Brinens and Things

Me, running my copy of Winter of Fire through a homemade scanner rig: "Hey, childhood selves! Remember that time you tried to make a digital copy of this book by hand-transcribing it into OpenOffice (and it was a massive project and you were never able to complete it)? Check out this present I got you! The future is pretty sweet sometimes."

---

(I hadn't even absorbed touch-typing yet! I had to keep looking back and forth between the page and the keyboard! I'm proud of my past selves for making it as far as they did, really.

(That being said, I do think there's a valuable lesson here about the power of automation. Even now, with a vastly increased ability to *obtain* automation methods I find out about, I still tend to default to the obvious-but-tedious methods of doing things without first checking if there's a better way.))

Comments on my own posts:

The one about Signal [four comments]

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by reasonableapproximation) Radical self-expression through clothing.

[cw: embarrassment squick] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by rustingbridges; partly in response to sigmaleph) The confusing proliferation of names in Worm. [two comments, three if you count the tags]

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by BagelofDeath) Honest Chinese food reviews from a Chinese restaurant owner. (Also, advice on how to get good chicken fingers in Canada.)

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by grayestofghosts) Sometimes reading less is a reasonable response to changing circumstances.

[cw: food] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by moral-autism) Some types of professionally preserved foods we highly recommend trying.

[maybe cw: stalking] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by nerviovago; in response to plain-dealing-villain and moral-autism) Hiding secret passageways inside fake clothes dryers.

---

Links:

[cw: nsfw text, (mild) death] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (by arihi) A new repository for mind-control erotica, one that is *not* built on 90's tech with 90's limitations.

[Rock Paper Shotgun; Wayback] (by Nate Crowley) I thought this was going to be about priest-based Age of Empires builds, but the thing it actually is is neat too.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[Bloomberg; Wayback crawling forbidden] (by Matt Levine)

Or combine the last two approaches: “At the end of each trading day from now on, the number of Tesla shares will be adjusted, via split or reverse split, such that each day’s closing price is $420.69.” A share of Tesla could represent a variable percentage interest in the company, but always be worth $420.69. Elon you can live this dream if you want it enough.

[Kiwix; Wayback] (by Stéphane Coillet-Matillon)

I wish I could tell you how we did it, but it involved some C++, Typescript, and sacrificing a few chicken. Only two of these three worked, and there’s still some discussion about which.

[cw: politics] [The Guardian; Wayback] (by Lauren Aratani)
( Read more... )


There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

[none this time]

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[arguably cw: poverty, apocalypse] [WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by marcusseldon; partly in response to eightyonekilograms and bambamramfan) If you're concerned your job will get automated out from under you one day, try to factor the eventual layoff into your finances now.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by sizvideos) Omeo hands-free wheelchairs (steered by leaning) are very cool and very expensive.

[WordPress (Tumblr)] (OP by voxette-vk) Are dishes put *up*, or put *away*?

---

Links:

[mailbox.org; Wayback] My email provider is running a Christmas promotion offering new customers €6 of credit if they sign up by January 10th, enough for six months of the basic plan (which is plenty in my experience). I've been happy with them, and I would definitely recommend them over Google or an ISP email. (It's even better if you use a custom email domain so that you can easily switch to a new provider if you ever change your mind.)

[CellSol; Wayback] (h/t Hackaday): I'm not sure how practical this system is (maybe?), but if nothing else I love that a disaster-tolerant comms network has the motto--according to Wikipedia's translation--"get results, whether God likes it or not".

[Kiwix; Wayback] If you ever find yourself on one of those data plans with zero-rated WhatsApp and expensive everything-else, exploit some loopholes with the help of the iHarare WhatsApp bot!

Laugh rule: [Wikipedia; Wayback]

Iqaluit Public Transit used to offer bus service in the city, but the service was cancelled due to low ridership. Motor cars are increasing in number, to the extent of causing occasional traffic jams known locally as "the rush minute".

There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

( Read more... )

I learned about Recoll today while looking for a way to search ~50 chat-log ODT documents for a particular exchange, and oh my god it's amazing.

