Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@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:

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2014/04/04/the-most-eye-opening-things-ive-ever-read/

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.

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/intel-underestimates-error-bounds-by-1-3-quintillion/

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. #game #music 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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y37R33rTPD0

Fillmore from Actraiser for SNES... the "what Castlevania is this from?" song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b0GxFFourc

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 https://github.com/masmu/pulseaudio-dlna

(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.

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

1. Install https://www.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 https://openelec.tv/ box.

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

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.yaacc/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.xbmc.kore/

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."

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. #music #funny

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

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

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.

...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.

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.)

I just recently ran across this blog post on the core flaw in the Go programming language's focus on simplicity that I felt like sharing.

https://fasterthanli.me/blog/2020/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride/

TL;DR: They seem determined to force a veneer of simplicity, even when things are fundamentally complicated, and that makes things painful when the abstraction leaks.