Woah, impact, much contrast, very colour, some sort of sci-fi hall with people in dramatic poses" but as you look longer... nothing. The people are just blobs. The architecture is... like upside down or something? It's got none of the usual tells, like too many hands or mystery non-writing, but nevertheless it's just... blobs of imagery that briefly fool the brain into thinking it's seeing something profound.
Here's another way to describe what's going on: You know how with music, certain chords and keys are associated with certain emotional responses? Like major keys make for great anthems, victory parades, happy positive assertive stuff, while minor chords are a bit more melancholic, a bit more conflicted, great for love songs or complex emotional situations. If you're not familiar with this, watch literally any one of Bill Bailey's standup routines, explaining this is a standard part of his act.
A skilled composer can build a piece of music using purely those emotional building blocks to create a powerful cinematic soundtrack for a movie trailer or fight scene or something. But if you take that music out of context and just try to listen to it *as music*, it's often kinda flat and boring because there's nothing actually there, it's just a sequence of emotional triggers that don't add up to anything.
I think the AI pictures are doing something similar with pictures. It's learned to blend visual blobs in a way that triggers an initial emotional response in humans, without actually being anything. And that's why they so often give a great first impression, where people are astounded by what the soulless machine produced, but it turns out you can't sell the stuff (except maybe to idiot Art Investor types trying to Diversify Their Portfolio. These people are perfect because they don't look at art, they store it securely in a safe somewhere) because the illusion never lasts more than about 60 seconds when your brain starts to actually process what it's looking at.

2024-10-01 20:35:45 UTC

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ooh, i have a relevant anecdote!
About 15 years ago, my employer has been spending a decade trying to modernize their flagship product. It was written in Natural, which is very similar to COBOL, and this was hurting sales. Several projects to rewrite this massive ancient code base in something more modern had failed.
Then we found a company from Hungary which had a magic tool that would do a machine translation from Natural/adabas to Java/sql.
The most incredible thing is, it worked and they delivered on time. Obviously a lot of manual fixes to deal with bits of code that confused their tools, but it actually worked.
But it didn't work well. It was painfully slow, the whole system would lock up on the most trivial actions (like querying a customer's balance), but that was because natural and Java are conceptually VERY different. The correct logic of one is totally stupid and clumsy on the other. And that's before we get to the database... Adabas predates relational databases. That account query that took so long? It was doing something like iterating through the entire table till it found the correct record because adabas commands were very low level and that was the correct and most efficient way to do things. But in a SQL db, that command logic translated to SELECT * FROM TABLE; and then doing a for loop on each line of output till you find the record you want. DB server thrashing, app server suffering memory exhaustion, and nobody can do a thing till the query ends.
The magic translator tool could not optimise for stuff like that.
Anyway, this AI tool is facing an almost identical task and I bet it will have the same problem.

2024-10-01 13:53:56 UTC

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I hadn't actually tried to suspend yet!
But a quick look tells me that S3 is not supported - only S4 and S5

2024-10-01 12:47:47 UTC

My FreeBSD laptop experiment is going extremely well. In fact, after using it as my daily driver on the company laptop for the past month, I've run into only two problems:
1) The sound chipset isn't properly supported, so it doesn't detect the built-in microphone. My USB mic worked instantly though.
2) I can't find a decent malware suite that supports FreeBSD. Corporate IT policy makes no exceptions, I MUST install something that they have approved. Meanwhile, FreeBSD forums are full of people breezily and slightly contemptuously explaining that antivirus is actually a scam and a security hole and anyway is completely unnecessary as FreeBSD is literally immune to anything bad ever. Which may or may not be true, but you're not going to convince either me or my security department with that kind of sneering arrogance.
#FreeBSD

2024-09-23 10:16:16 UTC

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Page not found

2024-09-15 14:33:10 UTC

Somebody on our neighbourhood whatsapp group just shared security camera footage of two guys derailing their gate from it's motor so they could get into the property to steal a motorcycle.
And what nobody seems to have noticed in the replies is that these two were standing under a bright spotlight, perfectly illuminated, casting long shadows across the street.
Bright lights do not deter criminals. They only make victims of crime feel a little better by addressing our primal fear of the dark.
#LightPollution

2024-09-12 05:02:23 UTC

I grew up in a time when schools only taught feminine subjects like typing and cooking to girls but TV told us that the best cooks and typists were male chefs and hackers.
So i would never have dreamed of taking one of those girly classes but remained quietly determined to be amazing at both.

