Art Delano @ardgedee@octodon.social

The Messages app in Mac OS uses the backspace key to erase the character to the left of the cursor and the command + backspace chord to delete the entire message history with neither a confirmation dialog nor an undo method.

This is the sort of user-hostility I would ordinarily expect from a Linux GUI app.

I mean, the Kitchen Sisters have a really fantastic radio (and now podcast) series called Hidden Kitchens which has a couple-few episodes about eating in midcentury America...
http://www.kitchensisters.org/stories/hidden-kitchens/
...but as far as I know there's nobody who's tried tracking down the people responsible for designing the recipes in the cookbooks for Better Homes & Gardens, Parade Magazine, those innumerable 32-64 page cookbooks full of recipes for Jello, Campbell's Soup, etc.

Why has nobody produced a documentary or oral history of the people who worked in the test kitchens that produced those thousands of cookbooks full of questionable (to our generations' palates) recipes?

There's got to be some fantastic stories there.

Nope! This is the hill Track 19 wishes to die on.

Do I double down on trying to get a quality rip of 3 minutes 52 seconds of music? It'll take close to three hours. Heck, might as well. I've got other things to do anyway.

Watching CDParanoia rip a CD track at 0.1% playback speed is fun like watching a frozen lava lamp, but at least has the benefit of dramatic tension: Will luck allow the hardware to pull enough data this time for checksums to fill the gaps?

Now that it's no longer October the big box stores have been freed of the embargo against Early Black Friday Sales.

I swear I cooked oatmeal for breakfast this morning with no awareness whatsoever of Mastodon's temporary oatification last night.

Pumpkin spice baked ziti.

Srsly.

It's good.

Discovered mouse shit around my soldering station.

Hopefully this means the little bastards will all die of lead poisoning.

A glib history of science fiction:
1930-50: What if we made really cool things?
1960-70: What if those things could be misused?
1980-90: What if their misuse was taken for granted?

TIL: The Wikipedia article about the "Any" key is not considered trivial enough to nominate for deletion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Any_key

Reading about 3D printing once again reminds me that the people who built a thing are the least qualified to document it.

Thanks for all your hard work, @CobaltVelvet !

@RexfordGTugwell @jalefkowit Just added to my to-do list: Write a browser plugin that parses and scores forum posts for similarity to the Treaty of Westphalia in a range of 0-1 where:

0 == no resemblance.
1 == contains an intact excerpt or entirety of the Treaty of Westphalia.

The airport workers who are so diligent about stealing shit from checked luggage must be spasming from uncontrollable glee over the U.S.'s new ban on carry-on laptops from Europe.

(Like I said, I don't know where I'm going with this line of thought.)

Current notions of democratization of the Web are focused around how to equalize and liberalize access to privatized resources (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or how to make alternatives to those resources (Gnu Social/Mastodon). But that's all about the complications imposed on users due to subscribing to specific tools.

Democratizing the building of the web now is probably impossible. The sites have become The Hard Problem.

The early web had what was in retrospect an astonishing degree of transparency, it took very little effort for anybody to become a web developer -- this isn't an argument for its etymology but I wouldn't be half surprised if "web developer" came to be coined as a kind of intermediate tier between "computer user" and "programmer", what with HTML being a markup language, making room in the engineers' office for people without STEM backgrounds but stopping short of granting them peer status.

But at the same time, that enforced simplicity accommodated a degree of accessibility to the web -- at a genuinely fundamental level -- that the web's punctuated evolution has continued to obfuscate since.

You can still build a site with raw HTML and nothing else now. But where will you host it? Find a tilde club instance I guess? But you have to be part of the right technological in-groups even to know what that is.

Which begs the question of how necessary this tech knowledge has to be.

I don't see the point to harboring nostalgia about old web design. It was overly simplistic, and the browser wars, instead of accelerating standards acceptance and development, led to a dozen years of aggravated misdirection that ended up harming everybody involved.

For fuck's sake, CSS1 achieved recommendation status in 1996, but it wasn't fully supported in browsers until 2010. Imagine what we could have accomplished in UX development if Netscape and Microsoft had gotten on board.

(I don't know where I"m going with this line of thought.)

Preservation impulses will, ultimately, sabotage themselves; instead of allowing the historical state of websites to be knowably unknowable, future generations will *think* they know how the web worked, and will come up with something tantalizingly close but different in critical aspects.