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[14:16] The internet offers all sorts of really useful things. A super simple storage service, for example. (see also)
[22:54] The Diomede Islands are located in the Bering Strait and are separated by the international date line, with the big island 21 hours ahead of the small one. There is a webcam facing the big island, looking at a place in the future, "Tomorrow Island".
For some reason it always amazes me to see places so far off from pretty much anything have access to the internet. And remarkable peculiarities like in this case are pretty much the icing on the cake. (see also)
[20:22] It is World Standards Day today, celebrated by IEC, ISO and ITU. The US however, specifically the ANSI, celebrate the same issue deviating from the standard. Kind of reads like a hoax.
[22:23] I played "Stone Story RPG" today, a game with absolutely beautiful ASCII art. I'm not much of a fan of this gameplay, but the artwork was brilliant and well worth a look. YouTube has some game footage.
[21:59] Neuromancer had one supporting character that died before the actual story took place and only existed as a digital copy of his personality and knowledge people could interact with. Here's a person who, as far as I understood, trained GPT-3 (Project December, specifically) on texts written by their late fiancée for a chance to have a chat. Touching. And fascinating.
Update: I forgot to mention the character I was referring to: Dixie Flatline
[22:32] If you have multi million dollar equipment on one planet and a few serious nerds on another, one possible outcome is Curiosity singing Happy Birthday to itself on Mars. I love this.
[23:27] I love to find little projects on the internet where someone seems to have had fun building something and which also offer an opportunity to learn something. Here is one. (see also)
[22:35] I know the Lack Rack, but I recently learned that there is a viable alternative: the rast rack.
[22:36] I really want to keep using Firefox, but it is way too common for this thing to freeze and hold my entire computer hostage, forcing me to reboot. Most of the time I can't even switch over to another tty to find and kill the process. Calling this "annoying" is a massive understatement.
[14:42] A running tv can not only annoy people, but other electric devices, too.
[17:32] Two more tildes I missed. Neverending story, I guess. (Not complaining!)
trash.town is running on an Asus Eee PC 1015P. This thing is ten years old, which is appropriate given that this server is focussing on reusing technology instead of dumping it when it gets old. I like this mindset.
The other one is dimension.sh which has quite a bit of history. (both via)
[06:08] Another music group with unusual instruments: ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS!
[22:25] I like it when people take interest in very specific things most people don't think twice about. Here is an analysis of the the user interfaces of Lego computers. (see also)
[23:55] A while ago I was pointed to this blog entry regarding comments which made me want to formulate my own stand on comments. Because, obviously, there is no option to write any on gmb.
I have two main reasons not to offer this option but to rely on my contact page: hijacking on one hand and on the other the pest web 2.0 brought us: hatred and flame wars.
When scrolling through comments (which I try to do seldom) I often find people write trivial comments with the obvious sole purpose of posting a link to their own blog or website, which is terribly annoying. Even sites like lobsters or hacker news, though moderated, tend to give the impression that they are just glorified centralized comment sections. The content is of way higher quality than on any blog I've ever seen, but especially on HN I often see people just dropping in to promote their own products.
These cases are not the rule, though. Moderation seems to help, I guess.
I don't want to get into detail on the flame wars, as you likely have seen those going on. Instead, in this matter, I'd like to quote Stephen Fry:
"Whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining."
So I really had no motivation to implement a comment system on gmb. And, of course, embedding third party scripts like disqus is completely out of question.
So, no comments here. I do however receive the occasional email or get approached on IRC, so that option seems to work just fine.
Update: I slightly changed my tone with regards to HN and lobsters. It appears I was a bit more annoyed at the whole topic than I should have been and wronged these sites a bit.
[21:40] Gemini is a newish internet protocol somewhere between http and gopher that I wanted to try for a while now. I'm not a huge fan of gopher, but gemini might just be that little bit closer to http for me to like it. And since I just noticed there is a public_gemini folder in my home directory on ctrl-c.club I have no excuse for not trying it out this weekend.
I came across gemini via the Castor browser, by the way, which had managed to draw my attention right away.
[23:19] Sad to see soup.io die. This microblog actually has its origins over there, I used the service from May 2015 to mid-July 2016, before I began writing my own microblogging script and moved over to ctrl-c.club and then finally here.
I found a lot of cool stuff over there, followed the rabbit hole of reposts to many interesting accounts and spent way too much time scrolling.
Thanks, soup, and farewell!
[22:32] How many cores do you need to play Pong? No less than 896. (see also)
[19:19] If you find yourself with a broken keyboard on your laptop and need to write something, you can still use your laptop lid to send Morse code.
[21:03] The tildeverse keeps spawning unexpected things. breadpunk.club is all about baking.
[22:25] In case you have an urgent need for coffee stains on your documents but don't have a cup of coffee at hand: there is a LaTeX package for that.
[14:23] Being able to watch a live stream from space is really awesome.
[14:56] Usually password requirements are aimed to make users pick secure passwords and have the side effect off pissing some people off. This one has it the other way round. :D
[22:50] Yekaterinburg in Russia has a Keyboard Monument.
[19:40] This rarely happens, but I have to recommend a game: VirtuaVerse, a wonderful adventure that I played this weekend. A cyberpunk story, obviously made by nerds for other nerds (and with a great soundtrack). I can't remember when I last had that much fun with a game. I played (and finished) this on a friend's account, but I'll definitely buy it myself, too, if only to throw a little amount of money at the devs.
[14:27] It impresses me when people find creative ways to make music with things that are clearly not designed as musical instruments. A while ago I mentioned the Phantom of the Floppera and later the music-making tesla coils, but there are noumerous others, some of which I came across only recently.
Many of these acts use computer parts (floppy drives are a thing), devices connected to those (like, for instance, this dot matrix printer) or both (the Floppotron appears to be well known).
The Device Orchestra on the other hand is not limited to computers and periphery but takes whatever is available, while others show that even a car is suited for this task (there is some weird yelling at the end, so be sure to stop the video once the music is done).
Really creative folks out there, awesome work!