2024-09-06 09:38:51 UTC

As I may have mentioned before, one of the services my business offers is managed mastodon hosting.
This means that I run servers and install mastodon hosting software on them, so that if you want to have your own mastodon instance, you can do that. You own the instance, you set the rules and stay in control of who can join and who gets blocked, and I make all the technical magic happen. Being a small company, we're easy to reach and are willing to be flexible. Need custom code changes, so that you can have more than 500 characters? No problem. Want to activate translation so that you can read posts in other languages? We can do that. Do you have an instance already that you'd like to move? We have experience with this, whether it's a self-hosted instance, or one managed by a hosting company.
Our rates are reasonable, our service is "Desperate to please" and our existing customers have only positive things to say :)
My DMs are open if you're interested.

2024-09-03 13:44:02 UTC

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So call me naive but... they didn't have this before?!

2024-09-02 07:11:09 UTC

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Okay this is interesting. Starlink should be pretty easy to block - park a signal jammer near a base station and it should be trivial to remove it (and all starlink customers using it) from the network.

2024-08-30 11:05:22 UTC

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So it seems like the streaming companies aren't even the primary villains here. It's the labels, like it's always been?

2024-08-30 10:28:08 UTC

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I saw a Rick Beato video once where he tried to actually do the maths to figure out what artists actually get from streaming services, and found it extremely difficult because the rates are so variable depending on all sorts of factors like how many people share the copyright to a song, what the licensing regimes are in different territories, and so on.
His conclusion surprised me - if i understood it correctly it turned out to be approximately the same as with the old model.
See, you obviously can' compare rates because streamin pays for each time a song gets played, but you can never know how many plays come out of any given CD sale, or how many people happened to be listening to a single play on the radio. But you can look at how much money big artists are depositing into their bank accounts, and this was what appeared to be much the same as it was before.
But... I'm not sure I understood it correctly, and his analysis was on big hits not small artists and his point wasn't actually anything to do with streaming vs sales but rather how opaque streaming deals are
Anyway, video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY15RzKZeJ0

2024-08-28 11:18:45 UTC

So apparently bitcoin miners who've gone big, buying defunct power generation plants to feed their mining gear, have found that they can make significantly more money simply selling that power into the grid.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto
In places where there's an actual market for electricity (unlike South Africa where the price is fixed by a state regulator, and is constant throughout the day and night), you can sell spare capacity back to the grid. If you've got rooftop solar, and your batteries are charged and are harvesting energy that you can't use, you can sell it back to your provider. And the power firms themselves are able to do something similar, and so wholesale prices fluctuate constantly as demand and supply shift. We all know this, from those amazing stories about electricity prices sometimes going negative in places like Germany.
So the bitcoin miners with their crappy old coal-burning generators have found they can play the market: when demand goes up because it's hot and everybody's running the AC, they can turn off all their mining rigs and sell the power to the grid for a pretty healthy profit - $32m compared to $8.6m in one example
In other words, bitcoin is a very inefficient use of power: The process of turning electricity into bitcoin caused an almost 75% loss in value, which is the opposite of how manufacturing usually works - you turn a thousand dollars worth of raw material into $5000 worth of refined material, into $10000 worth of manufactured goods (completely made up example numbers to illustrate the point).
Bitcoin gets it backwards!

2024-08-07 07:55:16 UTC

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... and suddenly everybody wants records again but we already threw them out

2024-07-30 19:31:07 UTC

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The wikipedia page is a blast though, lots of fun snippets!
Like the ad they put out around 1900, with a picture of the pope drinking a giant mug of the stuff, with the tagline "The Two Infallible Powers – The Pope & Bovril". Classic.

2024-07-30 19:21:26 UTC

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Oh for pete's sake... according to wikipedia, it's called "Beef Tea" in the UK and I think somebody's abusing their editor privileges to have a good laugh 😂

2024-07-30 19:16:27 UTC

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I read a history on the stuff once. It was a very typically late 19th century product, in that the name itself means something like "Life essence of Cows" - Bo(vine) Vril. Potent health food, contains all that a body needs, etc etc. Apparently vril was a thing people believed in, it featured in fantastical fiction, mystical writing and snake oil cures alike. That kind of marketing wouldn't fly anymore so now it's just that weird intensely concentrated savoury black ooze that people like to put on toast :)

2024-07-30 17:17:04 UTC

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All of the above, except for making it a drink! I'm strangely squeamish about that one...

2024-07-30 17:10:36 UTC

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more of a bovril guy myself...

2024-07-08 17:27:17 UTC

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Mmm. I live in a home built to South African standards, which essentially boil down to "WE ARE A HOT COUNTRY WINTER ISN'T REAL IT COSTS TOO MUCH TO MAKE WINDOWS CLOSE PROPERLY I'M NOT LISTENING LALALALALA"
I'm pretty sure we have a colder experience of winter despite objectively being much warmer than most countries simply because we let it inside our homes.

2024-07-08 16:48:56 UTC

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Wow.
currently 5ºC here, I'm wearing multiple layers in the hot room (where we keep the inverter and all the computers) and wishing I had a blanket 🥶