I’ve had a real itch to buy an answering machine. One of those proper old school ones with separate cassette tapes for the outgoing and incoming messages. I could hook it up to an ATA connected to a VoIP service and…well, receive messages!

Wow—a treatment for Huntington's: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevz13xkxpro

I've been working on getting Fielstation42, a cable TV simulator, up and running with some channels and content I'd like to have. available on my CRT 24/7. So far so good! I found a site that archived cable TV channel plans from the 90s which is great. It's a real […] [Original post on mas.to]

We need more TV shows about old computers. There are only so many times I can rewatch “Halt and Catch Fire” and “Valley of the Boom”

I kinda want to upgrade to the iPhone 17 Pro for the camera and battery, but then I’d also be forced to use iOS 26. That’s quite a tradeoff. The battery life on the iPhone 15 Pro is absolute trash and the battery health on mine has degraded by 10% in two years despite my good charging habits […]

Benjamin: I would like to live in less interesting times.

I’m watching the 1997 film “Wag The Dog” and out of nowhere we get a full screen gorgeous shot of a PowerBook Duo. That’s hot.

Apple Intelligence is so advanced it was able to detect that this is a dog.

Last week in Portugal we visited a place called “Happy Donkeys” where you can go for a walk with these donkeys and the owner chats with you about donkeys and such. Absolutely perfect day out. #asstodon

I feel like those of us with Plex servers and piracy savvy have a duty to help friends and family cancel streaming services by offering a replacement.

A second late night host gets yanked in the US. The purge continues. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c203n52x1y9o

People think life is so easy when you’re single and have no dependents. Sure it is at times, but sometimes you’ve got so much free time and you can’t decide if you want to play video games, read, watch TV, or plan a trip, and you just end up sitting around wasting hours doing nothing.

I’m not one to give myself credit for much, but when someone said “the guy came to install the wifi cable” and I just let it go, that’s growth. Sure, yeah, wifi=fiber=the internet. Absolutely. 🧘

I got an alert from UniFi about a new AP ready to adopt. Interesting since I don’t own nor have ever owned a U6+. Where the heck did it find this? Bluetooth to a neighbour? #unifi #ubiquiti

Sad to hear about Robert Redford, one of the quiet greats of cinema. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c07p8yle7pet

I don't need a rabbit hole on a Monday morning but I just noticed that in Ruby, DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank have their own variants of UTF-8. I'm assuming this has to do with emoji since they didn't have fully compatible emoji codepoints back in the days when emoji was a Japan-only thing.

We were sitting out having dinner in Lisbon and heard a big bang. An e-bike had a bit of a fire. They’re going to be scraping the remains of this off the street.

I’ve been compiling a list of English words that have different meanings and pronunciations that are differentiated only by where the stress is placed. These words should have accents to disambiguate them. Content, Object, Subject, Present, Convict, Compact, Convert, Project, Console. Then a […]

Sometimes the value of duck typing over type assertions appears in real life. I’m chilling at a cafe at Lisbon airport and a girl just came to me. Her: “hi sorry are you from Lisbon?” Me: “No, why’s that’s?” Her: “Oh, do you know where the Metro is?” Me: “Yes, <gives directions>” Another way […]

I’m not a fan of football but if I had to pick a team to support, it would be SSC Napoli purely for their logo basically being the Netscape logo.

I’m once again wondering how the F Bolt is figuring out my location. My phone was in flight mode (wifi off too) and I got this notification moments after we touched down in Amsterdam. Its location permission is set to “While Using” so something must be wrong or […] [Original post on mas.to]

We deal with a bank that sends us data by zipping-up a CSV and emailing it to us every day. They told us they'd have an API in December 2022 so they're a little late on that. Usually the CSV headers are in English, but sometimes they're in German, and sometimes a mix of English and German […]

For a few years now I've been a member and player of Learned League, and online trivia game/league. The questions are similar to what you'd find Jeopardy! Anyway, some questions are just made for me: In a 1997 action thriller starring Harrison Ford, his character instructs Gary Oldman's Ivan […]

I was surprised my ISP assigned me an IPv6 /48 prefix but then I saw the math that: "a /48 could be assigned to every human for the next 480 years before they run out". Love that.

