Andy Valencia @vandys@mastodon.sdf.org

My van conversion (Promaster 1500) continues! A friend lent a table & chop saw. The walls are in & insulated, native softwood ceiling is waiting for some M5 bolts, and the floor is ready for rigid insulation after filling the lows between floor ridges.

That didn't take long!

You can follow notes from the desk of Trump at @trump

https://metro.co.uk/2021/05/06/twitter-suspends-donald-trump-from-the-desk-account-that-wasnt-his-14533082/

@11112011 @furgar

Ok, I went ahead and created a Bot to import Trump's new postings into the Fediverse:

@trump

I just finished repairing a bread machine, the second repair where cheap (Chinese) connectors corrode, overheat, and fail the appliance. The one before this was the same failure in a fan/heater in our bathroom ceiling.

Are crappy connectors the new planned obsolescence? Sort of Chinese capacitors, the next generation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Thanks to various expressions of interest & support, I've freshened my old ForthOS. It builds its own GDT/IDT, has a proper RTC handler, and all I/O is interrupt based (previously it was a polled system). On qemu it no longer pegs the host CPU at 100%. It's still free, open source, and so forth. Try the new image disk image (source included):

http://sources.vsta.org/forthos/bochs/

@tindall In fact, profound complexity creates a huge moat around software which intends to be open to open source participation. Firefox OS suffered from this, as does Firefox itself, along with projects like ubports. Most enthusiasts--even those with a lot of SW experience--are hard pressed to climb the mountains of complexity (usually barely documented) to understand enough about the system to contribute meaningful changes.

Unbounded complexity might be the defining challenge in SW.

COVID-19 is weakening, could die out without vaccine, specialist claims

"It was like an aggressive tiger in March and April, but now it's like a wild cat." Even elderly patients – who a few months ago would have died – "are sitting up in bed, and breathing without help."

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/covid-19-is-weakening-could-die-out-without-vaccine-specialist-claims-632324

We actually have TWO pandemics running. A virus, and a first-of-its-kind social pandemic. Like most new epidemics, a lack of resistance makes it very dangerous.

Global social media, amplified by algos optimizing for engagement, make it spread like crazy. Lockdown slowed the virus but amplified these effects.

The result is skewed decision making, resulting in self-destructive behavior. Please consider a two-week "lock down" break from social media.

I don't understand how even a rough approximation of vi's notion of "marking" a location in a file so you can jump right back to it hasn't been adopted by every other editor in the world. Heck, even in non-editing contexts, it would be amazing. I would kill to be able to mark and jump between browser tabs, and between points in webpages. Why is this not a thing?

The MUF actually got high enough that I made a contact on 15 meters - to South America even! Idk if all hams know about this site but it tells you the highest frequency likely to produce ionospheric propagation at 3000km. Very helpful for seeing which bands are "open"

http://prop.kc2g.com

An essential resource for any serious software developer... https://ohshitgit.com/

You should update your Firefox. Right now.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2020-03/

#firefox #vulnerability

My wife's Folk/Celtic radio show, latest episode:

http://foresthalls.org/wordpress/?p=3373

Play it on-demand:

http://archive.voiceofvashon.org

Seriously? Seriously???
American #Healthcare system
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/12/23/787403509/for-her-head-cold-insurer-coughed-up-25-865