Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

By the way if anyone knows of a better reliable way to get string than just randomly wandering around at night waiting for spiders, let me know.

#minecraft

This morning it became clear that I’ve been playing too much Minecraft when I saw some cobweb Halloween decorations and thought, “Ooh, I should collect those to make string!”

#minecraft

Aww yeah, Paw Paws delivered today.

#pawpaw #pawpawfruit

We’ll see how it does against the Gom Jabbar in a couple of years, I guess.

New lesson this week is that a 5 year old will definitely earnestly repeat the Litany Against Fear if you teach it to them, but also it isn’t as effective as you might hope for staving off fear of monsters at bedtime.

Anyone aware of something like the Speech Accent Archive (https://accent.gmu.edu/) but for Spanish? SAA has people (native and non-native speakers) read a short example phrase in English to capture their accent. I seem to remember encountering a similar thing for French years ago, I would be curious to hear the same thing with Spanish.

#espanol #Spanish #linguistics #language

I don’t understand why it’s 2023 and I’ve never seen a Bluetooth connection UI that allows filtering by the type of device you are looking for. I’m trying to pair headphones, I don’t need to see that there are 50 TVs and computers broadcasting their IDs around me.

Coming next year:

PEP 818: Biphasic physical storage of package metadata
Replaces: 517

I had a dream last night that Java came out with a new packaging spec that involved encoding your metadata as a crystal that you then dissolved in a liquid, and somehow my first thought was, “That seems convoluted, but who are we (Pythonistas) to judge?”

Having trouble remembering the difference between the flag of Belgium and the flag of Germany?

Remember this simple rhyme:
“Black touches Red, you’re in Germany like Kaiser Fred¹.
Black touches yellow, you’re in Belgium, so have a waffle with marshmallow².”³

¹This assumes that you know that Kaiser Frederick III was the second Emperor of Germany.
²This is only a slant rhyme, and it barely works since — while dessert waffles are associated with Belgium, and they would be pretty good with marshmallows on them — marshmallows are not particularly associated with Belgian waffles.
³Yes, I am not particularly good at coming up with mnemonics.

#flags #vexillology #mnemonics

Learning a new language: “Why are there two words that both seem to mean ‘very’ in this language? How am I supposed to know which one to use?”
Speaking English: “There really should be a word between ‘amble’ and ‘stroll’, ‘meander’ isn’t quite right.”

Anyone out there with #minecraft installed willing to take a screenshot for me?

I’m trying to get an image to illustrate the sentence “you put it there, but I want it here” for an Anki deck to teach my son to read.

I was thinking something like a house in minecraft with a door attached in the wrong spot (like above a door-shaped hole in the wall), or maybe a railroad with a few rails shifted over by a few voxels.

Prefer if you’d release the image CC-0, since that will minimize complications when I eventually make the deck public.

I dunno if you can tell from my open tabs, but I miss my #pebble… 😿

(And my #PineTime is really not cutting it…)

Did You Know‽

Most people know that humans drown when immersed in water for prolonged periods of time, but did you know that they also cannot survive immersion in molten lead?!

For more fun human facts, subscribe to my newsletter Human Fact of the Day!

#humans #didyouknow #funfact

Tried to go extremely stereotypical, specifying the “three eyes” multiple ways. The closest I got was a lemur with a little yellow light on its forehead.

“a three-eyed lemur; the lemur is sitting in a lotus position and all three of its eyes are open. The third eye is centered on its forehead. highly detailed digital art trending on artstation”

Anyone have any good tricks for getting AI image generation models like #dalle or #stablediffusion to produce animals or people with three eyes? I was hoping to get a lemur with a typical “mind’s eye” third eye, but all the models seem to ignore the third eye condition no matter how frequently I specify it.

#promptengineering