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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


From Tumblr. I might as well post it myself...
in reply to Neil Gaiman

Magic is a little more than that, but not much more. You have to be good at writing to take it to that next level, though.
in reply to Neil Gaiman

you know what else is magic?
Getting in your climate controlled coach, driving to somewhere 40 miles away and arriving about a half hour later, and all the while you listened to a symphony played by a 100 piece orchestra.

I admit it's not as magical as being moved by words written someone 1000s of miles away or centuries in the past, but it is pretty damn good nonetheless.



Huh. The council phoned up to ask me some questions and send me a £10 Amazon voucher.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


After all these years I’m rarely surprised by medical misogyny, but finding out that the research from the first ever tests on period products using blood instead of water were published LAST WEEK is one of those surprises.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Katy KingInTheTron 👸🏻
and even then, this research didn’t use period blood, which can vary wildly in consistency. Cups or discs can contain the thicker material that pads and tampons can’t absorb.
in reply to Bethany Black

as a trans woman who, thankfully, doesn't need to deal with menstrual products, but who patiently listens whenever my cis woman friends vent about their periods and therefore knows the general sentiment on that topic, I was shocked by this fact, and now I get why people hate menstrual products so much.


The worst thing about going all explodey mopey on social media is feeling a bit of a fraud when you don’t feel quite so bad.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

If you're at all being triggered by external events, then its going to come in waves.

The question is, do you feel that you were being fraudulently mopey, or that the feeling not so bad is a fraud? Hint: it's neither.

in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] External events are a factor but my reaction to them is way over the top or even exists at all because of the depression. I think the feeling is that I was somehow exaggerating how bad it felt (I wasn’t) to get attention, and now one of guilt for having alarmed or alerted friends now that 48 hours later I’m a bit ok again. And also a sort of fear that everyone will go away again.

Similar feeling regarding my therapist. She’s offered an emergency appointment rather than waiting until September but it doesn’t feel like an emergency today. Saturday evening it definitely did.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I think the potential for emergencies almost certainly counts as an emergency. It's a bit like standing on a plank and it wobbles, I think. If you try again and it doesn't wobble the next time it doesn't mean that it's okay to put all your weight on it, or that it's not worth investigating it as a priority, or that it was silly to alert people to it!
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Having been there: just because it's stopped being an emergency now, doesn't mean it's not going to be again before the next time you can see your therapist. Or that next time it's going to go away so quickly. There's no such thing as a false alarm in this sphere, just that sometimes it takes a *lot* of work to figure out what the root cause is.

Have long post brewing about feeling guilty about alarming friends and family, particularly those who understand. Just do it. Some of us are going to be in a place to listen, some aren't, and if we're all honest and transparent about this then those that aren't should just be able to back away from the moment without anyone's guilt, and be there another time.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Looks like I was pretty prescient ~5 years ago about the Hashicorp CLA being added:

twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1…

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Remember that free software licenses are irrevocable - even if a vendor changes a project to a non-free license, the older versions continue to exist as free software. So while we should absolutely criticise vendors who take the work of others and make it non-free, we should also bear in mind that they gifted us the earlier versions in the first place, and cannot take that away again.

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in reply to Matthew Garrett

Yes, and there are examples where things went sideways; "Hudson" was a tool to do Continuous Integration testing, and Oracle trademarked "Hudson" and claimed that they owned it. Community quickly continued under "Jenkins" that we now all know and love. "Hudson" was abandoned and donated to Eclipse, and largely a forgotten name by now.

MySQL -> MariaDB is another example.

in reply to Niclas Hedhman

And something similar happened to OpenOffice; community went an created LibreOffice and Oracle dumped the remains on Apache.
in reply to Matthew Garrett

All the woke contingent in Apache is working hard at that too, and the reason I resigned from the Board 2.5 years ago.
in reply to Niclas Hedhman

@niclas AOO's failure was obvious far longer than 2.5 years ago, and everyone on the board since the handover needs to accept responsibility for fucking up the value of the OpenOffice brand
in reply to Matthew Garrett

I agree. I opposed the acceptance of OpenOffice into the Incubator in 2011, pointing out it was going to be bad for the ASF reputation. However, the Incubator PMC majority was in favor of accepting it.
I am pretty sure there was powerplay with IBM behind the scenes.

"2.5 years ago" was a reference to the woke invoking cancel culture on an individual from his own (original creator) project and Apache at large, because people were upset about what he wrote on Twitter.

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
The Gregzone
No, no, see, piracy is only illegal if you’re an individual. If you’re a multinational, it’s called “the cost of doing business”, and they’re banking on the (very likely) fact that they can afford way more and way better lawyers, and bribe — sorry, I mean “lobby” — way more judges and lawmakers than you can.


