I dreamed up this dashboard panel that shows you at a glance which Bluetooth devices (in my case speakers and/or headphones) are currently connected.
Because zoom loses its tiny mind if you forget and get on a call with both.
Remote
Feoh
@feoh@oldbytes.space
mastodon 4.7.2+glitchI'm a crusty old nerd who chases bright shiny things and loves playing with old computers :) Especially my Atari 800XL and Amiga.
I build castles in the cloud(s) for a living.
Apparently I exude TOXIC POSITIVITY, or so people on the internet tell me. We're all gonna die eventually, might as well feel good while we enjoy the ride :)
1774 Followers
5004 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 21, 2017
Pronouns:
He/Him
Languages:
English, Python, BASIC, LOGO
Homepage:
Interests:
Everything! But I love history, esoterica and old computers :) Also reading Science Fiction and Urban Fantasy!
@popey@mastodon.social Congratulations on the new role!
Interesting hearing you and @martin@wimpysworld.social talk about DevRel. I feel like the industry is coming around to the idea that this is almost an impossible role to fill as currently designed. It seems to be burning out humans at an alarming rate.
My wife pointed out that I tend to be REALLY LOUD when I'm on a zoom/Meet call for work.
I realized she's right, so I built a tool called "Inside Voice" that beeps at me if my microphone's audio gets louder than an adjustable threshold.
I'm pretty happy with it!
https://github.com/feoh/inside-voice
#python #textual #audio #loud
Dear tech talk/conference presenters: USE BiGGER FONTS PLEASE!
The average age of your bog standard techie is increasing. I've had crappy eyesight all my life, but I suspect now more and more are struggling to actually try to read the code samples you're putting up.
Make the fonts (for you) uncomfortably large. I guarantee your audiences, both in person and later on Youtube will thank you!
#a11y #vision #technology
this is the PSA for anyone who needs to hear it.
Disconnect your work everything when you go on vacation. Log out of chat. Disable the Calendar accounts. Disable the email accounts.
Even if you absolutely cherish your job as I do, take the time to do this to give yourself that mental disconnection. It makes a world of difference in my opinion.
Things I adore about #kde #plasma part 9000:
When I have a problem, I can search out an answer and get one that works.
KDE doesn't reinvent itself from the ground up every few years.
Today's example: I changed the UI scaling factor a few days back, but hadn't run Zoom since.
Zoom is a poorly built Linux application, so when their "Workspace" came up, it was sized way larger than my current display, so all the sizing gadgets were invisible.
NO PROBLEM!
Just hold down Meta/Super and right drag. Whichever corner of the window you're nearest to will determine the resize vector you get.
SWANK :)
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@jimsalter@fosstodon.org Jesus Effing Christ on an Atomic Pogo Stick yes THIS so much this.
Let me tell you about EVERY FSCKING TIME we go to the car dealership together.
As we've discussed in the past I am partially blind and can't (and may never be able to) drive.
She's the driver. SHE'S the car owner. I am merely a grateful passenger.
BUT EVERY SINGLE TIME the dealership drones will FORCEFULLY engage with me and ignore her, despite my consistently intoning: "Please talk to her. She owns the car. i can't drive."
SO VERY INCREDIBLY sick of this.
Partly because it makes me ill every time it happens.
It's one thing to know that you inhabit one hell of a circle of privilege on an intellectual level, but watching someone you love more than life itself get just UTTERLY snubbed and ignored a whole lot hurts like hell.
Humans suck. Part 9999.
At first the idea of interactive fiction based entirely on choices seemed incredibly limiting.
Then, I remembered the Choose Your Own Adventure novels I read as a kid, and it took on a whole new complexion.
So now we can create Choose Your Own Adventure novels, but with puzzles that can save state and make decisions based on various factors like what you're carrying or the other decisions you've made.
I have a project going that's nowhere ready to share yet. Just in the formative stages.
I am a crappy writer, but man I am having fun with this!
https://github.com/katelouie/bardic
#interactive #fiction #if #chooseYourOwnAdventure
Can you imagine how different life in this digital age would be if we could just knock down some of these damn vendor silos?
Lately I've been using the Headspace app on my #iphone to help fall asleep. I've struggled with insomnia all my life and have that "MIND RACING. CAN'T GET SLEEPY!" thing so many of us do.
And I told my wife about how well it's working and she asked if I could play it over our bedroom Sonos speaker.
Short answer is no, you can't, because neither the app nor the speaker support it.
Imagine how nice it would be if smart speakers spoke ONE protocol, and any device could just connect.
Replying to on hachyderm.io
@bittner@hachyderm.io Holy cow yes! I get that presenting is hard, and I recognize that a LOT of people find it hard to work with large font sizes, but IMO it's so worth the effort!
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@glyph@mastodon.social So that's the problem in the large.
