Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

This is my maternal grandfather, Nelson.

From the 1940 census:

Occupation: Farmer

House Owned or Rented: Rented

Highest Grade Completed: Elementary school, 4th grade

Class of Worker: Working on own account

Weeks Worked in 1939: 52

Income: 0

New user on my instance today's reason for joining: the Birdsite "banned iembot" and they can't keep up with weather info anymore over there. It's going to be strange if my personal instance here is more useful for weather than X-chan 🤔

Are you finding Mastodon to be less vibrant and active?

I’m worried that we are not getting as much engagement on our Ukraine war reporting as we used to.

We are trying to decide which social media platforms to continue posting on, given how much effort it takes to replicate across all of them.

If you want to send a signal to us that we should keep posting here, will you sign up for our newsletter? Counteroffensive.substack.com

I’m only asking Mastodon users today so we can gauge impact.

Nope, I'm doing 99% CW

A lot of people saying just add some hashtags and engage more! Which, fair.

But one thing I want to convey is how exhausted our team is. We spend all day traveling by car or train. We are out in the heat reporting from the field.

We work 14-18 hours a day. All of us live in our office in Kyiv.

We are doing everything we can to bring better journalism to you folks and every small task takes up time we could be sleeping or reporting or just not working!

"Ad blockers are unethical—that's how they pay to keep the lights on!”

Exactly. It's how THEY pay to keep the lights on. It's not how I pay for anything. I didn't agree to see ads, although I'm ok with some ads; what I definitely didn't do is agree to be tracked and profiled and have arbitrary third-party code running on my computer just so I could read this awful, pointless, SEO-ified shitfest of an article that doesn't come close to answering the question I was googling.

#enshittification

Felix Mendelssohn wrote a standalone concert overture in 1826, when he was 17 and half years old (E major, Op. 21) inspired after he read a German translation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream".

16 years later in 1842, he was commissioned by King Frederick of Prussia to write incidental music (Op. 61) to accompany performance of that play (which would include the famous "Wedding March"). Mendelssohn incorporated his overture from 16 years earlier Op. 21 into Op. 61 as 61's overture and first of 14 total numbers for the performance, and this combination became what we know as his "A Midsummer Night's Dream" today.

Mendelssohn died five years later of chronic illness, at the age of only 38.

Italians elected the ultra far right prime minister Giorgia Meloni in September, and now #Italy has started deleting mothers from the birth certificates of the children of lesbian couples.
Because that is what is important in Italy in 2023 — not solving the rising poverty or improving the youth unemployment rate of 20.4 percent — but harassing gay families.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/07/21/europe/italy-lesbian-couples-birth-certificates-scli-intl/index.html

Remembering his experiences as a child in an internment camp for Japanese Americans, George Takei asks supporters to sign a petition calling for action to stop the cruelty Texas Republicans are visiting on migrants now. He writes,

"A leaked e-mail from a Texas Department of Protective Safety trooper documents the remarkably cruel measures Governor Greg Abbott has instituted at the border to deter crossings."

#Texas #Republicans #GregAbbott #migrants #cruelty
/1

https://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/806/513/820/?TAP=2430&source_id=TexasMigrants

Concerns rising that using an "int" for the count of Trump indictments may have been a ploy for rollover to zero out his indictments entirely.

WHAT?!! How much scattered light you get inside your eyeballs depends on your eye colour! Blue eyes will have more scattered light inside them than brown eyes. That is wild!!

Paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09103.pdf

Light pollution you see in sky is a combo of everything along your line of sight - light reflecting off particles in atmosphere+light from streetlights scattering inside your eyeballs (intraocular scattering), the latter dominates within 10-15 meters of bright streetlights

#ALAN2023

#introductions We cobbled together a free-to-use dialup ISP out of trash and spare parts. dialup.world is composed of four modems for simultaneous connections delivering speeds up to 33.6K.

This is currently a bunch of USR Sportsters hooked into Linux, but we are currently working on setups with Cisco gear, as well as some musings in 56K, other weird dialup appliances, and retro networking.

We also supply dialup access to the WebTV Redialed project (http://webtv.zone/) which means if you dig your WebTV out of storage and hook it into a phone line, it *just works* with no modification needed on your part!

I invite you to watch our bad ideas become reality.

#modems #dialup #retronetworking #webtv

Hey lovely Mastodon folk. I've just released an HP-35, HP-45, HP-80 simulator called HP-1973 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the HP-45 calculator. (Free) standalone versions for Mac and WIndows (no need for any Python installation or knowledge) & Python source for Linux. It's been a coding marathon, so it'd mean a lot to me if you could boost this post, so it gets in front of the right people. Download here: https://sarahkmarr.com/retrohp1973.html Enjoy. #retrocomputing #calculators #python #coding #rpn

Last evening before going to sleep I was thinking about how lucky you are if you don't have bloody russians invading your country right now.

Every night we have a few air raid sirens. Sometimes explosions.

Ban everything that benefits russia. Ban trade with russia. Ban trade with whoever trades with russia. They dismantle electronics and build drones from those parts.

#Politics #RussiaIsATerroristState #UkraineWar

Trump shares sinister new video issuing apocalyptic threat to anyone who ‘f***s around with us’

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-new-video-threat-b2379177.html

#Independent #TrumpThreat #ApocalypticWarning #USPolitics #VideoThreat #F***sWithUs #Politics #News

#food #beer #hero #California

Instead of closing down the brewery, Anchor Steam employees offer to buy the company and make it worker-owned

https://vinepair.com/booze-news/anchor-employees-brewery-takeover-bid/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

Entire #California town (#Burney) has gotten E.coli, due to the #WaterSupply getting infected. #ecoli #infrastructure #water https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-20/e-coli-hammers-a-california-town-sending-patients-to-er-and-shutting-down-restaurants