Mental health


in reply to Alexandra Lanes

How does one "do" friendica. I don't particularly want to post things, but being able to comment would be good, if that's a friendica thing?
in reply to kæt

@kæt I don’t understand. You literally did just comment on a friendica post?
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Oh, I see. It's two-way from mastodon is it? The friendica post content is presented to me here as a link. But unlike RSS, if I comment on mastodon, the replies are federated to friendica?

I was confused, expecting either the content and replies to both be embedded within my mastodon client or else neither.

in reply to kæt

@kæt It’s two-way, yes. Or rather, they’re both activitypub servers so use the same protocol to exchange messages. Dunno why the content might just be a link though. Sorry.
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@chiffchaff The confusion may be that a Friendica post has (can have) title and content, and when it gets federated to Mastodon all we see is the title and a link back to the full post on its server. But you can just reply to that stub here and it gets federated back as a comment.
@kæt

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Stop using Brave Browser.

Seriously.

spacebar.news/p/stop-using-bra…

If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
lproven
@ScottStarkey I am, but in context, it really makes no difference at all.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
lproven

@Feral3D Vivaldi is a great browser in a lot of ways, but I personally have never got on with the Opera UI, even 23Y ago.

But others like it and always did, and that's good.



Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


When I gathered the courage to tell my mother that I was her daughter, not her son, she simply said:
"I have suspected so, ever since you were born."
"Why?"
"I was cursed when expecting you. A demon would take my firstborn son."
"And?"
"It came, looked at you and said 'Nah'."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories
in reply to Micro SF/F by O. Westin

I love this trope! When magical beings know the true gender of a person

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I have booked my Winter Flu Jab for 14th September. I'm eligible to get mine free, but most pharmacies in England also have private jabs for around £20. In my case it was quicker to book the free one via my local chemist than to wait for the GP clinic in my village.

boots.com/flu-eligibility

#FluVaccination

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to NatalyaD

@NatalyaD @goatsarah Some years it seems to take months and months before schools get doses too. Though I think that tends to be when they've changed their mind last minute about which variants of flu to target this year.
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Eleanor LNR Blair
@goatsarah What year is this again?

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Whilst I like flying out of London City Airport for the convenience, a 31 hour flight to Porto seems a bit long.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.



I wonder whether the Pavilion B Common Room at DAMTP is buzzing with talk of all this! mastodon.social/@Dtl/110858637…


Interesting! Newtonian Gravity seems to break down at very very low accelerations - perhaps the end of dark matter models for the universe?

phys.org/news/2023-08-smoking-…





Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Here's a repeat of an experiment I did on Twitter about 5 years ago.

Can you fit an entire Shakespeare play into a single social media image?

This uses the tiny GNU Unifont which is the most compact way to represent most characters.

The image is 4091x2069px and about 460KB . But when expanded it uses about 70MB of RAM - so some devices and services have trouble with it.

If this breaks something unexpectedly, please let me know.

(My original at twitter.com/edent/status/97032…)

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in reply to Terence Eden

it aliases horribly on my phone, probably monospace font size beating against sampling used to show the preview. If I was more awake I could probably figure out something from the alias period, but I'm not that awake yet.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


The Royal Mail swap-out form has a box for your old stamps and no constraints on how you arrange them. So I tried to do something pretty.
#SwapOut #Art?
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Ben Harris

OK. How did that form end up with an odd multiple of ½p on it? I presume I must have mislaid a stamp somewhere.

in reply to Tony Finch

After some faff getting git repositories into shape, here are some notes on making the PCB and plates for Keybird69

dotat.at/@/2023-08-09-kbpcb.ht…

here's the hero image from the blog post, you will have to click through to enjoy the awesome purpleness of the actual PCB

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Bluntly, Britain should be banned from hosting major sporting events over this racist policy. #cyclingWorldChampionships #Glasgow23 amp.theguardian.com/sport/2023…

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Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Cab
@Nicovel0 yep. Here it's even more blatant because his schedule is so visible - the guy competes around Europe, he's not suddenly a flight risk because he's coming to Glasgow rather than Ghent. Britain is insular, racist and petty.
in reply to Cab

What I find most ironic with the British Government and their racist policies is, the most racist members of said government, and hoping I don't come over racist myself, are non-white.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to David Gerard

100% tax. Every American tech giant has their European HQ in Ireland for a reason.
in reply to David Gerard

Yep, breaking their system and making the users fix it is par for the course for Patreon.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I wasn't surprised to learn that someone proposed a unit for reciprocal of resistance to be called the 'mho' (ohm backwards).

I was suprised to see it proposed by Lord fucking Kelvin in 1883.

He even suggests to play 'ohm' backwards in a phonograph to work out how to pronounce it.

19th century physics shitposting.

in reply to Babechamel

But what about phoneticians who came up with their 'cepstrum'?

