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Apparently ECMA-6:1985 and ASCII-1986 declared UNIX line endings deprecated in favour of DOS/Windows-style ones and ECMA-48:1991 declared them disallowed... shows how well that worked.
(Source: aivosto.com/articles/control-c )

I just thought of a good way to respond to people who grumble about younger generations lacking skills that used to be taught as essential. (eg. beautiful handwriting, being able to catch bugs in your output effectively enough to do it on real dead-tree paper before ever submitting it to a computer, etc.)

"No one disputes that it's a useful skill to have. The question is whether the value you'll get from it in this day and age justifies continuing to ask people to invest time into it as anything other than a hobby."

There are plenty of useful skills that used to be essential to at least some segment of the population and are now hobbies. Horse-riding, carpentry, calligraphy, ballroom dancing, etc.

Sorry I went silent. I've been too busy to even check Mastodon, let alone post on it.

Today, however, I self-nerd-sniped and implemented a one-click aspect ratio correction userscript for 320x200 screenshots of DOS games on MobyGames:

greasyfork.org/en/scripts/4009

(See gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe for an explanation of why it's necessary.)

I just got nerd-sniped by an old Tom Scott video which touched on bodging multi-keyboard input.

The funny thing is, Linux is technically easier to do this bodge with, but it's the documentation that holds it back.

Want to bodge it through evdev? Good luck learning to permanently adjust udev permissions.

Want to use XInput2? Qt and GTK don't expose the relevant field, so you have to learn raw X11... which doesn't have the best documentation.

Another two thoughts I'll have to remember to send upstream:

1. With local timelines making it possible to actively follow everything local, it'd be really nice to have something milder than "Mute" so I can remove arXiv Quantitative Biology from my local timeline but still see exceptional entries that get mentioned by people.

2. Posts should have an "I'd like to be notified of people's answers to this too" button.

I've been using COVID as an opportunity to deep-clean the couple of used Unicomp buckling-spring keyboards I snagged at a good price as spares (since they don't make standard US104 layout anymore) and I noticed that one of them not only had the separate keycaps and keystems, but that it had a whole bunch of different colors of keystems, so I decided to have some fun putting them back in.

(Yeah, the keys that are always one-piece designs are yellowed. I'll order some replacements eventually.)

@freemo To clarify, I do understand that it's served up by the site that hosts the post I'm trying to fave/reply to/etc.

I'm asking whether an option could be added to opt out of it when both the user and the post are on qoto.org and, thus, the code serving up /interact can see my session cookie.

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@freemo Given how much I use middle-click as part of a "triage first, read and fave later" workflow, do you think we could get an option in qoto.org's Preferences to skip the "/interact" page (the page with the "Proceed to ..." button), rather than just pre-filling the username?

For anyone who might be following this for updates to existing entries on my blog, I've added "YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is" and '"Games as a service" is fraud.' as related mentions in my "The Most Eye-Opening Things I’ve Ever Read" post:

blog.ssokolow.com/archives/201

A little bit of a counterproductive phrasing to use for a single link to a site that's otherwise known to be trustworthy, don't you think, YouTube?

I just ran across an interesting and highly detailed blog post from 2014 about the Intel x87 fsin instruction.

randomascii.wordpress.com/2014

No big surprise that it's from Bruce Dawson's blog. I really need to do an archive trawl of it some day.

Since I'm impatient when it comes to partially finished stuff, you get another music roundup today. covers:

The two I wound up tweeting about are "original arrangement, better instrument" covers of songs I love:

Haunted Woods from Diddy Kong Racing for N64:
youtube.com/watch?v=y37R33rTPD

Fillmore from Actraiser for SNES... the "what Castlevania is this from?" song:
youtube.com/watch?v=7b0GxFFour

I'll probably also do a few faves rundowns covering stuff I didn't tweet about, like filk music.

Further ideas for when I'm feeling like working on it again:

1. Write a custom web remote for my existing Audacious Media Player setup and install github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dl

(audman exists, but appears to intentionally make design decisions I don't like.)

2. Write a Firefox extension and helper daemon to expose open YouTube tabs to DNLA for on-the-fly youtube-dl-ing and playback.

3. Combine all three prior options into a really polished web remote to supplant my use of Yaacc.

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I finally did phase 1 of putting proper entertainment in front of the exercise machines:

1. Install gnu.org/software/gmediaserver/ on my PC and wrap a shell alias around `gmediaserver -p <PORT> --profile=ps3 <FOLDER>` on my PC.

2. `ufw allow <PORT>` on my PC

3. `Settings → Services → UPnP → Allow control of Kodi via UPnP` on my openelec.tv/ box.

4. Install these two packages onto an old phone for a remote:

f-droid.org/en/packages/de.yaa
f-droid.org/en/packages/org.xb

Explaining the joke 

There's an old verbal joke that goes "Perl is like a pair of vice grips. You can do anything with it, and it's the wrong tool for every job."

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A family member just asked if we have any vice grips. I asked what size. He said "small".

Without thinking, I responded "Yeah. There's a pair hanging off my desk with a tag on them that says 'Perl'".

Sorry I haven't had any new posts. I've been meaning to start adding in some retro-hobby posts in addition to continuing the music ones, but, over the last couple of days, I've been getting carried away trying to clean up a proof-of-concept hobby project to the point where I can post it.

(An experimental Tesseract OCR frontend intended to make it as comfortable and efficient as possible to OCR speech ballons and text boxes in manga and doujinshi and feed them to Google Translate.)

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

youtube.com/watch?v=3ToEvz-7tr

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

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

youtube.com/watch?v=ud6LiVJkwy

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.

youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaF

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