Might as well share my weirdest proto social media thing.

9/11.

(I’m in Finland. This happened in the afternoon.)

I was leaving work. I distinctly remember a coworker being alarmed about news.

I turned to the usual news source. Slashdot. Massive bloody thread about airplanes hitting the World Trade Center.

OK, that’s pretty bad.

I finally turn to TV news. …OK, stuff is far more in flames than I expected. I think I caught one of the towers collapsing in live TV.

But the following days, my primary news source about 9/11 was, actually, IRC! There was a channel on Freenode where a bot posted headlines about 9/11 investigations. Because the actual news websites were bloody dead under the massive traffic.

Eclipse

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

Will probably need to check this out.

I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.

Bonus speculative factoids:

• A pancake tortoise hatchling is called a Morsel
• A pancake tortoise adult is called a Flapjack
• A pancake tortoise group is called a Stack

I have no way of verifying this, of course. English language doesn’t have a governing body, after all.

JavaScript is powerful

Old joke (yes, you can tell):

“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”

As it says on AdoptOpenJDK page, the project has rebranded to Adoptium.

I use Adoptium on Windows (dunno, seems to run Minecraft, OK, that’s good enough for me). On Linux I just use whatever OpenJDK is packaged in distro.

Sharing screenshots and video captures.

The only place where I tried to use it was on Xbox back when Xbox One first came out, and I didn’t like the way it worked back then, so I didn’t really use it much. It didn’t send the actual media to Twitter, it posted a link to the file, and Xbox screenshots got deleted after 30 days. If I wanted to properly post it so that the media was actually hosted on Twitter, I had to save the full res media anyway.

(In fact actually saving full resolution Xbox screenshots used to be needlessly difficult. Only much later they added a way to save screenshots to OneDrive, which occasionally worked, and only very recently they decided they don’t bother with the Xbox screenshot hosting at all and auto-upload everything to OneDrive.)

To adapt an old joke: “If you see a raging dipshit driving like a lunatic in the middle of the road with their giant-ass car, you should contact the nearest police officer immediately. It’s possible they’re behind the wheel.”

Oh last year I paid the ticket in cash, 20€, no problem. This year? 20€, plus 1+bits euros of processing fees. To “deliver” my ticket to the platform of my choice. (…Mobile app.)

So I went to the car show. They still had the cash booth. Mild failure to communicate. I just dodged the field of view of the booth guys, out of shame, and entered like normal, glad the ticket guards were accommodating.

Oh I forgot the best part! When I was trying to log on and the security interfered with CAPTCHAs, Ticketmaster reset my password several times. That’s how you know this company take security seriously. /s (Literally no site does this.)

Meanwhile, earlier this month, I had to literally disable quite a few bits of adblocks and other extensions just so that Ticketmaster’s crappy CAPTCHA thing would allow me to even log in. Literally screamed “Why are you pestering me, I’m just trying to buy a ticket to a local car show, not a fucking Madonna concert”

Well aren’t the requests to backend by definition slow? Actually TCP protocol is pretty much turtle as opposed to UDP’s hare: slow, but it gets you there.

Edut: was drunk here, was very spitballin’ too

Clearly, the superiour mode is to just use keyword based scoping (à la Ruby do ... end). When I was a kid I read an OBSCENE MAGAZINE where I saw a Forth program go dup dup dup and I was like “ok so what’s the problem here? Things happen and everything is just keywords?” and my young mind was corrupted forever I guess

You’ve not understood to Existence until you’ve gone “oh good. foo-ood.”

Source: Been a student, subsidised, unsubsidised, employed also, then left alone too. Unemployed, Also an intern, and not as much.

Foo-ooood is goo-ood. Just grab it. If you can. Tacos are better than death.

In Wikimedia projects (and MediaWiki systems in general) you actually have to pay attention to other people’s usernames (when working with histories and in article discussions), and at least in Wikipedia long long time ago there was a lot of trolling/vandalism where people impersonated other users (particularly the admins) and made bunch of sockpuppets with tiny variations in names when they got banned. So this rule makes sense.

Well LaserActive at least got the Retsupurae reaction 7 years ago, so it’s not totally obscure.

One of my big disappointment with social media integration was Xbox 360, where “share” was basically “share on Facebook.” Wasn’t happy with that. Who shares video game screenshots on the Boomer Network?

Was further disappointed on Xbox One where they had Twitter sharing buuuuuuuuut it only put in links to expiring Xbox screenshots and didn’t, you know, post the actual images on Twitter. I don’t know if they changed it since its introduction to actually post the images. I only wanted to get burned once.

And now, finally, Xbox has announced that Xbox screenshots and clips go to OneDrive. Fi-fucking-nally. How fucking long did it take for Microsoft to realise that people with Microsoft accounts might want to use two already coexisting Microsoft systems?

Dunno about Switch. Was happy with it storing pics on SD card. Was happy with dumping them on my NAS month after. Never used the sharing system. Probably because Nintendo would ban me if I did. Sharing videos or screenshots of Nintendo games? Absolutely bannable. It is known.

It wasn’t really Microsoft that killed Nokia’s cell phone division, but gave it the final blow that made the house of cards fall.

Nokia was basically getting super arrogant. “Oh, trust us, we’re the #1 phone manufacturer on the planet. We know what’s best for the market”. They got caught completely pants down when iPhone came out. Despite the fact that they had already made successful smartphones (Nokia Communicator line). Despite the fact that there was this one small Finnish company that had made a touchscreen based phone and Nokia just laughed them off when they offered to help.

Every move Nokia made after iPhone was basically playing catch-up with some really strange decisions.

I believe that Nokia could have salvaged themselves if, instead of going with Windows Phone, they had just announced they’ll be Yet Another Android Manufacturer. But Nokia had to be special about it. They had invested in Ovi (app store) and Here (map service) and they just had to be special. (And even more ironic is that HMD Global is doing just fine as a maker of Nokia-branded Android phones these days.)

I really need to go through my old files and find The Screenshot from around 1999-2000. Basically, I searched for something in AltaVista and got back a page that was super chock full of ads and “portal crud”. …and a tiny little text that you really had to squint for, somewhere in the middle, that said there were no search results, actually. I got the strong impression that this search engine was fucked.

Sometimes Google’s results are kind of starting to look like the same, except the crud is in the actual results. Which is something Google could do something about. I mean, they used to care about SEO spam.

I remember Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo: “Hey, a new system update is here.”

Me: “So what’s new?”

Nintendo: (shrug)

Homebrew people: “This patch changed nothing, except they tried to plug a hole. Damn, took us almost 10 minutes to counteract that this time!”

(OK, there was one system update where they added the ability to run stuff off of the SD card, but beside that, there were a whole bunch of updates where they tried to stay ahead of homebrew/pirates and failed spectacularly.)