Mastodon Feed
Reblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net ("Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:") wrote:
One of the more popular slogans of the protests in #Germany against right wing movements is #NieWiederIstJetzt which can be translated as #NeverAgainIsNow and I think that is a slogan that should be promoted in the US too.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
samlitzinger@journa.host ("Sam Litzinger") wrote:
Here are our four brave foster kittens waiting to get their vaccine shots. Good babies!
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org ("Lauren Weinstein") wrote:
By the way, the one time in my career that I've ever pressed "The big red button that shall never be pressed!" was at RAND.
It is standard for computer room facilities to have a way to kill all power to the equipment quickly in cases of emergency. Traditionally this is a very large red button that can be pressed for this purpose, often just inside an entry door. Typically it's under some sort of plastic shield or such to avoid it being pressed accidentally.
This button is never to be used in the course of normal events. Because it abruptly terminates all power to associated equipment, the risk of data loss and even equipment damage is very significant.
So one day, I walk down the stairs to my basement computer room at RAND where the PDP-11s and ARPANET interfaces lived. I open the door ... and there's nothing there but a wall of white.
When faced with something like that, it takes a couple of seconds to figure out what the hell is going on -- it's not in your brain's expected scenarios for opening that door.
The room was full of white smoke.
Within a few seconds I reached up under the shield just inside the door and slammed down the "never to be pressed" red button.
Instantly power was cut to the UNIX PDP-11s, the ARPANET equipment, a bunch of peripherals, and even a number of disk drives that were in an adjacent room that serviced the big IBM mainframe on the ground floor above.
As it turned out, the Halon fire suppression system was within a few seconds of firing when I killed the power -- management was pretty happy about that since recharging the Halon was expensive.
I got a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) CE (Customer Engineer) out to RAND within a couple of hours. He quickly found the source of the problem.
A PDP-11/70 power supply had dramatically failed. It was partly molten slag. Very impressive. I tried to get the RAND photographer down to take a photo of it (this was long before cell phone cameras or even cell phones), but the CE grabbed the power supply, hid it under his coat, and ran out to his car with it.
Apparently he wasn't thrilled with the prospect of photographic evidence of the failure.
Interesting day.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
realTuckFrumper ("#TuckFrump") wrote:
‘Trump Is An Adjudicated Rapist!’ James Carville Goes OFF In Rant Against Media ‘Normalizing’ Trump https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump-is-an-adjudicated-rapist-james-carville-goes-off-in-rant-against-media-normalizing-trump/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
sohan@freeradical.zone ("Sohan Murthy") wrote:
Americans: please give us an affordable, practical, small EV with decent range
American car companies: here’s a $70,000 EV truck that weighs 6 tons lol
American car companies: wow americans aren’t ready for EVs
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
BethanyBlack ("Bethany Black") wrote:
Hard to believe Norman Rockwell predicted the internet
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
kfury@mstdn.social ("Kevin Fox") wrote:
Thank goodness we have the internet and Google to give us information we can trust.
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
I friggin' love macFUSE... mounting my remote user spaces as though they were local subdirectory trees on my local workstation is just plain wunnerful.
I such such a lazy sot
#RemoteFiles #LazyEngineer
Mastodon FeedReblogged by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
ninafelwitch@tech.lgbt ("Nina Felwitch :v_trans:") wrote:
@pierogiburo it's magical. You enter, sit down for 15 minutes, and when you get out you're in a different place. I love it.
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
love this https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/24/arts/design/cindy-sherman-photography-hauser-wirth.html
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
@brucelawson (a member of @owa) on the recent iOS engine choice news:
https://brucelawson.co.uk/2024/apple-and-malicious-compliance/
Mastodon FeedReblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
brianleroux@indieweb.social ("Brian LeRoux 💚") wrote:
Lots of us are trying to make sense of the recent EU regulatory rulings and Apples' bad faith letter to the law implementation. To me, it's an excellent demonstration of why browser choice is crucially important as standards participation and legal compliance are clearly not incentive enough.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
brianleroux@indieweb.social ("Brian LeRoux 💚") wrote:
I do have one last thing.…What about developers? [applause]…We've come up with a very sweet solution.…We've got an innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices. Really innovative.…The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. It gives us tremendous capability.…You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.
