le Pétomane Ancien @lePetomaneAncien@qoto.org

@sgul @freemo Wikipedia says 7-day "weeks" go back to Babylonia, including one day a week for making offering to the gods and avoiding prohibited activities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar

Of course, other systems since have used different approaches including the French Revolution attempting to create a decimal calendar of 10-weeks.

Most calendar systems are lunisolar with the sun's position determining year length and the moon's phase determining month length. Reckoning weeks was more or less optional and of little interest.

And since prehistory is, by definition, before anything was recorded we can only speculate from limited findings how, or even if, time was recorded. It seems likely that some tribal leader made scratches on something to tally lunar months and maybe solar years.

@ninkosan @joeycastillo I'll be getting one eventually. The F-91W is my EDC. Will be nice to spruce it up and fun to dig into the software. #IfYouCantOpenItYouDontOwnIt

Mastodon API request from Python.

Still using Postman to understand the API. GET fails, POST works

@m8urnett Need a poster on the Death Star that says "_____ days without a job site accident"

@skanman easy peasy. Just set up a request as an http post, entered the relevant parameters and hit send. I got the full response back and my status updated. Still not sure why curl is a fail but I'm not looking back.

Further testing using Postman

OK #MastodonAPI gurus.

I can use postman to update my status using the parameters specified by the spec but get a 404 when I use curl:
curl https://qoto.org/api/v1/statuses -H 'Authorization: Bearer myAccessToken' -F 'status= Testing Mastodon's API by updating my status'

Testing Mastodon's API by updating using postman

@logicalelegance Nice origami. I especially like the blue sheet (I know the pattern has a name but I'm blanking). Does it fold down as compactly as the sharply creased version?

@leo The internet regards Elon Musk as a failure and routes around him.

@freemo Thanks. I'm not good enough to dig into a large, complex code base. I just want to see if I can automate some actions like posting an update from an IOT-connected sensor.

Has anybody played with the Mastodon API? It looks to be pretty straightforward but there's always a gotcha lurking. I hope to get some time to beat on it toward the end of the week. If I learn anything interesting, I'll report back here.

#mastodonapi

@pj Have you read Sabine Hossenfelder's new book Existential Physics? It has a great explanation of this point along with arguments about why it's correct.

Thanks to @rpilocator I finally acquired a Raspberry Pi 4. Not sure what I want to build first. I'll probably just round up all the loose sensors in the junk box , wire them up to GPIO pins and write values to a Node-Red dashboard.

Or, I have a "robot" chassis, motor driver boards, etc. in the junk box. Maybe a desktop rover.

Or, I have a laser module, a couple servos and a new cat. Maybe a cat distracter to keep him off the keyboard.

Or, maybe the community has some ideas for Teach Yourself Python The Hard Way™

#raspberrypi
#python

@nirmal Don't think there was C on this one. It booted by toggle switches, then loaded the OS with paper tape. You got a BASIC interpreter or a FORTRAN compiler. I suspect we simply didn't buy a C license but that was 50 years ago and I was, by definition, a total noob.

@engelbart agile with scrum, when done right, delivers on its promises -- shippable software every two weeks. It does not scale beyond small teams and relatively simple products. It does not work when management measures productivity beyond any measure other than shipping products. It does not scale to large organizations with competing internal goals, e.g. multiple products competing for resources. Blah, blah, blah. In short, it doesn't work well in the real world -- which is why I'm so looking forward to retirement at the end of the year.

Although I will say that, properly written, user stories are an excellent way to write specifications.

@klyons Learned BASIC and FORTRAN on it as an undergrad 50 years ago. Went to grad school and graduated to a time-shared IBM 360. Ran a lot of late night jobs when the industrial types had left for the day - time was cheaper and jobs ran faster. Talked my prof into a Trash 80 and never looked back to big iron.