Matt

Never realized how easy it is to lose a connection with whole branches of your family after someone dies. My grandmother was the only person who knew anything about the side of my family that went from Italy to Australia. We have no way of contacting them now

@helpdeskaleer@social.coop @eamon@social.coop Yes, you can define sub-routines. Here is a repo with a bunch: https://github.com/mikepierce/GNU-bc-Functions

A PhD I was working with on a VR project quit halfway through and became a coffee roaster. Mad respect, not even upset

@eamon@social.coop

The language for the bc (Basic Calculator) tool. It's like C but interpreted and ships with POSIX-compliant systems. I mess around with it occasionally when I'm bored. Made a whole stats and linear algebra library for it

@helpdeskaleer@social.coop @eamon@social.coop It's pretty neat. You can create 'libraries' by defining a bunch of stuff in a script you pass to it on startup. I would load my libraries first, then data which is usually a bunch of 'bc' array statements assigning values from a data set that was parsed earlier. Once in a session it's difficult to get data out without parsing standard output but you can do some interactive stuff

Don't diss grandma's china cabinet if you got a Kallax just for your funkos

@mttaggart@infosec.exchange So... a keypad made with a bare PCB secured to a plastic base with socket head bolts? Random nerds on fedi pull of better hardware using surplus soviet parts in dimly lit bedrooms, and they don't need trillions of dollars in investment

Found a music mix CD my sister burned 25 years ago and it's great! Been my work soundtrack this week #cd #music

@cwebber@social.coop Plagiarism issues aside, keeping the scope of generative models as 'fancy auto-complete' or 'fancy healing brush' that run locally is the only way I can see this tech being reasonably useful and benign

@foone@digipres.club It's totally possible we're laundering military hardware through a private entity under the guise of civilian use. Easier to fund nefarious schemes burning virtually unlimited money pumped into a company via the stock market than use real dollars from collected from taxes. Also, probably only a fraction of the capabilities those satellites possess are publicly known. All sorts of additional payloads could be bolted on. Think they're putting data centres into space? Or is that just cover to put a large box of indeterminate contents with sinister intent into orbit using AI investor money?

While I was working at a vision science lab studying the effects of spatial distortions on perception in VR, I was once tasked to decommission an old experiment. It was a rotating room that was used to study visual cue conflicts on perceived body orientation. However, something seemed familiar about it, so I asked my supervisor why that may be and he said that they presented it for a kids show which turned out to be Popular Mechanics for Kids The first picture is a screen shot from that episode starring Jay Baruchel seated in the apparatus, and the other is me standing next to its wreckage after chopping it up for its precious T-slot aluminum The episode was titled "Spaceships" (S1E17)

Reviewing vibe-coded PRs is slightly demoralizing. Not a one-to-one match in terms of effort between the contributor and I

Prototyping Cairo/Pango support for graphics rendering inside PsychoPy

In 2018, someone high up in the display industry told me 8K HDR television would be common by 2020. Also that VR headsets would exceed visual acuity limits soon These were possible outcomes back then, the technology was there already, but big tech didn't see it through

There must be a firmware bug in my DVD drive. It seems for single layer discs the speed settings are incorrect. So it ends up sounding like a Dremel while writing even though it shouldn't be going past 8X speed. Brasero seems to just crash out and the disc get ruined

After upgrading to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS my screen brightness stopped being adjustable. The only way I found to fix it was by modifying the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry in /etc/default/grub to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=native i915.enable_dpcd_backlight=0"

So if you're having this issue, hope this is helpful

#linux #ubuntu #kubuntu

What's the point of granite countertops? Clearly no one buys them based on practicality. Oh, you can put a hot pot down straight on it? Is that worth it considering the multitudes of other kitchen related activities that ruin it?