It totally did handle that situation, but it also handles *so* many other file formats. EPUB, HTML, Thunderbird, *things inside zipped folders* (7-zip too, if you install the right plugin!), just to name a few. I tried a search for "backpack" and got hits from chat logs, fanfics, ebooks, blogs, wikis, emails...

And there's search syntax, to let you exclude stuff with certain words or restrict it to a particular directory and all that.

I have acquired my own private search engine! That is a thing, that exists, right now, that you can just download off Synaptic like it's no big deal and not something beyond Vannevar Bush's wildest dreams!

Comments on my own posts:

Vocation [three comments]

[cw: drugs, amnesia, maybe medical abuse] The onomatopoeia of breathing

[cw: food] The one about food routines [four comments]

How to Backup Your Dreamwidth [two comments, one of which is new]

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph; in response to contrarianarchon) Relatively good computer skills; the wonders of virtual machines. [two comments, one of which is new]

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) How to block the annoying sidebar videos on Serious Eats.

[arguably cw: embarrassment squick] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by argumate) Clever vs obvious solutions.

[cw: nsfw text] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by feotakahari) Foot fetishism vs snake fetishism.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by sanesparza; in response to rustingbridges) Dream points-of-view.

---

Links:

Some selections from old Youtube bookmarks I was going through:

[cw: abuse] [Youtube] (by TL Forsberg) A bilingual music performance.

Three laugh-rule entries:
[Youtube] (by Joe Nicolosi et al) A trailer for a hypothetical genre-savvy horror film.

[Youtube] (original by Toby Turner; translated version by Draazil) The Dramatic Song, as heard from the foreign grandma's perspective. (This one is only funny if you speak Icelandic or--in my case--have already heard the original English version (which is also hilarious in itself, btw))

[Youtube] (by Jordan Taylor et al) How to write a worship song (in 5 minutes or less).



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

( Read more... )

Comments on my own posts:

[cw: amnesia, poverty, anxiety, probably venting] The one about coping mechanisms [one comment, not counting the postscript]

[mild cw: death] I saw Spot click [two comments]

The one about changes to Flight Rising alchemy

Lifelogging

---

Comments on other people's posts:

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by itsbenedict) Alexander Wales has written even more great stuff than previously believed! Over a million words more, in fact!

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by yvannairie) That feel when you check on someone you ghosted a while back, and they have not improved at all.

[cw: amnesia] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) The characteristics of different types of Tumblr linkrot.

[cw: illness] [Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by contrarianarchon) Adapting to both the pathogens and shops of a new home.

---

Links:

(Tumblr *still* hasn't fixed the backwards post ordering.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by pedantricks, but read the whole thread; h/t fermatas-theorem) *Somebody* couldn't wait until 2021 and started doing earth-pod memes already.

(Ditto, although this thread doesn't actually lose much if you read it in reverse order.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by swordsdance, but read the whole thread; h/t itsbenedict) Birds wearing bells as hats.

[Tumblr; Wayback] (by evenstarsinthesky; h/t consumptive-sphinx) Creative [reusable shopping containers].

A customer was struggling with our app today and handed the phone to me to set up.

It always weirds me out when strangers just casually hand me their smartphones (and annoys me when strangers think they can just casually handle *my* smartphone). It feels...*intimate*. Not a *sexual* intimacy--I have no problem with my mother's tablet--but intimate.

Your computers are like an extension of yourself, you know? *Especially* a computer you carry close to you almost all the time. It's a part of your body, a part of your mind. It seems that a lot of people don't feel that way, though. Or maybe they'd be just as casual about other forms of contact.

So, I was clearing out my Wordpress spamtrap today. *Most* of it was just ads for casinos and stock-trading and call girls (as they put it), the usual crap.

But one of them was a bot that saw the number of duplicate (botched incremental backup) and near-duplicate (reblog chains that I participated in multiple times) posts, *assumed I was an SEO scraper bot*, and offered to sell me software to make me look more person-like.

---

(I'm going to tag this "proud citizen of The Future", and I honestly do not even know if I am being sarcastic. I'm kind of in awe.)