I was playing through the tutorial of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines and realised when you walk up to a computer it has a fully functioning prompt running that you can TYPE INTO, with the keyboard that you have, you know on your computer. They used to make GAMES

Since English is an Anglo-Saxon language, we refer to its speakers as "Anglophones". We missed a trick not being called "Saxophones".

I love how literally no Unix file system is able to normalise Unicode except Zfs, and it doesn’t do it by default. Like most Unix products you have to press about five ”’make it not shit” buttons. I believe this is for religious reasons. Unix people generally believe that every bit is sacred […]

Why is macOS literally the only OS with support for high resolution screens? Everyone else seems to have just given up having text you can read and gone ”ok screens are universally shit everywhere who gives a fuck”

Ok I’m not sure I think this is such a great idea. Power grids are sensitive to sabotage and attacks in wartime and we’re not exactly moving towards nice calm quiet times if you’ve noticed https://chaos.social/@russss/115219362872963164

We’re in trouble as a society aren’t we https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/

If you’re following the news you’ll notice that a *lot* of skilled, senior low level developers centrally placed in the Linux ecosystem are being diverted to other projects. This is concerning as hell to me because I can’t see a way that this doesn’t undermine future development and signal […]

Ok this was very funny @atpfm

#aesthetic: skogsrå [Shadowrun]

https://www.phoronix.com/news/New-Apache-Software-Logo It would have been a lot cooler if they’d instead leant into it and somehow managed to transfer ownership of the foundation to actual apaches though

I waxed my second hand Fjällräven Stina jacket and went a bit hard on the wax. Turns out getting it even is *very* difficult so I ended up with a mottled finish that looks like something Snufkins in Moomin would wear. It’s technically a both a success and a failure in that I’ve turned a jacket […]

You know how everyone says it's harder to make friends as an adult? I've found that to be true (acquaintances: trivial though, levelling them to friendship: impossible), but it's even truer for dogs. People with puppies love having their dogs play with other dogs. People with adult dogs are more […]

iOS users: probably a good time to turn off automatic updates https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment/115176409937798186

I know the rewrite it in rust thing is a meme by now, but the uutils coreutils rewrite is really doing quite well https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rust-Coreutils-0.2.2

What up #mosstodon look what I found

[Stupid consumerist baiting of the maddening drive to escape] It’s cool that they’re doing some sort of C64 reboot (though I’m the same kind of nostalgic for much later systems), but good god is if expensive https://www.commodore.net/product-page/commodore-64-ultimate-starlight-edition-batch1

I keep thinking: if the death of the pirate movement (as symbolised by the trial against the pirate bay) was the tragedy, then surely this GenAI moment is the rebounding farce.

I needed those numbers so that I could take the number of product lines of code and divide by the number of days the project has existed. Which makes this:

I’m considering selling my Thinkpad x230 *tablet*. Perks include: - SSD, probably - IIRC 16 gigs of RAM - BIOS flashed Skulls (cool rabbit logo at boot, runs only SeaBIOS/Coreboot) - the large battery, in good to excellent condition depending on how it’s fared in storage (I haven’t found the […]

Me: oh god migrating the server from FreeBSD will take ages how can I even do that without downtime when I don’t have more than like ten minutes consecutive time to work on it Idiot solution: buy a second server. Migrate one thing at a time and load balance from server #1. Then, finally […]

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware. #android #google

I’ve been using Hover for a few years and good God they suck. The portal is generally broken (ie entered changes disappear), support is piecemeal, confused, and generally unbelievably slow. Like, months waiting time slow.

I have an old MacBook Pro from 2013 (MacBookPro11,3), and I’m considering options for OSes. I’m very unhappy with modern DEs, most notably Gnome but also windows and the direction macOS is taking whenever Apple can be arsed to modify it. With #GhostBSD’s recent trial of a cool, modernised NeXT […]

Free idea: Dyke Nukem, a riot grrl Duke Nukem total conversion mod that pays homage to smashing literal male chauvinist pigs.

I’m considering moving away from #writefreely. I’ve been paying for Write.as for a number of years but the UI is completely broken in iOS safari, the generated markup is kind of messy, and the general user experience of publishing very confusing. I figured I’d pay for it to help fund development […]

"The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company directors?" "Really?" said Arthur. "No, I didn't. For what offense?" Trillian frowned. "What do you mean, offense?" "I see." #hitchhikersguide #douglasadams #quotes #quote #bot

When and why did cables stop having those iron clumps near the ends?