And then there's the problem in the small where individual soulless CEOs fire vast swathes of staff thinking they can be replaced with AI.
Were it ONLY those CEOs who would enjoy their justly deserved fate of smashing into a brick wall headfirst, I wouldn't shed a tear.
But getting laid off is a traumatic process. We all learn to cope who work in the industry. You dust off your resume, start interviewing, and pick yourself back up again.
Only in the current climate it's MUCH harder to do that. There are still jobs, people are still being hired, but a lot of people are also falling through the cracks and either wandering away to do something else of slowly twisting in the wind.
Just wanna send a big warm thank you and shout out to the folks in #support on the #CachyOS discord.
They switched Cachy over to systemd-boot and either it or their conversion scripts were not happy with my setup (I have one whole disk for Linux, another whole disk for Windows, and I use the BIOS to choose which to boot.)
I saw an error during package update, figured I'd be SOL if I tried rebooting, and folks helped get me sorted after a few diagnostic commands in very short order.
@CachyOS@fosstodon.org is not something I'd run on production systems, but on the desktop it's an incredible way to learn more about recent developments in the #linux universe :)
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@robpike@hachyderm.io We should all be questioning it. At the end of the day we either have to do what the biz-dev ghouls demand of us or find a new line of work, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't raise issues we see just like any other engineering problem.
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@shapr@recurse.social @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @bittner@hachyderm.io But a thing I REALLY want to say in this thread since everyone LEAPT to slides is that often they're by far not the most problematic bit.
It's when folks inevitably pop open their editor, IDE or terminal to show code or a demo and the font is TEENY TINY!
Replying to
@jimsalter@fosstodon.org Very true.
It's kind of interesting when you start zooming out and thinking about this at the meta level.
Most of what we see as "progress" is also a means for capitalist landlords to level up their extractive practices at the expense of workers.
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@jimsalter@fosstodon.org Doing things the hard way is really good when learning is (as it always should be!) your goal, and when you don't have some kind of artificial Sword of Damocles arbitrating your ability to make a decent living.
I will always choose learning over not, but sometimes I will also choose being able to draw a paycheck versus not, because feeding, clothing and housing my family and I are in fact more important than my desire for life long learning.
One of my hopes for retirement is changing that equation.
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@fedops@fosstodon.org @jimsalter@fosstodon.org @shom@gts.shom.dev I hate to say it but I think @fedops@fosstodon.org is right.
I just tested this on CachyOS (An Arch derivative I <3 for desktop use. It magicks away the hellscape that is Nvidia drivers on Linux, but you do have to get used to paying the Arch tax The community is amazing so for me it's a wash, but YMMV)
systemctl halt / poweroff --when=+1m does exactly what you'd expect.
I wonder if this is another upshot of them porting many of the userland tools to Rust?
Replying to
@jimsalter@fosstodon.org this is happening across the entire technology industry. The business folks have decided that the reputational risk of allowing quality to go down the shitter is irrelevant compared to the cost savings that they can realize.
I remain very grateful to be working in academia at the moment.
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@meltedcheese@c.im @dannyman@sfba.social Respectfully disagree. There are times when a live demo or showing some code in action speaks louder than a thousand slides.
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@meltedcheese@c.im @dannyman@sfba.social That's great when it's slides, but as I said elsewhere in the thread, often people are showing their editor/IDE or terminal, and then using your method I'd need to take ~60 photos a second and animate them or something :P
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@SnoopJ @dashdsrdash @AlexxKay
My goodness this is an incredibly powerful piece!
"If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism."
"Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
"We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling:
I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land."
This is the kind of written work that germinates like a seed the first time you read it, and grows over time, maturing into a bumper crop of ideas.
Thanks so much for sharing! I look forward to reading it again in a few months when it's had some time to marinate! :)
#facism #philosophy #language #words #power
@tatsh@hostux.social Woo! mutt-oauth2 just made my day!
Previously a gent from MIT IS&T put in HEROIC amounts of effort to pull together the prior jank-fest of oauth2 scripts and mutt configurations...
But with your nice new package I can 'uv tool install', add the bits you specified to my muttrc and BOOM! I'm reading my MIT E-mail in a sane interface that doesn't make my remaining damaged eye want to shrivel up and retire :)
Thank you!
(Also just sent a Buy Me a Coffee :)
Replying to
@SnoopJ @dashdsrdash What a thoroughly fascinating man Eco was! I look forward to having contemplative time to sit down and read this. Thanks for sharing!
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@dashdsrdash In my view it's not really a question.
Facism is a set of identifiable characteristics. A heuristic perhaps? That you can check an entity against:
Appeals to the mythic pastCalls to ViolenceUs Versus ThemDehumanizing The Other
To name a few. If a person passes the test? They're a facist. Same goes for a corporation.