(A cepstrum is a kind of inverse spectrum. Get it? spectrum -> cpestrum)

((The independent variable on a cepstral graph is quefrency. Get it? GET IT? frequency -> quefrency))

(((Phoneticians are very good shitposters.)))

#phonetics #linguistics #acoustics



Thinking about heat pumps, since there's been waffle on the radio about them recently. My mental model of a heat pump is that you have unit(s) outside, and aircon unit(s) indoors which you can run either to cool or heat your preferred rooms.

However, what's being talked about on the radio seems to consist of hooking a heat pump up to replace your gas boiler and warm your radiators. Is this more effective or efficient? It seems to me that as the chances of hot weather increase you'll want to cool your house for some of the year, and this doesn't do that.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Traditional model in this country has been to hook them up to low-temperature wet-underfloor systems. Recently they've started producing higher efficiency/temperature ones which can hook into an existing CHS, but you might need your radiators upsized.
in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] I think @mobbsy has underfloor heating (wet, if I remember seeing the spaghetti of tubes rightly) and described it has having horrid latency so it takes forever to get to whatever temperature you wanted.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

indeed, not helped by the giant mass of poured concrete that the pipes are set into.

However, it's unobtrusive, no radiators on walls, warm floors are lovely in winter and the house stays pretty much constant temperature.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

daikin.be/content/internet/int… sort of thing
in reply to Adam

AIUI they're basically "drill hole through wall of the room to be heated; install unit A on the outside and unit B on the inside; supply with electricity. I think they'd be an adjunct to the existing gas CH rather than a replacement.
in reply to Adam

@Adam Yes, I think that’s probably what I’d want for the downstairs living area.
@Adam
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Do let me know if you find anything interesting in your research!
Unknown parent

@Peter Ellis If I were to do this I think I’d have ducts in the loft for the upstairs rooms. Maybe the two big downstairs rooms would be more of a challenge.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Today i am releasing a new font for $pay-as-you-like. drj11.itch.io/airvent-font

Airvent is a utility sans with near-monoline strokes with rounded terminals.

Airvent includes pre-built and OpenType fractions, smallcaps (including smallcap numbers and a couple of smallcap symbols), sub- and super-script numbers, ballot boxes, planets, and a typical range of daggers, section symbols, currency symbols, mathematical symbols, and so on.

Please try, buy, and boost!

#advertisement

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to David JONES

Fira Sans does. Dotted zero is a total killoff for me, even unstyled zero is less bad, slashed from lower left to upper right is the best ofc.
in reply to mirabilos

taste aside (i'm pretty sure i have at least a few friends that share your opinions), it can be difficult to separate undecorated zero from /O and slashed zero from /Oslash (especially in this particular font, where i inherited the basic shapes; for example, the /zero and /O are unusually close in width).

[edit: oh, and disappointingly i don't think there is an OpenType feature for dotted zero, despite IBM implementing this option on the 3270 terminal thousands of years ago]

This entry was edited (8 months ago)

in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] On catgirls specifically. I feel part of the trans experience has somehow passed me by
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Oh, yes, me too. In my case I put it down to not being sufficiently girl, not being sufficiently cute, or not being sufficiently young. See also thigh-highs, which I would definitely have done when younger if sufficiently cute (and if they had been as available as now).
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] I tried them in my early transition (also lockdown!) clotheshorse phase and thought I looked kind of cute in them. They never stayed put though.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Maybe you just don't have the right shaped head? :blobcatSad: (Like the way I can never get behind-the-head straps to work properly, on anything from VR headsets to masks.)
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Oh right! Either early phases you've not got enough thigh, or nobody's telling you to use tape.

(I can imagine you in cat ears though. Looking somewhat bemused.)

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


railadvent.co.uk/2023/08/polic… This is rather amazing. As in the the 1963 robbery, they interfered with signals to get the train to stop. There was an excerpt from an incident log on the birdsite which I’ve shamelessly lifted here but I have no idea of its provenance. I’d be fascinated to read more.
Unknown parent

@geekylou :transgender_flag: Probably not quite that well informed? Most people kind of understand signals by analogy with traffic lights (though they probably don’t understand yellow) but are probably entirely unaware of track circuits.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Branches of Costa on the verge of becoming entirely arsehole-free newsthump.com/2023/08/01/branc…

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Font Licensing. I would be interested in exploring a somewhat permissive license that is more restrictive than SIL. In particular, i would be interested in incorporating elements of firstdonoharm.dev . What licenses have people been impressed or intrigued by? (doesn't have to have an ethical stance)

Please boost.

#FontLicensing

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to David JONES

re ethical font licensing, this 2021 AIGA provides some interesting background eyeondesign.aiga.org/some-type…

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


"In this composite image I wanted to represent the position and the changing phases of the Moon above the peaks of the Cridola Group, in Italy, during a lunar month, called synodic month." -- Giorgia Hofer
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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The German word "Arsch" means "butt".

