Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@hrisskar Yeah. It's so rare, these days, for me to see sci-fi being promoted or bundled which isn't either "dystopia in the future", "contemporary thriller... in spaaaace!" or "the author is clearly trying to craft something that'll get picked up for a movie adaptation".

Where's the sense of wonder and optimism for what's out there?

...and then there's the problem Lost had that this io9 article lays out:

https://io9.gizmodo.com/ringworld-is-a-lot-like-lost-but-theres-a-crucial-diff-5566084

I just got introduced to this great song satirizing the state of online discourse. #music #funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToEvz-7trY

@fatboy Thanks. That'll be joining the following ad-related entries in my "The Most Eye-Opening Things I've Ever Read" blog post:

* http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
* http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
* http://www.less-broken.com/blog/2011/11/why-ad-blocking-is-not-moral-dilemma.html
* https://marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics
* https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2018-03-13/an-overview-of-online-ad-fraud/
* https://blog.zgp.org/notes-and-links-from-my-talk-at-rji/

(The post is at http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2014/04/04/the-most-eye-opening-things-ive-ever-read/ if you want to check the unrelated entries.)

@brandon @jellal I *would* sleep in my socks but for two things:

1. My legs get uncomfortable if I leave something elastic gripping them without a break every night, so, if I wanted to sleep in something like socks, it'd have to be footie pyjamas.

2. My body loves to dump its excess heat into my feet... to the point where I'm often wearing matched socks and sandals when others have switched to shoes and shoes when others have switched to winter boots.

I almost forgot today's #filk #music ...my other top favourite:

Pushin' the Speed of Light by Julia Ecklar and Anne Prather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwyA

The best way I can sum this story up is "The plight of the young working man, watching everyone else age into oblivion as he lives life aboard a relativistic starship." Very poignant.

I like to contrast it with '39 by Queen, which has a similar theme, but with the main characters being seen as heroes rather than everymen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU

@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.)