- Steve Jobs, 2007 at WWDC
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
Looking to kill a couple of hours? Enjoy
Mastodon Feedxor@tech.intersects.art ("Parker Higgins") wrote:
i've been thinking about rewriting it as a web site and maybe this is the motivation I needed to finish that!
Mastodon FeedReblogged by kornel ("Kornel"):
neuralex@neurodifferent.me ("Alex C") wrote:
@technicat the original Mac UI devs noticed and solved so many problems in *1986* that more recent Web 2.0+ frontend devs just ignore -- like this one, *drag delay* -- solving the problem that when the user moves their cursor towards an item on a popup menu, the mouse may drift outside the lines momentarily *en route*, so you should make sure not to close the menu prematurely; these days lots of popup menus instantly pop closed if you stray outside their bounds #UI #UX
Mastodon Feedcollinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth") wrote:
A pack of SVG icons for dark UI patterns called DeceptIcons
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
emacsomancer@types.pl ("(mapcar #'emacsomancer objs)") wrote:
on portable EPUBs: https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/#epub-content/EPUB/index.xhtml$ , the page itself being a web-based EPUB.
"Despite decades of advances in document rendering technology, most of the world's documents are stuck in the 1990s due to the limitations of PDF. Yet, modern document formats like HTML have yet to provide a competitive alternative to PDF. This post explores what prevents HTML documents from being portable, and I propose a way forward based on the EPUB format. To demonstrate my ideas, this post is presented using a prototype EPUB reading system."
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
Oh wow. These machined sculptural pieces from Chris Bathgate are quite something to behold:
https://chrisbathgate.blogspot.com/
He's got a book out:
https://schifferbooks.com/products/the-machinist-sculptor
And a youtube channel:
Mastodon Feedxor@tech.intersects.art ("Parker Higgins") wrote:
I don't think this is an X problem, but it's a bummer
Mastodon Feedxor@tech.intersects.art ("Parker Higgins") wrote:
this week my 78 bot that posted on twitter between 2017-2023 got a bunch of takedown notices and then got suspended 😭
Mastodon FeedReblogged by nadim@symbolic.software ("Nadim Kobeissi"):
zombierustpunk@hachyderm.io ("Dana (née Bonnie) K") wrote:
The thing about apps like mIRC, ICQ, and Winamp is that they felt like they were made by people who used them. Apps today feel like they were designed by a committee looking at a spreadsheet.
When an app is missing basic features and still pesters me whenever I open it to try some new AI bullshit, I wonder if the PM got the promotion they were going for.
That’s one of the things I like about open source apps. Even if they’re less polished, you can feel they are made by people who use them.
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
I got a used fresnel light for indoor photography. These things are really expensive new. Now I just need a stand because this thing gets very hot.
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
petting the Housepanther & sucking on a cuppa… almost time to head out for my Sat AM volunteer gig walking dogs at the #ROC City Pound.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):
Quinnypig@awscommunity.social ("Corey Quinn") wrote:
“For some reason our AWS bill spikes 4% in February once every four years. I don’t understand why.”
Mastodon FeedReblogged by collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth"):
neuralex@neurodifferent.me ("Alex C") wrote:
When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that's not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
Now, AOL Everywhere 1999:
"Ultimately, though, America Online is betting that the cable companies need it more than it needs them. Mr. Pittman argues that if anyone can sell broadband, it is America Online, because the most likely prospective buyers are its 17 million members. ‘‘We realize that we’re one of the few who can write the big check,’’ he said."
They really thought they could become cable tv. And since then so has every #bigtech company.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/business/now-aol-everywhere.html
Mastodon FeedYou know you live in Japan when your kid, paying with her Lego set, suddenly starts massively shaking the table saying “EARTHQUAKE EARTHQUAKE!”
Mastodon Feedrmrenner ("The Old Gay Gristle Fest") wrote:
The Human League, seeing that I'm trying to re-learn Cultist Simulator and deciding to sabotage my run with bad advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqqBs6kkzHE
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
annierau@wikis.world ("annie rauwerda") wrote:
My letter to the editor made it into this month's Harper's!! tldr: Wikipedia is great and degrading it is not so great
