Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Hmm.. My personal "local-only" server went down a few days ago, I think because the MB died (first it was starting and showing red for the "CPU" and "DRAM" LEDs, then it stopped booting entirely).

It's still under warranty, but when I do an RMA from ASRock I get an internal server error 500. I suspect that even when I finally get them to accept the RMA, it will be some time (weeks?) before I get a new motherboard. I could have a new motherboard from MicroCenter for $120 this evening, so I guess I'll just do that.

I bet the joke was on them when they got to the afterlife and the Shabti figurines kept drawing portraits of them with extra fingers...

So apparently AIs have been taking human jobs for almost 5000 years now:

> Another probable reason for the decline, and eventual end, of retainer sacrifices is the creation of shabti-figures. Shabti-figures were mummy-shaped figurines, meant to replace retainer sacrifices; "... the responsibility for carrying out tasks on behalf of the deceased was transferred to a special kind of funerary statuette, known as a shabti-figure".[2] These shabti-figures were believed to carry out a wide variety of tasks, including everything from cultivating fields, to irrigating canals, to serving the deceased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_retainer_sacrifices#Reasons_for_dwindling_of_retainer_sacrifices

@freemo Is there any kind of "status" page for qoto.org that is independent of the mastodon instance? Or somewhere that lists known issues?

I'm experiencing significantly degraded performance and I feel like it would be good to have a place to go to find out if this is scheduled maintenance, a DDoS attack, or something else.

Heh, I just noticed that it looks like `virtualenv` seems to use the "COVID-time" version of #calver: https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog.html

Version 20 starting in 2020, still version 20 now... 😛

I think at this point `setuptools_scm` (and other tools like it) have probably caused more headaches for me than they've solved.

Haha, `setuptools_scm` apparently does not, itself, expose a `__version__` attribute.

Also it turns out I set up release automation for `dateutil` over 3 years ago and completely forgot about it and only ever used it once. Thanks, past me!

Cutting this release has made me nostalgic for the days when I was a conscientious, responsive and organized maintainer 😛

Oops, someone made it so that you could lazy-load `dateutil` submodules over 4 years ago and I never cut a release including that.

That has now been rectified in `python-dateutil` version 2.9.0. Enjoy: https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

#python

I'll be speaking at this, so if you are in the Western Mass area and are interested to hear about the app I built to teach my kids to have perfect pitch, stop on in. 😀

Found the issue here — after `libuim.so` showed up in some stack traces for other things that were crashing (e.g. Element), I installed `ibus` and uninstalled `uim`, and now everything works again. 🎉.

And apparently in some contexts I am now able to do the Super + . shortcut to pull up an emoji picker!

#ibus #uim #firefox

I feel like I've been lucky that when I saw the [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/) page, I thought, "Hm, weird that people need to be told that — all the (public-facing) software I know and work on maintains changelogs.

I am guessing that this is... not as common in some other software ecosystems.