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.

Joke’s on you, Microsoft.

First of all, I already have Game Pass, so you don’t get any new sales.
Second, if I open the settings app in Windows 11, it just straight up crashes. (Can access the other tabs, e.g. through desktop customisation. But if I go to the front page, it crashes.)

It was broken by the update that supposedly added some other ads. But I’ve not seen them! I had to disable the “recommendations” in start menu because it made the start menu not work at all (due to the aforementioned crash, same deal).

This actually really sucks, though. Windows Store apps do not update themselves, Xbox services stopped working (due to being unable to update WS games), and I don’t know if Windows Update works or not. I guess I need to reinstall when I get arsed to.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn’t bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn’t matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I’m going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I’m contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there’s still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? …Oh they’re still around!? Good.)

Oh no. You know shit is really terrible when they cannot even afford to communicate at 8 bits. It’s 5 bits Baudot code. Capital letters only. They actually had to pay extra for @, #, and $. Thankfully, by 1870s, % was part of the character set. My heart’s with anyone who can’t just blast UTF-8 out wherever they can.

(Edit: In case you’re wondering why it has a weird gif attached to it: The Memelord, Musky Elon, has decreed that you can actually attach a shitty random gif FOR FREE. So of course any cash strapped institution will do so.)

large, easily readable font

Ah, but readable by whom? I have a bar code font here. If you can’t read it you’re clearly not nerd enough.

Also, putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms will only turn the kids into sarcastic, blasphemous little fellows. …I mean, more so than they already are.

I prefer this version: Wikihistory

Well, voting registration as it’s implemented in America isn’t exactly in vogue. As in “oh, you just need to get an ID to vote from now on.” And people without ID need to do some extra paperwork and the office is open 5 minutes every other week, just go through the door located behind the acid moat and bear traps.

Over here in Finland: Government has a comprehensive record of citizens, they know where everyone lives and who’s eligible to vote. So they send you a letter. “Here’s how to do the advance voting, here’s the polling location you need to go to on election day, Also here’s how to draw the numbers, so this will be less confusing. Just bring this notice card with you. And an ID. If you don’t have an ID, visit the police station and they’ll give you one for free.”

Most common mouse problem I have is that grime gets in the wheel and it acts up or seizes up. (Cleaning wheels is also a huge headache with newer mice.) Buttons rarely quit working. …except on some of my Logitech mouses, sometimes the buttons just started going funky or died. My Microsoft wireless travel mouse has kept working for years. I have an Microsoft Intellimouse Optical from early 2000s that I still use with Raspberry Pi, no problems.

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.)

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”

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can’t believe a lot more people don’t know about it.

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?

Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you’re into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.

deleted by creator

NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

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.