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @shapr@recurse.social @bittner@hachyderm.io STAHP you're making my lone under-powered eye scream at the very idea :)
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@fedops I can't say that I'm particularly well educated on the smart speaker ecosystem, but now I know.
shrug
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@fedops I would presume it does? But the Sonos isn't a regular bluetooth speakers.
Yes, I bought in without realizing, because the Sonos ostensibly has a Plex plugin and that 's what I was focusing on at the time.
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@britter At least they're 1) Being really open about it and 2) offering straight forward opt-out.
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@hjwp@fosstodon.org OOH new syntax that actually makes things more readable and easier to understand. LOVE this! <3 <3 <3
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@jimsalter@fosstodon.org This industry is insane.
I count myself very lucky to be working for a sane, humane employer, and yet still I will be doing the touchdown dance for at LEAST a solid month in 8 years when I can retire.
Replying to
@dashdsrdash And thinking a bit further on this - I will admit I had to look up "plutocratic".
I really don't understand where you're going with this.
It feels to me like you're just hijacking a word that means one thing and coneniently shoe horning it into another undesirable thing just because it's undesirable.
Sure, plutocratic Megacorps that exploit and abuse their power are bad, undesirable, and need to be eliminated or at LEAST brought under control so they stop behaving like lunatics... But does that mean we must label them facists?
There are PLENTY of figures in our modern world who fit the traditional definition of the word. I say leave this particular combination of letters as the powerful totem they represent, and maybe coion a new word or phrase for the megacorps gone insane.
Just my $.02, and obviously I'm more than willing to be convinced I've got it wrong.
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@dashdsrdash They do change, and I think that's great so long as everyone or at least most people are on board enough with the change that meaning is not lost.
When I think of the kinds of behavior I think you're referring to on the part of Megacorps, I think of words like "exploitative" "immoral" "inhumane", "profiteering" and the like.
I don't really think of "facist". But perhaps that's because I struggled a bit for years understanding what Facism was other than "That thing Hitler and Mussolini did".
Reading books and understanding the heuristics that, at least at the time made facism facism was very helpful.
So maybe the problem is that tiny grug brained people like me need a new set of heuristics to actually understand what people mean for the NEW usage of "facist".
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@andrew@fedi.aeracode.org Andrew this is fantastic! How did you get the production quality so high?
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@nedbat@hachyderm.io This one really resonated with me.
How long it takes to learn something shouldn't matter, but in the tech job market it's a metric that's widely used and even more widely (IMO) over-emphasized.
I've joked that I have a learning cliff, not a learning curve. It takes a cetain period of dedicated plodding away for something to actually "click".
Good day Fedinauts! Today's #electronica OTD comes from some of the masters of modern Drum & Bass - #noisia !
It's just them doing a studio DJ mix. LOVE it! :)
Replying to
@popey Remember when even the shithead vandals at least SEEMED to have a conscience?
Like, no attacking hospitals/health care. humanitarian/releif groups or Linux distros?
Those days, if they ever existed, are LONG gone :(
Replying to
@tschak@oldbytes.space You're right but also the implied injustice is endemic to modern capitalism.
People have always been seen (and MUST be seen in the eyes of modern corporate law) as inconveniently sloppy cogs in the production machine.
In that sense, LLMs are the inevitable blight on a system with so few external controls that it's virtually guaranteed to turn inwards and start consuming itself.
@Dodo_sipping@cupoftea.social Yay dogs :) Love your profile photo.
We have all we can handle here with our little 15lb hot dog who has MANY opinions on just about everything :)
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@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io My god so frustrating.
I'm currently paying the $100/year JUST so I can install an app I built on my phone.
And Android is locking down so fast they may be soon to follow.
Not great :)
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@dashdsrdash I can appreciate that, and while I respect their right to differ, I think they're wrong :)
I think that Palantir's crimes against morality are very clear, and I'm honestly not sure I would refer to them as facist.
Privacy is and should be a basic human right, and Palantir's tech runs roughshod over that right left, right and center.
The word for this is "intrusive" or maybe even "invasive".
I do appreciate you clarifying, but I must respectfully disagree.
My wife convinced me to stop cursing all the time because doing that robbed the curses of their power.
I have since come to believe that she is right.
I assert that, in my opinion, the same goes for "facist".
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@SnoopJ @dashdsrdash @AlexxKay It's funny I feel very similarly about Orwell's Politics And The English Language
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
But I could see this essay occupying a similar pride of place in my mental library :)
@martin@wimpysworld.social Really enjoying your note taking journey on @linuxmatters@ubuntu.social !
I feel you WRT Obsidian and friction. I use and love it but it's a definite investment to figure out how to winnow down the VAST array of potential control surfaces to something that's not just usable but intuitive and near zero friction. I've done that for myself but I'm very glad you found an alternate route to happiness!