Ethan Blanton
boosted
Ethan Blanton
boosted
Ethan Blanton
boosted
I used to believe in the inexorable advance of progress, that society’s annoyances would gradually be engineered into oblivion.
Then one day I casually mentioned to my grandmother about how USB plugs—contrary to the laws of physics—had to be rotated at least three times before they were properly seated.
She responded, “So you’ve never tried to put the first corner of a fitted sheet on a rectangular mattress, then?”
I no longer have faith in progress.
When I was in middle school, a particularly annoying English teacher made us memorize a list of (I think 38?) prepositions, and asserted (against my protest) that they were the only prepositions in the English language. Every time I use a preposition not on that list (I just used during, for example), I get annoyed all over again. It's been almost 30 years, I should probably let it go.
PSA: if you're sending an email with something essentially textual in nature to say, just send text. Don't attach a document, don't send an image. If you really super need to send your cute announcement image or whatever ... send the details in text, too.
Everyone who processes text better will thank you. Everyone who reads their email in a terminal will also thank you.
Ethan Blanton
boosted
I am going to start selling my original NFT soon
pleease do NOT copy or save or redistgribute this NFT it is worth millions of dollars PLEASE
here is my nft that is worth millions of dolars
Downside of piano practice on a keyboard:
No kid ever set something on their upright and accidentally pushed a button transposing the entire keyboard by a half tone.
I love how when Android says an app is not responding, it ALMOST ALWAYS means that it WAS not responding, but it is NOW responding fine, as of the time of the not responding popup.
Ethan Blanton
boosted
"HTTPS Everywhere plug-in no longer needed"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/09/https-actually-everywhere
Excel 365 is just completely unusable. I don't know how people do this.
GNU coreutils mv has a _surprising_ number of arguments.
I honestly didn't know mv took arguments at all, but even BSD mv takes -f -h -i -n -v. Who knew?
Ethan Blanton
boosted
All browser prompts need a "Lie" function in addition to Allow and Block.
<Website> wants to:
* Know your location
* Use your camera
[ Allow ] [ Block ] [ Lie ]
Ethan Blanton
boosted
"XXX needs your permission to enable desktop notifications" - no you *really* don't. Because I *already* *actively* took away your capability to do notifications because *I* *do* *not* *want* your notifications!
Since when did it become OK for software to try and pull a Carthāgō dēlenda est on its users?
To just blatantly ignore user choice and keep nagging? This is even a service I am paying for, for crying out loud.
I hate how technology has become a means for companies to remotely manipulate u̶s̶e̶r̶s̶ herds of assets instead of a tool of enlightenment and liberation.
It didn't use to be like this.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
Ethan Blanton
boosted
For clarity, this is a followup to an earlier post about my article of #Facebook censoring mentions of #Mastodon : https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10285-facebook-censored-me-for-mentioning-open-source-social-network-mastodon
Ethan Blanton
boosted
ok, so qemu-system-sparc finally runs netbsd 9.2, on qemu version 610, machine sparcstation 5, with 256m ram, host aarch64
installs with factory eprom only and runs with open firmware only with command line:
../../../qemu-6.1.0/build/qemu-system-sparc -m 256 -drive file=hdisk.img,format=raw,media=disk -cdrom NetBSD-9.2-sparc.iso -boot c
"but" looks really good ... retro ... dm for install instructions, not enough room here ...
This is very interesting. Symbol rate limits have been very contentious in the amateur community for reasons I don't quite understand (but I think can be summarized as "get off my lawn"), and some proposals to do just this have failed to gain enough traction recently.
Ethan Blanton
boosted
> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as USB Type-C, or as people have recently taken to calling it, USB-C, is in fact, USB 2 or USB 3. USB-C is not a system unto itself, but rather a connector of the multi-functional data interface made useful by USB 2, USB 3, USB Power Delivery, Audio Accessory, Debug Accessory, HDMI, DisplayPort, MHL, Thunderbolt, and vital physical layer components comprising a full system as defined by USB-IF.
> Many computer users run a version of the USB every day. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of USB which is widely used today is often called "USB-C", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically USB 2 or USB 3, developed by the USB-IF. There really is a USB-C, and these people are using it, but it is just a connector to the system they use.
