ALAN LAVENDER @lavenderlens@qoto.org

I'm now the proud owner of a Commodore Amiga A500! It's absolutely filthy and feels disgusting to the touch, but a good project to have.

I haven't tried to power it on yet, but as far as I can tell everything is there, what it needs more than anything is a really good clean.

There is a little damage in spots on the casing, especially the top left, but it's part of its story. If anything, it makes me want to restore it even more the poor thing.

#amiga #retrocomputing #amiga500 #retrogaming

I was woken up by an SVT heart racing incident at 01:20 this morning. Rate was 133 bpm as recorded by Apple Watch. I did the MVM* at 01:25 and this stopped it. Rate dropped to 78 bpm.

Data in Apple Health shows the high rate started about 00:50. See pic.

* See this post for more on SVT & MVM https://mastodon.social/@ianRobinson/110251779905694078

#SVT #MVM #StupidBiology

Apropos of nothing, I've always imagined blockchains as looking like some kind of brutalist/Borg jenga tower.

Due to popular demand, here is a list of the fedi-services that are part of the infosec.* family:
1 - https://infosec.exchange - Glitch-soc fork of Mastodon (the mothership)
2 - https://relay.infosec.exchange - Activitypub relay
3 - https://video.infosec.exchange - Peertube instance (like youtube)
4 - https://infosec.press - WriteFreely blog
5 - https://pixel.infosec.exchange - Pixelfed instance (like instagram)
6 - https://matrix.infosec.exchange - Synapse (with sliding sync) homeserver
7 - https://infosec.place - Akkoma instance (like mastodon)
8 - https://infosec.town - Firefish instance (like mastodon)
9 - https://infosec.pub - Lemmy instance (like reddit)
10 - https://fedia.io - General interest Kbin instance (also like reddit)
11 - https://fedia.social - General interst Firefish instance
12 - https://elk.infosec.exchange - Elk web interface for Mastodon
13 - https://books.infosec.exchange - Bookworym instance (like goodreads)

Risky.af is/was another mastodon instance that is being sunset due to a number of factors (lack of interest and may be losing the domain name)

A large, many-leveled topic, but I offered this quick note a moment ago to a post critical of "faith":

The words of course get used in different ways by different people. But as a student of world religion and a Buddhist minister, I favor the distinction a professor of mine made:

"Belief" can be a closed-minded and often bigoted idea.

"Faith" can be an open-hearted and often humbling engagement with life's worth.

Tried Threads for 48 hours and my verdict is, it's definitely what it was intended to be: text posts for Instagram. It’s probably good if you’re used to the IG algorithm, but for people from Twitter/Mastodon/BlueSky looking for the classic social media feel, it’s basically unusable.

Launching without a following feed seemed like an extremely weird call, given it's the easiest to design. I assumed the algorithm would pick up the slack, but it hasn't. It's near impossible to find posts from people you follow, reposts seem to just go into the void, and there's no text search.

Threads is ideal if what you want from social media is being blasted by generic content from celebrities, but if you're looking for community, it's not viable. I've basically spent 48h there just twiddling my thumbs waiting to be able to find posts from people I actually care about, meanwhile most of them have already got bored and left.

ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution - OpenAI's chatbot has been heralded as spurring a revolution in the tech world. But its sp... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/07/chatgpt-users-decline-future-ai-openai/