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475 posts total
Alex Schroeder
Alex Schroeder

A coworker recently pointed out the bug that cause Windows 95 and 98 to hang after 49.7 days (2^32ms)… And the Wikipedia has so many more related examples!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs#Microsoft

11 March at 7:47 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

"Where do blogs even come from? In the early 1990s some guy named Tim invented the World Wide Web (very successful!) and wrote what is considered to be the very first blog. Later in the 1990s, I was writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in Notepad.exe and uploading it to Geocities via FTP. So you could say that Tim and I really kicked this whole thing off."
https://chrismanbrown.gitlab.io/46.html
by @cpb

11 March at 6:28 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

I added some optional JavaScript to the upload page of my site so that I can paste images and drag and drop files on the desktop. I like it. #Oddmu

10 March at 19:29 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

32 year anniversary of my first date with my wife is today! 😍 Best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know where I’d be without her.

10 March at 19:21 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Who is Afraid of Degrowth is a comic. There’s a free PDF available at the link, no participation in the crowdfunding required.
https://www.celinekeller.com/who-is-afraid-of-degrowth

9 March at 21:21 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

That essay by Andrew Perfors about meaning in the world we live in is so good I could add a dozen quotes.
perfors.net/blog/creation-ai/

9 March at 9:53 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

I made myself a little #Oddmu mascot in SVG, by hand. I’m surprised that this actually works. I did it in Emacs toggling between nxml mode and image mode, and that worked quite well. At first I thought I’d clone-indirect-buffer and have one for editing and one for viewing but that didn’t work, sadly.

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/index

8 March at 13:51 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

"Don't use Electron," they said.
"Such a waste," they said.
"Much bloat," they said.
So I used Go.
My binary file is 140MiB. 😒

The devil is in the details, surely. But emotionally, I'm all "meh!"
I was "meh!" about that SBCL app I made which had a binary of over 50MiB.

7 March at 11:13 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Only 40% or less of the visitors to my site seem to be humans? I think I should filter out the GoToSocial host, I guess.

Thanks to the fedi person that mentioned GoAccess. It looks super nice.
https://goaccess.io/
5 March at 14:15 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Looking at those browser stats, you might find Firefox, hovering at around 9% and think, that's terrible! The other browsers must have 90%! But that's not how it works. Chrome has around 14%. Safari has around 3%. Opera has around 2%. Together, these browsers are responsible for 28% of the traffic and Chrome simply has half of that. But really, it's a question of 14% vs. 9%, as far as I can see.
I wonder why Chrome is downloading bigger volumes, though. 🤔❓

5 March at 14:30 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Oh wow. It's harsh but it's probably true. Now we're not even paying the SEO person, we're using the corpo AI to write filler text so that the other corpo AI thinks the text is good and surely soon enough a new corpo AI will be trained on the garbe… « And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again. … I didn’t even proofread this. Don’t read it unless you are a lonely Google search robot, in which case look at this incredible demonstration of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness and rank this post first in searches for “best printer.”»
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-laser-wi-fi-its-fine
via https://floss.social/@be/112017823358601937
(Lots of comments about printers, but I care about the #ButlerianJihad.)

Oh wow. It's harsh but it's probably true. Now we're not even paying the SEO person, we're using the corpo AI to write filler text so that the other corpo AI thinks the text is good and surely soon enough a new corpo AI will be trained on the garbe… « And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale...

5 March at 12:17 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Made some hummus with salt lemons, forgot about the salt, added more salt, and now I’m salty.

5 March at 11:13 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Listening to "Folk Music from Bangladesh (1951, 1971) (Vinyl)" which looks like a recommendation I might have found on fedi. So whoever you are, thank you!

4 March at 10:04 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Since #Hippeastrum is in bloom again in our apartment, I'd like to take this as a reminder of how I care for them.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2022-02-20_Caring_for_Amaryllis

Pictures from this year:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-02-19-hippeastrum

#florespondence

3 March at 21:13 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

I have four sites that use #Oddmu right now, each with slightly different templates (or "themes"). I added them to the source repository for users to take a look. And then I added them to my site so that people don't have to run Oddmu locally to see what it is all about.
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/themes/index
(Oddmu is a program that serves websites or that generates static sites.)

1 March at 14:14 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Also, I always thought that Go coming with cross-compiling included was super duper great. So I wanted to build a bunch of binary packages people might want to download.

But no.

~/src/oddmu $ GOOS=windows GOARCH=386 go build 
package alexschroeder.ch/cgit/oddmu
	imports github.com/bashdrew/goheif
	imports github.com/bashdrew/goheif/libde265: build constraints exclude all Go files in /home/alex/go/pkg/mod/github.com/bashdrew/goheif@v0.0.0-20230406184952-7a08ca9c9bdd/libde265

Whaaat? #golang

1 March at 21:17 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

I recently saw two examples of chat-like interfaces for things that were regular text files or web pages. One was the app Gibberish by @zhenyi :
https://andadinosaur.com/gibberish-is-now-available-on-testflight
Earlier, I had seen the media diary by @latte :
https://anhvn.com/media/
And I wondered. It feels a bit like we're used to chat. It gives us that feeling of intimacy. Would I want that extra emotional push to get me to write, or would I abhor the idea of publishing something that I wrote in a vulnerable moment? Or is it more like those toot-storms of people that turn their blog posts into a post-per-paragraph? You know who I mean. 😅
My previous website engine had comments but my blog didn't have many commenters. Often it was just me, appending stuff! Which is why my current engine has both "edit" and "add" actions. And themes. And I started thinking… Shouldn't it be possible to… maybe… ah yes! And here it is: A theme for the website engine that has the "add" action at the bottom of every page, and renders paragraphs like speech bubbles. It looks… very different.

