K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

Looks like we are getting a lot of former Twitter users today - I hope you enjoy exploring QOTO and the rest of the Fediverse! Our rules are at https://qoto.org/about/more#rules and you will be expected to abide by them. Be aware that our rules are not the same as Twitter's, and other instances on the Fediverse will have different rules that their users are expected to follow.

If you're considering reporting a foreign user (i.e. from an instance other than QOTO), please take a minute to read that instance's rules. There's no point in filing reports over conduct that the foreign instance doesn't prohibit. You can block the user or his whole instance yourself, but QOTO won't intervene except where the offending user is evading your blocks e.g. by setting up alts to contact you.

If you think the user's conduct *does* violate his instance's rules, make sure you tick the little box to forward a copy of the report to the foreign moderators. They might hand down some kind of punishment to him if they agree with you. But in either case, no punishment will come to him from QOTO's team.

I'll do my best to answer questions if you tag me.

@freemo could you please check in on QOTO's infrastructure when you get a chance? I'm seeing symptoms of federation failing in both Mastodon (missing posts from last night) and Matrix (can't join foreign channels).

Satisfaction is... finding the sweet spot in your parallelised code parameters, so that it hovers at about 95% of CPU time, and the machine stays responsive for daily use

My best guess is that it's supposed to be a chimney - you could put a candle in the bottom and it would heat the air in the cylinder, driving it up and replacing it with fresh air from the bottom, driving its own circulation. At the same time, it would heat the contents of the bulb like a retort.

But there's no fitting to attach anything to the top of the bulb, so any vapours would just be exhausted upward with the combustion products of the candle. I also don't get the point of the serpentine tube - if it were just for support, why would it be hollow and matched to an orifice in the side of the cylinder? If it's for filling the bulb, why not just use the orifice at its tip, since you can't have anything attached to that anyway? Were it straight, you could maybe use it to stick a thermometer into the bulb, but the bends in the tube prevent that.

Can anyone #identify this piece of #glassware I came across today? It's a bulb suspended in a cylinder, with a serpentine tube connecting the bulb to an orifice in the side of the cylinder. The bulb also has an orifice at its tip, and the cylinder is open at both ends.

Does anyone use GNU #Octave #GNUOctave on Linux? Every time I switch workspaces it keeps hoisting itself on top of the other programs I have running - I would love to learn how to disable this behaviour.

Anyone with a #stats #statistics background:

I have a record of several hundred events. Each event occurred at a particular univariate condition x and had a binary outcome y. I don't get to choose x; there are about a hundred values that occurred exactly once, up to a maximum number of fourteen repetitions at one value of x (to measurement precision). The samples are roughly clustered around a central value of x, not uniformly distributed.

Is there a recommended way to estimate the local probability of y as a function of x (that is, if I measure the conditions as x=X, how likely is it that y will occur)? Simply averaging all samples at x=X doesn't give a usable curve, because all the single-sample values swing it wildly to zero or one, regardless of what any neighbouring samples have done. Currently what I'm doing is summing the averages over all samples where x<=X and the average over all samples where x>=X, then subtracting the average over all x. It looks more or less like the smooth curve predicted by theory but I'm pretty sure this counts as "misuse of statistics".

I'm especially interested in identifying regions (intervals on x) where I can say the observed probability differs from the prediction of theory by a statistically significant amount. I think coming up with a formula for a confidence interval would be the way to go, but feel free to point me in another direction.

Happy Riḍván, everybody!

I see that #QOTO now has 14,000 users! Thanks to everyone who's decided to become a part of our community :-)

Which of these is the past tense of the verb "shine", as you would use it in your variety of English? If you would use different forms for the past tense and the past participle, spoken and written communication, or formal and informal contexts, please leave a comment.

Is there a trick to code blocks (the ``` ... ``` environment) in the flavour of #Markdown we use here on #QOTO? Line breaks keep disappearing in mine.

Here’s a tool I put together this evening.

The Problem
Sometimes I’m on a #Zoom call and need to unmute my mic quickly. There’s a keystroke for this (by default Alt-A), but this only works if Zoom has focus. It’s not uncommon for me to have switched to the PDF or email we’re discussing, so I have to dig up Zoom before I can unmute and chime in, often missing the conversational opportunity.

The Solution
I wrote a script that:

1. checks if any audio streams are going into Zoom, otherwise quits
2. finds the numerical ID of the audio stream going into Zoom
3. toggles the mute flag on said audio stream

I bound it to the keystroke Control-Alt-A in my desktop environment, so I can easily toggle the mute no matter what application has focus.

The Dependencies
This is written in #Bash for #Linux systems using #PulseAudio and depends on its control tool pactl being installed.

The Code

#!/bin/bash

PASOPS=$(pactl list source-outputs)

if echo "$PASOPS" | grep -q 'ZOOM VoiceEngine' ; then

	SOPID=$(echo "$PASOPS" | head -n $(($(echo "$PASOPS" | grep -n -e 'application.name = "ZOOM VoiceEngine"' | cut -f1 -d:) - 1)) - | grep -o -e 'Source Output #[0-9]\+' | grep -o -e '[0-9]\+' | tail -n 1);

	pactl set-source-output-mute $SOPID toggle; fi

Tip for anyone composing in #Frescobaldi:

If you want to use MIDI input but get errors about an "invalid running status" when you attach a physical MIDI instrument, your instrument or interface may be generating SysEx messages that Frescobaldi can't understand. To work around this, you can use an app like #VMPK - in VMPK's "Connections" menu, set the input to your MIDI hardware; and in Frescobaldi's "Preferences" dialogue, set the input to VMPK. This makes your instrument change the internal state of VMPK's keyboard, and VMPK then generates appropriate MIDI events reflecting those changes. Since it's tolerant of SysEx messages in its input but won't generate them in its output, this effectively filters the stream to make it safe for Frescobaldi to consume.

As a bonus, you can see the keys light up on the VMPK interface to reflect the notes currently sounding, which may be more intuitive than reading the #Lilypond source Frescobaldi generates. If you also set something like #FluidSynth as the output in the "Connections" menu, you'll be able to hear what you're playing, too.

Lots of celebratory gunfire mixed in with the fireworks this year. I'm sandwiched between office buildings to the east and a pretty expensive residential area to the west, so I wouldn't have expected that much shooting around here. But I'd guess I've heard upwards of a hundred rounds fired just now, maybe two hundred.

Working around Twitter in 2020, a play in two acts.

Summer 2020
My browser: Hi, #Twitter! I’m #PaleMoon.
Twitter: We don’t like you, so we’re going to pop up a modal warning on every page you request to force you into retirement.
My browser: That’s okay, I can suppress the warning with #uBlockOrigin.

This week
My browser: Hi, Twitter! I’m Pale Moon.
Twitter: Seriously, how are you still here? Every page is now an error page advertising browsers we like.
My browser: Wait, that’s it? I can’t just suppress the warning to show the webpage behind it?
Twitter: No. And if you pretend to be a supported browser, we’ll serve you content that you can’t display correctly and it’ll look stupid.
My browser: The hell? You’re just a microblogging service. Your roots are in SMS messages, for crying out loud. Why on earth can you not make do with normal #HTML?
Twitter: This is 2020; who would want a normal HTML webpage anyway?
My browser: Hmm, who would want normal HTML, you say?
puts on false moustache
Hi, Twitter! I’m Googlebot!

Friends, today was the anniversary of the Polytechnique attack. Please take a moment to consider the obstacles still faced by women and minority STEM students in many parts of the world, and, if you can, lend your support as they confront those obstacles.

#STEM #Engineering #ÉcolePolytechnique #BIHE