The perfect open letter to web developers. https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

Helped my dad drop off his busted work computer at what turned out to be the Data Recovery Place To The Stars

My immediate feeling of rage when having to deal with text and code generated by AI in a work context is a flashback to circa 2004 when a guy in *sales* would edit my ASP code using Dreamweaver because he wanted to "just make a quick change" and it would completely mangle the code. That's the […]

lol "Mastodon Moderation & Compliance Division" that sounds super legit let me go ahead and click that link

There are times in life where you can really recognise your own growth and progress. Today is one of those days. One of our developers is very obviously using AI to respond to feedback on GitHub and I'm pretty sure also for generating code. A younger version of me would have flown off the handle […]

Dealing with Okta to get an app approved is the most tedious experience I've had in recent memory. They have all these automated tests your instance has to pass and some of the tests are nonsensical. It's to the point where I'm considering pulling a Volkswagen and "if okta, return http 200" on […]

GamersNexus did a 3.5 hours documentary on how export-controlled NVIDIA GPUs are smuggled into China for AI. Bloomberg then got the video taken down from YouTube with a bogus copyright strike and would only release for what amounts to a shakedown. This smells like some intersection of […]

I just got order confirmation from my new ISP including my IPv6 configuration. They’re giving me a /48 block. That’s enough for 65,536 VLANs. Should do nicely for my one person flat.

You know those days where your stomach is a bottomless pit and demands constant feeding? So weird. I feel like a bear preparing for winter.

Weeding is back-breaking work. Work smarter not harder.

Dealing with people in local classifieds reminds me of dealing with people at airports. Just...where do these people come from? How do they function in real life? My ad: "Some item, price, local pickup only" Them: "Hi can we negotiate the price in half also can you ship it at your expense?" […]

You know you’re not awake yet when you sit down at your desk, shake the mouse to wake up your computer, shake it again, smack some keys on the keyboard, and then realise your laptop is still in your backpack.

I've been wanting to put more M.2 NVMe SSDs in my server, mostly in RAIDZ-1, but it just doesn't have space for them and doesn't support PCI-E bifurcation. A new option enters the arena: a mini PC with 6x M.2 slots and built-in eMMC so you don't waste a slot on a boot drive, all for $200. Now […]

I always love reading Linus Torvalds' responses to merge requests. > Torvalds described the submission as "garbage" and took particular issue with certain aspects of the code. Notably, he criticized the inclusion of a helper function – make_u32_from_two_u16() – saying it made the codebase […]

I was slightly nervous upgrading my server from Debian 12 to 13. I shouldn't have been though since the Debian team does such a good job with documentation and testing to make these upgrades smooth. Somehow I purged the Linux kernel headers package which caused the ZFS module to not be re-built […]

Every time I have to deal with some Kubernetes issue that's way too difficult to diagnose I can't help but think "this would not be a problem with bare-metal hosting". Today's issue is nodes being re-created at an alarming rate and network connectivity problems. I assume this is a data centre […]

Currently sitting on the train watching someone copy/paste generated commands out of ChatGPT and into a Windows Command Prompt with administrator privileges 🥴

If you ever wanted to hear Taylor Swift talk about everything for two hours straight, this podcast is just immaculate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2lX9XESvDE #TaylorSwift #NewHeights #ErasTour #TS12

I looked at a flat today and I hope I get it since it’s got TDC’s 5 Gbit fiber available. Also it was nice in other ways but that’s the main attraction.

Aside from "ch", why does the letter C even exist in English? I can't think of any situation where S or K aren't a perfect substitute. Maybe C should be re-assigned to the "ch" sound only. If only refactoring natural languages were this easy.

imagine wikipedia with a microsoft win9x interface choose your lord

Waking up with T minus 12 minutes on a Taylor Swift countdown that turns out to be a pre-order for her new album. Who needs caffeine? What an absolutely blessed day. Can't wait for The Life of a Showgirl #taylorswift

I've been daily-driving Kagi as my search engine for months and it's great. Well worth the cost to have an experience free of ads, promoted results, AI shoved in your face, etc. One of the best features is being able to block, lower, raise, or pin results from sites. It's so nice never seeing […]

Say what you like about mechanical hard drives, but audible status indication is pretty neat. I was just sitting here and noticed the sound and thought "oh, is today zfs scrub day?!" and it is! Torrent activity has its own particularly chaotic sound to it. I can tell when a new Plex stream […]

I’m starting to pack for my move and this box will have to be marked as fragile and valuable and probably wrapped in plastic to keep it extra safe.

Tautulli is a fun companion app to Plex for fans of data and graphs. I always enjoy seeing the stats of how many users are streaming, the platforms, resolutions, how much transcoding is going on, etc