Chat theme:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/themes/chat/README

Regular theme, for comparison:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/themes/alexschroeder.ch/README

I recently saw two examples of chat-like interfaces for things that were regular text files or web pages. One was the app Gibberish by @zhenyi :
https://andadinosaur.com/gibberish-is-now-available-on-testflight
Earlier, I had seen the media diary by @latte :
https://anhvn.com/media/
And I wondered. It feels a bit like we're used to chat. It gives us that feeling of intimacy. Would I want that extra emotional push to get me to write, or would I abhor the idea of publishing something that I wrote in a...

2 March at 12:23 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

The feeling when you're deleting over 160 passwords from passwords.google.com … aim for the button, aim for the link in the menu, hit enter key, wait half a second, repeat.

1 March at 12:47 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Going through such extremely old lists is like a glimpse of the past. Strange websites I used to know. Forums I used frequent. Services I used to subscribe to. For comparison, the GPG encrypted local file I use these days has over 600 lines in it.

I'm just deleting these passwords inside the old Google account because I don't want get emails warning me about weak and non-unique and passwords that have been part of a breach. There's too many of them. If the service in question hasn't locked my account or expired my account or deleted everything after all these years, I don't think it matters if the spammers take over. I can't stop them and our society will have to learn to deal with the zombie accounts. My position towards such accounts is similar like my position towards other personal information online: the default should be expiration. To keep them forever is a burden that just keeps increasing. 600 passwords to change or accounts to delete when I no longer care about the service and barely know how to navigate the garbage and with all the scripts I have to enable just to see the login box? And most of the time those old passwords no longer work anyway? You must be kidding me.

Such accounts should auto-lock at the very least.

Going through such extremely old lists is like a glimpse of the past. Strange websites I used to know. Forums I used frequent. Services I used to subscribe to. For comparison, the GPG encrypted local file I use these days has over 600 lines in it.

I'm just deleting these passwords inside the old Google account because I don't want get emails warning me about weak and non-unique and passwords that have been part of a breach. There's too many of them. If the service in question hasn't locked my account...

1 March at 12:59 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

“This really made me think: most of my apps fall into the “make the crappy web tolerable” category, and sometimes, it does feel like janitorial work. Do I want that?” – @zhenyi
https://andadinosaur.com/i-m-back

1 March at 8:25 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

No tea from the fancy pot anymore, I guess. I don’t know about glueing it – would you drink from a tea pot that wasn’t fixed with silver and gold but with some weird glue? I wonder how safe that is.
29 February at 13:36 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Well, I thought kintsugi was about melting gold and fixing tea vessels using liquid metals but now that I'm reading the Wikipedia page it seems that the actual fix is urushi, i.e. laquer with gold dust or whatever else you want. Maybe it's not so expensive after all… If only I knew where to get some material and some instructions here in Zürich. I'm curious, now.

Oh wow, there was a workshop in 2021 at the FabLab!! 😲 https://zurich.fablab.ch/events/klimawerkstatt-kintsugi/ … now that's unexpected!

Well, I thought kintsugi was about melting gold and fixing tea vessels using liquid metals but now that I'm reading the Wikipedia page it seems that the actual fix is urushi, i.e. laquer with gold dust or whatever else you want. Maybe it's not so expensive after all… If only I knew where to get some material and some instructions here in Zürich. I'm curious, now.

29 February at 21:27 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

Every now and then I am reminded of the fact that for at least one mutual, I can't see the messages from her #Akkoma instance on my #GoToSocial instance but I can see them on a Mastodon instance where I have an alt. But when a third person I'm following replies to her messages, I do see the reply – and hers! – on my GoToSocial instance. It seems that only the original posts are affected. How weird is that.

27 February at 15:48 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
Alex Schroeder

On Sunday I explained to some friends what Xenophon's Anabasis was all about because I have a map hanging on the wall with the Greek army's movements. Most people can't find the familiar oceans, don't recognize the Latin names and cities, so they're always baffled.
All this to say: Print out a black-and-white map of something you like, mark some stuff on it, and put it up where visitors can see it. A great conversation starter.
At least, if they want to hear about the ancient Greek mercenaries trapped deep in Persian territory. 😅
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)

On Sunday I explained to some friends what Xenophon's Anabasis was all about because I have a map hanging on the wall with the Greek army's movements. Most people can't find the familiar oceans, don't recognize the Latin names and cities, so they're always baffled.
All this to say: Print out a black-and-white map of something you like, mark some stuff on it, and put it up where visitors can see it. A great conversation starter.
At least, if they want to hear about the ancient Greek mercenaries trapped...

26 February at 17:40 | Open on social.alexschroeder.ch
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