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I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.

It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.

It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.

Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.

It occurs to me that if someone persuades a couple of dozen news sites to start sending their feeds to Mastadon it will start bubbling. Or does it work in the other direction. Is there some clever person who could automatically scrape sites for mastadon?

I don’t know about others but my Twitter account has become an Elon shitposting account. It’s cathartic as hell, even if it’s petty.

I’m purposely not engaging with other content and moving all other discourse here.

@rpilocator I checked around 9am EST and they weren't in stock. I just saw your notice and checked (1pm EST) and they weren't in stock. They fact that Adafruit had them even briefly is encouraging.

What if advertising could know where you are and what you're looking for, but not what you've been or done in the past? Great ideas on Reimagining from @chandrn_@twitter.com from @iDPI_umass@twitter.com

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@freemo @alex

In many senses, I find sets high standards for communication in . You have enabled connected services, allowed 65K characters, you have robust policy, we can use markdown in posts, and you are also very welcoming, responsive, and open community!

Tech companies have developed unprecedented power in people’s everyday lives.

Today we're launching the the Coalition for Independent Tech Research, which supports/defends academics, journalists, and communities working to study the impact of tech on society.

Please join us!

#commodon #science

independenttechresearch.org/

RT @aedwardslevy@twitter.com

VLADIMIR: well? shall we sign up for mastodon?

ESTRAGON: yes, I'm estragon@go.dot

they do not move

🐦🔗: twitter.com/aedwardslevy/statu

For those who've asked - Northeastern will be recording the lecture and we'll post soon afterwards. I'm also recording the audio and will cut it with my slides (sometime soon) into a version I will post on YouTube.

(And there's still time to come down and attend in person...)

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Any moment now, as Christmas and (American) Thanksgiving get closer, people will start posting suggestions of things to donate to food banks and 'Reverse Advent Calendars'.

I can't stress this enough:
Just. Give. Money.

Food banks can usually get more bang for their buck than you can.
They'll probably be able to give you a tax receipt for money, but not for cans.
And it lets them buy, store, and distribute food in the volumes they need and can handle.

(Please boost to make sure people get the message.)

#FoodBanks #FoodInsecurity #Christmas #Thanksgiving #Charity #JustGiveMoney

@ethanz As I said over on the bird, please record and podcast this if you can.

I've found Postman to be the most useful tool for exploring the API. cURL is still problematic -- I've followed carefully a couple tutorials with no success and I can't figure out why. A simple python script using the request library works well but isn't quite the explore and debug tool that Postman is.

Next up is hook up some sensor to an MCU, send data to a Raspberry Pi running Node-Red, then have N-R use the API to update my Mastodon status. Day job+holidays likely push that out to the new year.

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@edrybicki @freemo @jonreed Thank you for not taking the low road and working "toot" into the limerick.

Yes, that's a crow at my backyard bird feeder. Not an everyday occurrence.

@wmvanstone Not bad, per se, just restricted to the MS Office suite and a bit cumbersome. But yes, if you're extending Excel native functionality, it's pretty much the only game in town.

I intended to make a joke but fell short of the mark. My apologies.

@wmvanstone Welcome. What did you do so wrong that karma made you code in VBA?

@freemo @sgul You probably could, as an exercise, extrapolate calendar systems forward and backward in time then attempt to align them. Any system that used a 7-day weekly cycle would allow aligning by weeks to "line up the Sundays." The hard part is that each system used a different approach to intercalary days to correct slippage.

@freemo @sgul Ah! Let me attempt to answer your actual question a bit more directly.

The Jewish people adopted the Babylonian calendar systems during the Babylonian Exile so for Western purposes we can mark the observance of the Sabbath and a 7-day cycle beginning sometime around 600 BCE. Of course every lunisolar calendar requires intercalary "leap" days to reconcile the lunar and solar cycles so "counting by Sundays" isn't easy over very long timeframes.

The last major revision to the Western calendar was, as others have noted, the switch from Julian to Gregorian, a process that took a couple centuries.

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