@CatherineFlick this was the one bit of Christmas shopping I failed to fit in this afternoon.
@solderandchaos oh, that was a day ago. Apparently over £20 is typically the point where corporate overlords are going to make it awkward.
@solderandchaos please hold, consulting my brother, who is a barista.
@ehproque @Reb@strangeobject.space @james@strangeobject.space I once paid for a gym subscription for one full year without ever walking through the front door. I meant to, but after three months of “oh, I should go do the onboarding” I couldn’t face explaining it to the inevitable look of disbelief from the staff.
“The signal is repeating! We’ve got the whole thing.”
“How many bits?”
“Almost 500k. 454,957 bits”
“I got a hunch, factorize that number”
“Bingo, seven fifty seven times six oh one. Think it could be a rectangular bitmap?”.
“It’s what we used to do back before those assholes let Arecibo fall down. Try bm2png.pl in my bin dir.”
“That worked. Holy shit I know that image. It’s the Pioneer plaque. That diagram from Pioneer 11 of human figures, and a map to Earth.”
“What, thats impossible, it’s only been, what, 70 odd years. That probe would still be in our own Kuiper Belt.”
“Outside it, actually, it’d be about one sixty AU out. They lost contact in the mid 90s. Still basically in our backyard but.”
“It’s too soon! If someone’s found it now, that would mean. Shit. They’re. Already. Here. Inside the Solar system.”
“And all they’ve got to say, is ‘Hi, we liked ur meme’.?”
“Maybe not, can you bring up an image of the original plaque? Are the images identical?”
“I’ll do a layer subtraction. Hey, there /is/ a difference. In the map of the planets. They’ve omitted Pluto from their copy.”
“Fucking hell. Little green reply guys.”
At least when Ubuntu did this they had the good sense to start each release name with the next letter in the alphabet. For the last four years Debian releases have all started with B.
Is there a document somewhere that explains why Debian insist on referring to releases by the names of Toy Story characters rather that the corresponding release number, because every time I have to look up whether Buster is more recent than Bullseye or not I age another year.
I am disproportionately sad that when using an Apple TV for music it shows an endlessly looping animation that's kind of like an EQ, rather than it being an actual EQ.
One day people will look back on "net zero by 2050" as one of the dumbest things ever.
How on Earth do Github still not have ARM runners for Actions three years after Apple made ARM processors common place on developer's laptops?
If your ActivityPub server is offline for long enough then other instances give up sending notifications to it. Entirely coincidentally I’ll be spending some of this evening refollowing everyone.
@Edent I've bought *so many* cheap USB-C docks. The only one I've found which consistently works, and doesn't randomly drop out every now and again, is the Caldigit TS4 (although I here good things about the earlier models as well). Everything I've bought in the sub-£100 range was laughably bad.
@saramg I'm only late 30s, and definitely tick most of the con boxes already. I'd like to think I also tick the pros, but would feel like tooting my own trumpet to declare them as fact.
@tehstu @thomasfuchs and they leant into that hard ://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us
@Edent but do you really want a scanned copy of the local Indian takeaway's menu emailed to you every three days?
@james@strangeobject.space that's so much more tactful than my usual approach of waiting a while to see if someone gets to explaining what's going on, then butting in and saying "but what are you trying to do"?
@rvr @thomasfuchs but imagine being the person sat next to you, as you sit in your cramped airline chair flailing your arms around the place doing some work.
@solderandchaos just to clarify, because Apple are awful at this, Apple TV the subscription video service is different to Apple TV the set top box. (Although to add to the confusion, you can use Apple TV on your Apple TV).
@solderandchaos as far as I'm aware tvOS, which is what does the nice set top box stuff, isn't available for Apple computers, only Apple TV, so you'd basically be in the same position as DIYing something. With Apple TV proper, it comes with a remote control, but you can also use your phone.
@solderandchaos Apple TV if you're in that ecosystem, Chromecast TV otherwise. Everything else is just rebadged Android with a random selection of extra "features" nobody asked for, and worse integration.
@JackDeeth@mastodon.online give the customer support team a full time software engineer, who knows what pain points the team are feeling, and has the autonomy to go and either fix the bugs they're working around, or build new functionality to help them.
@JackDeeth@mastodon.online I have long wanted to run software teams where most members are embedded within other teams around the business. Maybe have a core engineering team who are responsible for foundational components, but everyone else should be immersed in the world of their users, not the world of the technology team.