My grandmother is over 80, yet if you give her a crudely drawn map to a destination in Toronto, she'll always find her way there. I'm a GPS abstainer with a certifiably excellent spatial sense and I certainly cannot pull off a similar feat

We got excellent open source re-implementations of Roller Coaster/Transport Tycoon, Command and Conquer, etc. but no SimCity 2000? I figure that would be low-hanging

There are whole ass skyscrapers full of people, other than those that clean the restrooms, who do absolutely nothing to better the human condition. Just business for the sake of business

Americans are quick to forget how much help we provide fighting their forest fires

I like watching bees in the garden. Although I can't prove it, they really seem to love what they do

Woke up feeling like I smoked a pack last night, bleh

First batch of "Midnight Snack" cherry tomatoes from the backyard garden #gardening #tomatoes

Finder in the dock showing "Application Not Responding" for a while now even though all the instances are awake I wonder what's that about

@MiNieuw@mastodon.green I remember those days, carrying IKEA furniture on the crosstown express bus

How many trillions are we dumping into trying to replicate the mind? Money would be better spent on the ability to share and organize ideas rather than generate them

Today I need to perfectly sync the audio and video for webcam responses in PsychoPy. I thought I nailed that but it seems a bit hit or miss so far

I'm pretty sure the people complain about "historical inaccuracy" in Nolan's 'Odyssey' probably are cool with '300'

@mikepmoffatt@mastodon.social It's a bailout. Why not allow the developers to go into receivership and snatch them up at what they're actually worth in this market?

Hard drives have gotten so expensive that I'm burning DVDs again for long-term storage 8.54 GB DVD+R Double-Layer discs are a welcome "new" development since I was last doing this #dvd #computers

Run operating systems so old that they can't catch modern computer viruses or spyware. It also helps if they don't have browsers that can access the modern internet due to the lack of HTTPS support

I wonder which hardware I built for previous employers is still in use. If not, I hope they open them up before scrapping them. I wrote some corny stuff hidden inside them for my wife which might give someone a good chuckle

If found an old model rocket catalog in a drawer. I looked up the model I had 25 years ago online and they still sell it (HeliCAT.) I didn't stick with the hobby because shooting off rockets over 500 ft in a school parking lot close to houses was sketchy. By some miracle I never lost a rocket to a roof or backyard

I believe data retention rates for CD and DVD have been greatly underestimated. Haven't gotten a read error yet for a collection of CD-R discs stored in a poorly insulated room for over 25 years

My cat figured out what finger pointing means. Point your finger in some direction and he turns to look there without fail. He thinks he's people, lol

$100B for pitiful fleet of submarines to 'defend' the arctic, sheesh. The mean time-to-obliteration for those subs would probably be measured in femtoseconds in a real war Didn't the military get the memo that drones and sensor arrays are in vogue? I hope we're not just transferring large amounts of tax money to prop up companies the PM's hedge fund buddies might be heavily invested in

Optical drives are widely considered inferior to flash and cloud storage, but like every technology they would have gotten better if we kept using them

Who would have thought the neo-cons would be the ones leading the way on de-carbonization? Sure, cratering each other's refineries is a bit extreme, but at least they're getting results. Now, we're only a few weeks away from the post-petroleum world we dreamed of

Reddit nerds love to give a civics lesson as a counter argument too why it's impossible for certain government officials to lie. Always besides the point, but it shows people are having a hard time shaking their conditioned normalcy bias

Banks really don't like self-employed people when it comes to loans. Steady income for six years, but they would prefer if I worked at a company which is actively laying people off. If I took those Apple and Meta jobs I was offered (to work on 'metaverse' stuff) I would be screwed right now

Sellers in the Ontario housing market are delusional. You're going to lose money at this point outside the GTA, get over it #ontario

@hannorein@mastodon.social University admins are job placement programs for MBAs these days Also, industry nearly completely captured research in universities during the last 25 years. They pour money into graduate labs because they get PhD level talent for peanuts, partially subsidized by taxpayers and student tuition. Higher education is completely cooked because they are addicted to revenue streams tied to corporate profits that can vanish suddenly once the tech bubbles burst

Installing another optical drive I had laying around to speed up ripping my DVD collection

Internet streaming killed the optical drive

The viroflay spinach in the yard is growing like weeds at this point. A single plant can fill one of those tubs you get a the grocery store, and we got hundreds of them. The leaves are healthy and the size of dinner plates

Picture taken this morning of some wildflowers growing in the yard

@GraphicMatt@mastodon.social The corporate execs that own these hylic husks really want private jet access to downtown. No high speed rail for the plebs until they get what they want

I hate ads so much that I go out of my way to avoid products and services shown in them

@teledyn@mstdn.ca I got Mayor Mamdani as my closest match, lol