But:

- am Arsch (at the butt) = out of luck, or: As if!

- im Arsch (in the butt) = damaged, broken

- für den Arsch (for the butt) = in vain, useless

- verarschen (to forbutt) = to hoax

- Das geht mir am Arsch vorbei! (That passes my butt) = I don't care

- am Arsch der Welt (at the butt of the world) = at the end of the world, out in the sticks

- Arschgeige (butt violin) = jerk

Enjoy our languarsch!

#TheGermanWord

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Jens Clasen

I love that “arse-end of beyond” exists as a literal phrase in German too!

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


TIL the soldering iron that has been sitting in a box of misc stuff in the corner of my room is about as much use for melting solder as a rod of graphite wrapped in wood

so tomorrow i should be getting a pinecil pine64.org/pinecil/

it’ll be the first risc-v micro in this house that i know of
(certainly the first user-programmable one)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to Tony Finch

Before I forget: this may be irrelevant for you, but have you seen one of the most common mods is to replace the tip screw with a thumbscrew?

There's advice on sizing on the wiki if that's something that appeals

in reply to Philippa Cowderoy

@flippac sounds like a sensible mod! so far i am not in love with the conical tip, tricky to get a good thermal contact, at least when soldering a breakout board with castellated edges to smt pads


Because there are images of child sexual abuse circulating on Twitter (or whatever it’s called) and Elon Musk has actively intervened to ensure the perpetrators retain their accounts, I judge it no longer psychologically or legally safe to remain on Twitter. I’ve deleted my account.

Sion [main] reshared this.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I was going to stop using it once TweetDeck becomes unavailable next week anyway (if that's still happening), keeping account to prevent appropriation of id.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


UK Pol, Lib demmery, TERFs, weariness

If I were a TERF, and I wanted to ensure institutional capture of a political party to further my bigotted rubbish, I wouldn't bother going for the tories, who are already there, I might go for Labour or the greens who seem susceptible, but in the name of all that's unholy I wouldn't go for the lib dems...

How many times do we have to vote overwhelmingly in favour of trans rights at conference?
How many times do we have to move next business on their poison as they misgender people from the stage?

It's a waste of everybody's time, including theirs. I wish they'd just sod off.

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in reply to 🦇 Jennie Rigg 🏳️‍🌈 (she/her)

UK Pol, Lib demmery, TERFs, weariness

This toot brought to you by me having to take time out from my life to respond to yet another substanceless bullshit complaint from someone objecting to me using the word TERF.

I'm so tired.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to 🦇 Jennie Rigg 🏳️‍🌈 (she/her)

UK Pol, Lib demmery, TERFs, weariness

Oh no I said TERF again.

TERF TERF TERF TERF TERF.

If they're going to kick me out of the party for that good luck to them, and good luck finding someone else to do all the sodding work I do as well.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

in reply to 🦇 Jennie Rigg 🏳️‍🌈 (she/her)

UK Pol, Lib demmery, TERFs, weariness
I've had a complaint leveled against me for liking a tweet, that compared dealing with their persistent attempts to make the party anti trans, to being like trying to get rid of Bed Bugs.
Apparently TERFS a are marginalised people and only Nazis compare marginalised people to insects, so I'm bringing the party into disrepute...
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.




What I’d ideally like, either in a client app or in Friendica, is the ability to filter outgoing posts to add content warnings (abstracts in friendica-speak) or possibly prompt to add one.
But maybe this is just laziness; remembering a set of things to CW is probably significantly easier than getting individuals’ pronouns right, which I regard as mandatory brain work.


in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Thing
Yes, apparently it does. Woohoo. (Checking that the CW feature in Mona actually works against a Friendica server)


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That's a pretty significant bump in global mean Daily Sea Surface Temperature this year, to say the least.

Yes, this should be on every newspaper. And importantly it should be analyzed more deeply than a daily "reminder" of or, even worse, "evidence" that #climatechange is happening (which only confirms the idea, that this is something worth discussing by now, which it isn't). climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst…

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So, let me get this right...

Musk is obsessed with the letter X. At some point he suddenly decided he wanted to rebrand Twitter as X just changed it to the Unicode X character i.e. uncopyrightable.

Now it turns out even the trademark is owned by arch-rival cage-fighting lizard Zuckerberg.

And they didn't even tell the owners of their HQ building they were changing the logo, so police got called on the signage engineers replacing it.

But this guy is a genius?

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in reply to Zoë O'Connell

If it's uncopyrightable, how did Meta and Microsoft already copyright it? reuters.com/technology/problem…
in reply to Martin Campbell

@martincampbell2 They didn’t, they own the trademark (brand) for it rather than the copyright (artistic expression).