Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

Floating point to hex converter - now supports 16-bit floats, plus I rewrote it in Rust and WebAssembly! https://gregstoll.wordpress.com/2025/01/08/floating-point-to-hex-converter-now-supports-16-bit-floats-plus-i-rewrote-it-in-rust-and-webassembly/

Announcing FediMeteo – Weather in the Fediverse!

UPDATE: I have created an account for updates and other information on FediMeteo - follow the account @admin to stay updated!

UPDATE: Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland have just been added

Weather has always influenced our lives: from agriculture to outdoor activities, to extreme events that, thanks to modern technology, can now be predicted with greater reliability. Personally, weather plays a significant role in my daily decisions, which is why I decided to create a service tailored for the Fediverse.

FediMeteo uses Open-Meteo data to publish updates every 6 hours, including current weather conditions, forecasts for the next 12 hours, and predictions for the upcoming days. Each country is served by its own dedicated instance (e.g., it.fedimeteo.com for Italy), managed through snac to ensure simplicity and efficiency in publishing.

You can follow FediMeteo directly in the Fediverse (on Mastodon and compatible platforms), via RSS, or by visiting the dedicated page for your city (e.g., fr.fedimeteo.com/paris).

Currently supported countries include:
Austria, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, – with many more regions coming soon!

FediMeteo is hosted on a FreeBSD-based VPS, with each country isolated in its own jail to ensure security and scalability.

Visit the main site to explore the national instances and start following your local weather updates today:
https://fedimeteo.com

Happy weather monitoring to all! 🌦️

FediMeteo is dedicated to my grandfather, who every evening would give me the weather forecast based on TV, radio, and his personal experience. He would convince me that the weather would be bad, so he had an excuse to accompany me to school instead of me going alone.

#FediMeteo #Announcements #FreeBSD #FediMeteo #WeatherForecasts #Weather #Meteo #snac #Fediverse #Mastodon

"What is the H5N1 bird flu? Will it cause the next big pandemic? If so, how bad would that pandemic be?" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/h5n1-much-more-than-you-wanted-to

"This is literally a DDoS on the entire internet.

"I am so tired."

https://pod.geraspora.de/posts/17342163

"In a major policy shift, South Korea announced Dec. 18 that it will end renewable energy subsidies for new biomass projects, as well as for state-owned coal and biomass cofired power plants starting in January 2025. The nation’s ministries also committed to phased reductions of subsidies supporting existing power plants using imported forest biomass fuel. " https://news.mongabay.com/2024/12/south-korea-slashes-forest-biomass-energy-subsidies-in-major-policy-reform/

(found on bluesky posted by @stephenjarvis )

Happy Baltic 🇱🇹 🇱🇻 🇪🇪 rail timetable coordination day 🎉

From today onwards you can *finally* go from Vilnius via Rīga and Valga to Tallinn in a day (the reverse also works)

Getting stuck in Valga is no more

One of my #CrossBorderRail campaign priorities is fixed! 💪

Finally was able to assemble friends together to do the tasting for James Hoffman's Decaf Project. It was really fun! Each kit was made with the same source beans, decaffeinated through the 3 main processes, plus an unprocessed control, then roasted by the same roaster. (Not all sample kits use the same source beans or the same roaster, however. The logistics of that just weren't practical.)

As someone who really needs to mostly drink decaf, it was really interesting to directly compare the results. My group unanimously thought the water process was weak and terrible, but split on rather ethyl acetate or CO2 was better. Each of those removed some of the more interesting notes from the control, but it was really just personal preference for which of those notes we liked more.

It also reinforced my belief that, while decaffeination does slightly reduce quality, the vast majority of crappy decaf is crappy because people don't bother to brew it properly.

Wrote a script to generate these "Iso Slice-O" drawings directly from 3D model files (with a tiiiny bit of manual SVG cleanup at the end). Ran it on some of the most popular models and I'm obsessed with the results using white ink / black paper

As part of the 20th anniversary of the BBS Documentary's release, I've ripped the 3 DVDs that were included in the project and have them hosted at Internet Archive. These ISO files can be played in the VLC player like DVDs, and include all bonus features, subtitles, director's commentary, etc.

https://archive.org/details/BBS_Documentary_DVD_Set

I love this so much, this is literally the physical form of a workaround that's grown to meet enterprise demands.

This is literally, physically, what developers mean when they talk about "tech debt".

There is no world where we solve climate change without consuming less, including driving less. No amount of magical paint can make a car move without substantial external energy input. Ride a bike!

https://bgr.com/science/this-solar-paint-tech-could-lead-to-nearly-unlimited-ev-range/

One of the hard things about having studied the sciences is having to learn how many people who claim to value science actually don't value science, they just hate the humanities and the arts.

I signed up for a black-market time-travel tour as soon as I heard about them. (The first rule of Time Club etc.)

There’s an hour long pre-mission briefing on how you must be extremely careful in what you say or do as the smallest event could have future-changing consequences.

After that, they give you back your money, admit that there is no time machine, and tell you “now go and do the smallest thing you can to make the future better”.

I’m not even mad.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-demystifying-common-microcontroller-debug-protocols

This is the kind of documentation I wish I'd had when I was starting off in embedded systems.

And we still don't have any because VIDEO ISN'T FUCKING DOCUMENTATION!

Demystifying Common Microcontroller Debug Protocols - media.ccc.de https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-demystifying-common-microcontroller-debug-protocols

The influenza A ripping through our community right now is no joke. I’ve seen flu pneumonia, strokes probably triggered by inflammation from flu, flu encephalitis, innumerable elderly folks with injuries after falling due to weakness from flu, and a never ending train of 20-40 year olds on day 7-10 of illness who are dehydrated, miserable, and desperate to get better.

Anyway, get your flu shot. Wear a mask if you really don’t want flu. Vaccine efficacy this year seems poor (but not zero).

#vaccines #memes

So, dear #tangara lovers and MP3 enhtusiasts, it finally is ready!

*Build your own Tangara*

Do you prefer to assemble devices yourself rather than buy them ready-made? Attending the #38C3 ? A group of electronics hackers from https://ZTL.space and coredump.ch are offering a DIY Tangara workshop at the Hardware Hacking Area, on day 1 only.

You can register here: https://events.ztl.space/9cklb/

All the information is in the pretix, please read carefully :)
Feel free to ask if you have questions!

"the forces of racism have regrouped on the borders of legitimate science and transformed themselves into a dynamic and creative citizen science movement capable of exploiting features of human genetics"