via https://www.tumblr.com/marlynnofmany/773214867518881792
An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell circa 500,000-300,000 years ago.
The maker appears to have deliberately flaked around the shell to preserve and place it in a central position. As a result this handaxe has been described as an early example of artistic thought.
From West Tofts, Norfolk.
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Courtesy Alison Fisk
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I have an old iPhone 7 Plus here, and wondered if anyone could tell me a positive experience of some alternative OS that would work on it ... ?
I think it's got a future as a controller for a music player, and while I guess I could do that on iOS 15 I'd be better off doing it on a more open OS ...
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Considering what a computer could look like if we removed all historical dependencies and started again.
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A 4-port KVM just arrived on my desk ... so now I have to tidy it all up so I can start laying out the cabling neatly. It was only a few months since I last tidied my desk, how can it have gotten so mixed up so quickly??
And I'm also going to have to figure out the mess of chained USB hubs, to work out which devices won't be available to the KVM and which will. I've confused a couple of machines over the years by having too many keyboards connected. As well as confusing myself :-)
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A Mastodon server probably shouldn't pre-fetch media in the toots it receives.
Instead, make the clients request the media from their local server, if it isn't present then the client does a direct request to the source, then sends the result back to their local server for other people to use.
Opportunity for shenanigans of course, if this first client decides to hand back something incorrect. However, you could defend against this in a number of ways, such as random client cache misses to make sure your user population converges on truth, or for smaller servers with a community-oriented base, just accept it.
This seems much more "distributed" than having a central server responsible for everything.
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I saw a website today with a prominent Content Warning header for one of their articles.
The text of the warning was blurred out, and became clear only when you hovered the mouse over it.
This seems like a great feature; it's obvious that there is some kind of warning, but you don't have to have the more explicit text of it pushed to your attention unexpectedly.
Might be nice to see something like that here on Mastodon & derivatives ...
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I still think of marking up my text in terms of which bits should be presented in bold type, and which bits should be in italic type.
I don't want to use the signals that Markdown uses. I've been using Markdown for years, but I've been typing plain text for longer. I don't want to use the signals that HTML uses. I've been using HTML for far longer than Markdown, but still, I've been typing plain text for longer.
Am I the only one who feels like the predominant markups work the opposite way around to their own brains?
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Today I'm migrating TOTP codes off an old work phone into something else; some sites now support passkeys which sounds positive ... most of them still require TOTP to be configured because "2FA is mandatory".
Well, yeah. Downgrade attacks, anyone?
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I'm wanting to wean myself off the streaming music services ... and have been busy over the last couple of days "format shifting" from a big box of CDs that I have collected over the years.
https://andreyor.st/posts/2023-11-19-linux-music-players/ was a very good article about a wide range of music players available on Linux, and I've ended up trying and so far liking Strawberry.
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I was looking at the output of ls yesterday, showing me lots of files with spaces in their names.
It feels like a terrible waste of my screen real estate to be putting ' at both ends of every string.
My terminal is in a GUI desktop, it could use some other mechanism for indicating the parts of display that are the data if it knew; change the background colour, underline or box it, something like that.
We're missing out on better interfaces because of the legacy of teletypes and "character display" terminals ... actually perhaps the problem is printf() itself, which could be signalling its format as metadata somehow as well as the formatted string ...
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Dammit why does my system freeze every now and then ...
Mmm that's a disk activity light on the case, isn't it?
Swap. I'm out of RAM. And the system is freezing because it's pissing around with a swapfile. That's something to go delete/disable ... an end-user workstation shouldn't need swap, certainly not 4G of it! Mind you, I probably should have more than 16G RAM these days too ...
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It turns out that most post renderers have fixed width displays, that don't work for this :-(
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I was asked for a countdown clock last night ...
watch -n 1 'date | figlet'
|_ | _ ___ |__ // | | _ \ ___ ___ |___ \ / _ ___ | || |
| || | | |/ _ \ |_ | | | | | |/ _ / _| ) | | | |) | || |
| || |_| | __/ _) | | | || | / ( / __/| || / /| _|
|| _,|___| |/|| |_/ _|_| ||_/__| ||
|___ |___ /_| | ( _ )| || | ( _ ) | \ | | / _ _ _|
) | | ()_ \ / _ () || | / _ \ | | | / /| | | || |
/ __/ _) | ) | () || | () | | |\ |/ /| || || |
|_|()_/ _() || _/ || _/|/ ||
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A lucky escape from #whamageddon this morning ... I'd put on a generic christmas/pop mix for my family to listen to, and my partner got as far as track 4 and asked me to switch it off ... and I got to the stop button 1 second before track 5 which would have been Wham!
I mean, I should have checked first, but a lucky escape ...
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[#]elitedangerous
"Daddy, what did you do after the Thargoid War?"
"Well kiddo, I bought a shiny new Cobra Mk V and went speedrunning to the newly rebuilt Hutton Orbital Station to buy some Centauri Mega Gin"
https://read.yjmbo.net/yojimbo/the-new-hutton-orbital-run-in-a-cobra-mk-v
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Signal have a few new features (see https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/113664144981851969) and one of them is described as "... keep work chats separate ..."
I use separate devices, or separate apps. I do NOT mix the streams, my personal identity is never the same as my work identity. I have multiple phones and multiple devices.
This helps me keep my sanity, but I know it's too much for many non-tech people to look after, so features to help them start this "separation" journey are always good!
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Reading @cwebber's discussions about ATProto (https://social.coop/@cwebber/113647109852249805).
She mentioned that email has effectively been converted from a distributed system down to a centralised one. Nothing in the protocol prevented this, and nothing gave us any other effective weapon to combat the abuse by spammers etc.
From what I can see, DNS will be the next system to be captured; already central players like CDNs are 'taking over' DNS responsibility as part of the fight against denial-of-service attacks, and they're not going to give them back. The only advantage is that we have a large ecosystem of rent-seeking registrars, and unless they're going to be enriched by operating DNS, this might not happen quickly ...
But imagine the consequence of "we will only allow DNS resolution from trusted partners - to prevent attackers contacting you, and will only resolve trusted domains for you - to prevent you visiting an attacker's source" ...
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I've been on a reasonably successful diet change this year, and my T-shirt size has gone from 3XL to L.
This has fucked up all my agile sprint plan estimates, and the project manager hates me.
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https://mouseless.click/ looks like an interesting approach - control the mouse position and clicks from the keyboard - not slowly by emulating left/right/up/down movement, but quickly by specifying the x,y position you want using a temporary grid overlay.
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Conversation with a dev ...
"Was that reused as in copy/pasted, or reused as in you call the pre-existing validation routines?"
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text/gemini
