Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@wizzwizz4 @badrihippo Yeah. If I ever run out of more pressing things, I want to write a normalizer which strips out formatting that only applies to spans of whitespace characters (as defined by Unicode).

@eletrotupi Two tips:

1. I use https://github.com/danny0838/webscrapbook/ as a way to archive every page I read.

2. There's a "Save Page Now" form at https://archive.org/web/

@eletrotupi Was it https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html?

@Steve12L I've been slacking on the aesthetics of my desktop, and I turned off compositing for better WM uptime, but here you go.

@dicktripover Also, here's a quote you might find useful:

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered. -- Lyndon B. Johnson, former President of the U.S.

@dicktripover To quote George Carlin, "this is really stupid".

Do they really want to make people paranoid about ever getting a needle for any reason, no matter how sick they are?

My mother already regrets getting my brothers and I fingerprinted in case we get abducted when we had our vaccinations as kids.

An interesting bit of related trivia:

If you have any Star Trek books on your bookshelf written by "L.A. Graf", that's a pseudonym for "Julia Ecklar, Karen Rose Cercone, and (once) Melissa Crandall".

Apparently it's a tongue-in-cheek abbreviation of "Let's All Get rich and famous".

I think I'll also share some of my favourite #filk (sci-fi/fantasy geek folk) #music because it deserves more attention.

Let's start with The Horse Tamer's Daughter, written by Leslie Fish. This ballad, is set in the world of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover and this recording by Julia Ecklar is from an out-of-print album that apparently went for CA$400 at a FilKONtario auction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuGIBX9FGZQ

...with this and Big Iron by Marty Robbins, I learned that I want more ballads.

OK, now for the first of my "summary of tweets that are still relevant" posts... #indie #music:

First, "The Nameless Murderess" by The Once. A swing-y murder ballad with some *amazing* vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ijxVHxzqA (See also: https://singout.org/no-fortune-fame-nameless-murderess/)

Second, "Jabberwocky". Kate "Erutan" Covington's comeback song after struggling to recover her singing voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlyrweRsILk

Third, "Long Lost Century" by The Woodlands:

https://soundcloud.com/the-woodlands/long-lost-century

More music roundups to come.

@codesections @MrChainman The two big reasons I find Mastodon superior, which you didn't mention are:

1. I was scared off Twitter by a friend slamming into a "to be allowed to continue to log in, you must give us your SMS number" message. (I have no mobile number to give)

2. On Twitter, I was in the process of progressively un-subscribing from more and more people as Twitter kept spamming my notifications view with "In case you missed it..." entries that I couldn't opt out of.

...and I just noticed that I didn't properly collapse the descriptions of figures 171 and 172. Since it's been 40 minutes, I'm just going to leave that mistake up.

No need to annoy people deleting and re-drafting after that long.

@3rik @fsfe Probably a good idea to add WireGuard above/below OpenVPN:

https://www.wireguard.com/

On the Linux side, it's been available as an out-of-tree kernel module for years and Debian Testing is now moving to flipping it on as an in-tree module:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-Enables-WireGuard

@victorhck Given things like BashFAQ's explanation of how flaky set -e is (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105) and how much of a pain it is to get everything just right for portability with bash, I've taken to just rewriting shell scripts longer than "cd to the directory containing the game, then exec it" in Python.

Aside from the niceties of having sane whitespace handling and variable substitution, try/finally, and stuff like os.walk, os.path.normpath, shlex, and subprocess, its presence is basically a de facto standard for non-Windows platforms at this point, as well as being easier to write in a manner that's portable to Windows.

I wanted to start off my #dos tweets recap with the link I found for IBM's CUA keybindings reference, but, sadly, it's now dead.

If anyone wants to try to track it down, this was the URL for the relevant section in one of the versions of IBM's reference:

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/f29al000/2.2.54

Failing that, I've since picked up a used copy of http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/931408154 so maybe I'll try to find time to transcribe the reference tables listed as Figures 171 and 172 (Keyboard Functions, p. 315-322), (Keys to Functions, p. 319-322), Figures 175-185 (Mnemonic Assignments for ..., p. 345-349), and Figure 200 (Shortcut Key Assignments, p. 451-452).

(That said, if you can find a copy of the book, pick it up. While it's primarily intended for OS/2, it's got a *lot* of nifty stuff useful for DOS TUIs, including "Appendix E. Translated Terms"... charts translating various English menu/button labels like "Redo" into 16 different languages.)

@oilyfish Is there an "introduction to fosstodon culture for newcomers" document which could explain things like the mindset behind caring so much about using invidio.us?

(Personally, I care about the risk of broken links so much that I think it's bad enough to be using YouTube, even with its own frontend... let alone a frontend that considers it a point of pride to not use YouTube's official API when youtube-dl spends so much time keeping up with YouTube's changes.)

@gairsty http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ really helped me get a grasp on things back when I was a geeky teen just getting started with it.

I'd also recommend these, since talking the terminal and related stuff digs up so much about the system as a whole:

* http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/
* https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
* http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ
* http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ (Stuff like why ASCII is laid out the way it is.)
* http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ (Focused on *why* UNIX programs are designed as they are.)

@mollusk @codesections Almost certainly JavaScript, given the ridiculous amount of effort poured into it and the results that show up in The Benchmarks Game.

@codesections I would own two RasPi boards.

Checkmate. :P

(Seriously, though, that's probably how I'd write it. I'm a bit of a nitpicker about my own use of language.)

@mollusk @codesections When devotees are fighting for the honour of their favourite language, they come out about equal:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fastest.html

It's all about the algorithms and features implemented and how much effort is put into optimizing.

@theodraxis Sounds like my preference to not use such stimulants for my ADHD was a good choice. 90%+ of the time, my problem isn't motivating myself to start what I *should* be doing, it's motivating myself to stop what I *am* doing... which is usually something with a similar "big work, big reward" profile to "actual work" (eg. hobby projects) and, thus, likely to have Ritalin emphasize the benefits of continuing to work on it.

Without any drugs, I already have a pretty good track record for "If I can just motivate myself to change tasks, five minutes on the new task will turn into five hours".

It reminds me of a comment on the TV Tropes secondary pages by a contributor who took some Adderall with the intent to work on a paper and wound up spending three hours improving TV Tropes instead.