Liam Cooke @liam@octodon.social

Welcome to wizard school. To begin, we'll be dividing you up into groups based on the 4 fundamental personality types:

Cop, Fascist, Smart, and Miscellaneous.

"The ReCode Project is a community-driven effort to preserve computer art by translating it into a modern programming language (Processing). Every translated work will be available to the public to learn from, share, and build on. "

http://recodeproject.com/

#theObservatory

the "analogue hole" refers to the idea that no matter how hard you try to make sure nobody can make illegal copies of videos, music, or text, there's always a "hole" in the protection that occurs when it's no longer digital. digital content can be protected - video files can be encrypted, music players can limit you to five devices - but analogue signals can't be. for example, itunes can disallow you from putting a song on more than five computers, but if you play the song through your speakers and record it, what you do with it is beyond apple's control.

one of the few remaining analogue outputs on a modern device is the audio jack. this is where you connect your headphones or speakers. your laptop only knows that something's plugged in. it doesn't know what's connected. you could be playing it through earphones or a massive speaker system and it wouldn't be able to tell. meanwhile, HDMI is a digital output format. it can tell if it's been plugged into a TV or a recording device, and can automatically disable output if you're recording it to make it harder for you to make copies of movies.

if the audio jack is replaced by USB-C or bluetooth, it becomes possible to tell what you're connecting to the laptop or phone. your phone might disable audio playback on anything but headphones to prevent you from hosting a public event with the music. it could also detect a recording device that you're using to (for example) make a copy of a song you're listening to on spotify and turn off the playback.

of course, at some point, digital needs to become analogue. humans can't watch electrical pulses, we need to see patterns of light. we can't listen to streams of 1s and 0s, we need vibrations in the air. this means that it's impossible to truly defeat the analogue hole - no matter what you do, someone can always just point a camera at their TV. it'll have worse quality, but it can never be stopped.

the analogue hole is one of many ways to circumvent DRM, or digital rights management. you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

#LynneTeachesTech

https://www.virginiamercury.com/blog-va/metalheads-with-kazoos-drown-out-westboro-baptist-church-at-capitol/

This is the best ever.

"A couple hundred metalheads with kazoos converged on the state Capitol on Monday morning to defend one of their own by drowning out a small group of Westboro Baptist Church members."

<3

In Runescape, the name of an ingame item must be at least three characters long.

The German word for "egg" is "Ei". So we translated the one egg item in the game as "Hühnerei", "chicken egg".

We did not realise until people made confused/amused forum posts that snake type enemies also have a chance to drop an egg.

speaking of fujitsu in specific, TIL they made an fm towns II laptop?? (also featuring: townsOS shots)

using the phonetic VAE to interpolate between US state names in a grid

Still find it EXTREMELY EXCITING that you can put magic words and sticky money on a physical item and put it in one of probably hundreds of thousands of networked boxes around the world, and an army of minions will efficiently convey it to the intended recipient within days.

Welcome to England, my name's David, and this is David. But you can call us all David.

I gave a little talk at work today that tries to explain what ActivityPub is; I also turned that talk into a blog post! I blogged!!! https://johnholdun.com/articles/what-is-activitypub/

i've been working on this tabletop worldbuilding game for a long time, and now its out~~

the ground itself is a one-session collaborative storytelling game about places over time, and the echoes we leave in the physical memory of space

you can get the pdf on https://everestpipkin.itch.io/the-ground-itself

I love working with this old Irish guy, he just turned to me to say "who t' feck made it this feck'n cold"

Interesting to see how anyone who interacts in any way with a bad thing is immediately and irredeemably a bad person.

Even if they're trying to make the bad thing less bad.

And anyone who stops and looks for more information is also irredeemably bad because they're supporting someone you immediately cancelled by trying to get the full story before doing things that cannot be reversed.

This strategy has a definitive end point. And that end point is when the lynch mob turns on you.

Whenever you see a big explosion of drama, stop. Wait until it dies down. Do your own research.

This has happened at least three or four times since I joined the fediverse. Every single time, it was because someone overreacted and nobody thought to check for themselves.

teach a man to fish, feed him for a day. Start a fishing podcast, feed the world on knowledge of how much fun you and your friends have just hanging out chatting about fishing or anything really just a fun group of guys that get together once a week to talk about fish

It's so hot today that the kebab shop is keeping their EFTPOS machine in the drinks fridge.

Potatoes and Technology: The Form of Glooms