Fellow South Africans, are you feeling sad and hopeless about [gestures expansively] all this bullshit? We may not be able to fix the whole world, but our money buys more effective aid locally. Here's a simple way to make a direct difference to someone: PEP Stores have a system which lets you make a donation to settle a random person's lay by debt. https://www.pepstores.com/pages/lay-by-buddy
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This is an extremely fun game. It has a lot of things going on at the same time: https://danielben.itch.io/dragonsweeper
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Pixelfed seems pretty nice so far. Federation with other services isn't perfect -- e.g. if you view a post from Mastodon, you won't see more than the first 4 photos (unless you click through to the post on the original server). Phanpy supports both Pixelfed and multiple accounts; I'm going to see how usable it is as a UI (photo limit aside) compared to the server default.
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First work-related bash script of the year: getting a list of modified files in the current branch (with dev as the default base branch). Can be piped to xargs MYEDITOR to open all the files (I didn't bake it into the script, for flexibility).
current_branch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
base_branch="${1:-dev}"
git diff --name-only $current_branch $(git merge-base $current_branch $base_branch)
(MYEDITOR is kate; still the least bad of the 1000000 editors I've tried.)
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The original source of the delightful "atoms are binary" meme that's doing the rounds is Katy Montgomerie. Originally originally it was posted on Twitter, but here's her repost on Bluesky. https://bsky.app/profile/cartoons.katymontgomerie.com/post/3lbz4temnwc2l
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Hey, Cape Town peeps, do you have a cat-shaped hole in your life?
I recently lost the older of my two cats, and immediately after (quite sensibly) telling everyone that it was Too Soon for me to go looking for a buddy for my younger cat, I stupidly went to look at the local SPCA's list of available cats. Over and over, and looking at the little video clips, and everything. So now I'm invested, and while it's Too Soon for me, maybe I can tempt one of you. https://capespca.co.za/adopt/cats/
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Today I had to say goodbye to Furious Purpose. She was almost 15 years old, a cat with enough personality for three cats, and a constant companion through many ups and downs. I loved her very much, and I will miss her terribly.
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Abigail Thorn writes about trans people's access to health care. The specifics are about UK politics and the NHS, but the broader philosophical points are applicable to any jurisdiction, and are presented in a crystal clear and accessible way. https://transwrites.world/my-doctor-emailed-me-back/
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"I asked AI" people are the next evolutionary stage of "I googled it for you; here's the top level of the docs; HTH!!" people, but with extra ocean-boiling.
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Today I saw someone unironically post a chatbot-generated answer in order to argue with a human (pretty rudely, I might add). That's an instablock from me, friend. I don't know what goes through people's heads when they do this, but I know that I'm not interested in hearing from them in future.
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My new (also Xiaomi) phone is fine for now (also, possibly as a result of negative feedback, you can remove a lot more of the default apps in the newer versions of the OS). But it's nice to have this option for later, just in case.
If you have an old bloaty Android phone, this is only medium-scary (as opposed to the full rooting / unlocking options). Apparently there's no way to truly brick the phone like this, but you can get it into a state that requires a factory reset, so maybe do a backup.
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I didn't have a lot to lose here (it's not my primary phone; I could have done a factory reset), but I was careful to follow recommendations from multiple safe lists (the GUI app has some built in, and there are various forum posts floating around -- some innocuous-looking apps should not be touched; this also varies between phones). I also wasn't that aggressive, although I removed all the (safe) MIUI cloud backup stuff which I will never use.
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You can install the basic adb (Android Debug Bridge) commandline UI from the normal Ubuntu repo (it's probably very old but it worked fine), and there's a friendly GUI app for uninstalling some common bloatware that you can get here: https://github.com/0x192/universal-android-debloater You also have to enable developer options and then USB debugging in your phone settings; this varies between phones. My phone didn't initially show up as connected (even in lsusb), but I think it was a dodgy cable.
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I have an old Xiaomi phone that I've been using as a media player (mostly for podcasts). It's been getting increasingly glitchy, and recently started complaining about running out of space. There seemed to be no way within the walled garden to find and clear the mysterious > 10G of "other files" eating the internal storage. So I finally figured out how to connect it to my desktop with adb. Works on Linux; no rooting required.
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I guess it also teaches you about patience, short-term vs long-term gratification, and compound interest.
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Education showerthought (from someone who discovered a directory of incremental games here: https://www.metafilter.com/206186/Wigging-Out) -- are long-term farming / building / upgrading games like this good for teaching mathematical literacy? Do the benefits outweigh the addictive qualities?
I'm specifically thinking of Kittens Game, where you have to keep track of exchange rates, compare the cost/benefit of different upgrades, and calculate the total time needed to accumulate resources (in series & in parallel).
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Phanpy has an option to display shortcuts in a bar across the top. Is this new? I like it.
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Found via MetaFilter: the work of Wacław Szpakowski https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/15/rhythmical-lines/
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Are you new? Don't know how to find people to follow?
There used to be several tools for finding people from your Twitter network, but I don't think any of them still work now (and realistically most people you know from Twitter aren't here). https://followgraph.vercel.app/ is good for filling in gaps, but you need an existing network for it to help.
My personal advice? Follow artists first. Then you'll have something nice to look at while you build a new network here.
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