#llm harm I hadn’t thought about before: one of their main functions is as huge decontextualisation machines. That’s one of the mechanisms behind the mind bending effects: SCP content on SCP wiki: obvious fiction. SCP content from ChatGPT: potentially believable. See also: Ao3 fiction. This is […]

An annoying feature of dark mode is that it was invented after humanity forgot how to make UI that wasn’t flat and so every dark mode UI is impossible to use as an aesthetic choice

For kicks I started listening to episode 1 of @atpfm (from 2013), and uh, the audio quality has improved. A lot. I’m looking forward to hearing about tech I can afford though!

I bought a Philips wall mounted CD player for my toddler but it only makes a loud buzzing sound when playing a CD. The disc seems to read fine though, it just doesn’t make any sound. Does anyone have pointers or is this an ”ok kiddo this is now a let’s disassemble old electronics” type situation?

[GenAI delusions] The interesting thing is that what this does is specifically tap into the same mechanism cults and manipulative people use to control others; it’s spinning a story that gives someone a feeling of being elevated and special, and keep spinning the story to have the person relate […]

Nice! Debian 13 has support for my MangoPi SBC!

Why does #freebsd need to be updated in two steps? Why can’t your update both kernel and userland in one go? Seems very arbitrary to me

Design prompt: visual computer UIs that aren’t derived from pen/paper/documents. A few ideas: - organic/animal/plant systems - mechanics/steampunk/pullies and levers - abstract modernist art It’s remarkable how quickly you run out of ideas!

Fun fact: Windows puts a circular symbolic link in every user's profile directory, so if you're using Windows standard "robust file copy" utility (which is better than xcopy which, I assume, improves on "copy" and, among other things, dies if you have a path longer than 266 characters with a […]

Friendly reminder that ”declutterring” by yeeting your stuff or getting rid of all your smart electronics replacing them with dumb ones is also consuming stuff. Consider prolonging the lifetime of things and then just not replacing them instead. Use what you have, if at all possible.

Interesting; I tried to get a more readable version of the weather report by rendering the SVG at 2x the resolution before dithering. This worked exactly as expected on my desktop machine but crashes on the raspberry pi. Getting debug logs is, of course, impossible.

The weather report is back! Better than ever!!!!

[ChatGPT induced psychosis x SCP commentary from seasoned SCP writer] Qntm, published SCP writer, has a few comments on the very obviously SCP-derived nonsense ChatGPT fed one of its investors and which seems to have driven him towards some sort of psychosis. https://qntm.org/chatscp

Uh, I'm attempting to cross compile a Skia project for Raspberry Pi and now it requires libudev and......it's not going well. I'm actually going to attempt compiling this on the pi itself to see if that's even possible because at this point the prep work required just to get a bloody binary out […]

It’s so funny that the Apple Store app invites me to compare my current iPhone (11) to the current (16), and over that five year differential is unable to show why getting a new phone for half a month’s salary after taxes (ie what I get) would be an upgrade. ”Wow your Bionic Chip has a […]

” Part of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old’, as the IWW put it, is developing forms of tech infrastructure that resonate with remaking society along convivial, confederal, and mutualist lines.” […]

I keep thinking we lost but did we? Storage now practically free. Bandwidth too. In everyone’s pocket, a BitTorrent client waiting to be installed. On every subway car; a peer to peer mesh network waiting to be born.

My next fools errand (after I finish fixing and reimplementing the weather station in Slint) will be remaking #silverbullet. It’s too janky for how important it is to me, and there aren’t any options. To save labour I’ll reuse as much software as I can. - sync with syncthing (terrible on iOS […]

One of the things I love about the Polonius project is it keeps surprising me. Like, Rust is big enough and complicated enough I’m now convinced no one fully understands all of it, and to make things even worse everyone is continuously evolving it. It’s a lot more gardening than the previous […]

I've blogged some tips for how to enjoy the web more! https://amandastjerna.se/blog/the-old-web-never-died/

As part of my general #anticloud project I’ve started reproducing my music collection offline. Bandcamp is of course really cool for this, but they don’t have most mainstream artists. Second hand CDs are great for mainstream releases made before ca 2007 or so, but for contemporary music I didn’t […]