Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
211 posts total
Alex Schroeder

A sustainable energy system does not only require sustainable production, it also requires sustainable consumption. And at the moment, considering the vast majority of energy is produced by fossil fuels, sustainable consumption means consuming much less, until global emission have been reduced to acceptable levels.

#FrugalEconomy

Alex Schroeder

Sometimes photographing birds is just pure joy 😍 Can you imaging my delight when not only did this happen, but I managed to pan with him AND my autofocus worked like magic. Sacred Kingfisher bathing today just before sunset. He dived in 3 times and I only caught the one, but I am simple delighted to have it. #birds #birdphotography

A kingfisher has just dived into the water and is now emerging in a spray of golden droplets
Sudden

@tessa_murray That's a really awesome photo, nice work

Alex Schroeder

"Several delegations cautioned that some States may misuse the instrument to justify human rights abuses, stressing the importance of interpreting the Convention consistently within their obligation under international human rights law, and not as permitting suppression of specific human rights and fundamental freedoms under the guise of cybercrime investigations."
https://press.un.org/en/2024/gashc4428.doc.htm

Alex Schroeder

I love it when radio stations offer their program as podcasts! The Swiss do this.

I don't love it when they geofence this shit. What is wrong with you? Well, I'm not abroad right now so I don't know whether they still do it but I remember downloading episodes of good stuff and just getting a few seconds of somebody explaining to me that I can listen to the episodes outside the country.

I'm not interested in circumventing this block. I'm interested in people stopping technical measures that only ever punish non-technical people; all the sneaky ones already know how to do it.

Anyway, listening to Jazz stuff from SRF Kultur: Jazz Collection and Jazz und World aktuell. Quincy Jones, Lou Donaldson, PJ Harvery (!) …

I love it when radio stations offer their program as podcasts! The Swiss do this.

I don't love it when they geofence this shit. What is wrong with you? Well, I'm not abroad right now so I don't know whether they still do it but I remember downloading episodes of good stuff and just getting a few seconds of somebody explaining to me that I can listen to the episodes outside the country.

Alex Schroeder

NASA’s Juno spacecraft launched in 2011. It’s studying Jupiter. This is one of many new images it sent back.

I’m blown away at how stunning it is.

This is a really large version of it. Open it up in a new tab or save it to your photos or whatever, so you can zoom in and see it in detail. Just take a break from the world’s sorrow to enjoy this delight.

More on the Juno mission:
jpl.nasa.gov/missions/juno/

#Jupiter #Juno #NASA #Space #AstroPhotography #MomentOfZen

NASA’s Juno spacecraft launched in 2011. It’s studying Jupiter. This is one of many new images it sent back.

I’m blown away at how stunning it is.

This is a really large version of it. Open it up in a new tab or save it to your photos or whatever, so you can zoom in and see it in detail. Just take a break from the world’s sorrow to enjoy this delight.

Top half of Jupiter against the darkness of space. It is saturated with swirling masses, mostly blue in the middle with a gradation to mostly orange on the perimeter.
Alex Schroeder

And look, it's going to be difficult. Malik is a highly qualified professional, but the truth is many Belgian landlords do not like to rent to refugees. He and the family will have to learn French or Dutch to function in society. But this, by the Gods, IS THE ASYLUM SYSTEM FUNCTIONING AS INTENDED. Belgium signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and is now beholden to it, and these are the consequences of having signed that document in 1948. This is HONORABLE.

8/

#AsylumSeekers

Alex Schroeder

This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats.

Elite:Dangerous is an MMO space sim game, with a big galaxy in which you fly a spaceship doing stuff. Spaceships need fuel, which you buy at stations, or if you have a fuel scoop you can skim the surface of certain stars to get usable fuel.

Space is big though, and it's quite possible to run yourself low on fuel in a way that you can no longer warp to any inhabited system to refuel. At which point you're screwed.

Show previous comments
S. Co1

@danderson What a fun memory to surface ☺️

Being a Fuel Rat was the most fun thing I ever did in E:D and kept me in the game much longer than I would have otherwise. After classes were done for the day I would just pop up some Netflix, poke around aimlessly in Fuelum, and hang out in the IRC channel until it was time to roll out. The only thing I ever fired at a player ship was a limpet!

Graham Spookyland🎃/Polynomial

@danderson Valheim has a similar thing. If you accidentally wander into a biome you can't handle and get killed, and can't get your stuff back, there's a loot retrieval squad you can get in touch with. You give them your game details and they'll hop in and grab your stuff back for you.

The game has random events and some of the late game ones are triggered when certain items are present in game, so they figured out what gear and items they can bring in for recovery without screwing up the game.

Adam R. Wood

@danderson I was completely ignorant of all of this. Thank you for sharing it, it's beautiful.

Alex Schroeder

Just a little bit frustrating to read people saying "the Fediverse should have starter packs" when I've spent the last four+ years hand-curating recommended accounts to follow on @FediFollows and fedi.directory

I'm not the only person doing this kind of initiative, the Trunk directory (communitywiki.org/trunk) was the first, and the Fediverse.info directory by @dansup (fediverse.info/explore/people) is an automated way for people to add themselves to suggested lists.

We already have these things on the Fedi, people just need to ask around and discover them, and let their friends know about them.

#Fediverse

Just a little bit frustrating to read people saying "the Fediverse should have starter packs" when I've spent the last four+ years hand-curating recommended accounts to follow on @FediFollows and fedi.directory

I'm not the only person doing this kind of initiative, the Trunk directory (communitywiki.org/trunk) was the first, and the Fediverse.info directory by @dansup (fediverse.info/explore/people) is an automated way for people to add themselves to suggested lists.

Show previous comments
Natasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸

@FediThing @FediFollows @dansup Understandable! Unfortunately having it tightly integrated is a huge perk, and Eugen isn't even properly working with PRs to make Mastodon better as it seems… 😔
Having the main entry point of new users (app stores) under control of a BDFL ("benevolent dictator for life") who's rather bad at his job is a huge problem. Third party projects like yours will most likely not gain sufficient reach without his support.

dona | commissions open!

@FediThing Thank you for making those 💕 I hate bsky starter packs, this is a much better way to do it.

Sonhasherd

@FediThing @FediFollows @dansup

I recently joined and had a little trouble at first. Thank you for helping me get started.

Alex Schroeder

49!

Germany has been controlling (some of) its border crossings for 2 months now, and has managed to find 49 people in that time on the border from Luxembourg infos.rtl.lu/actu/luxembourg/a

That’s FEWER THAN 1 A DAY! For ridiculous cost employing police to do these controls! 🤯

Regardless of what you think of the ethics here this is an insane waste of money

#Schengen

Show previous comments
Ulf Dittmer

@jon Luxemburg is not a major entry point into Germany for migrants. As far as I can make out, that border is 85 miles long, which is but a tiny sliver of Germany's external border. For more try to enter illegally via Poland and Czechia. All in all, thousands have been stopped in that time (spiegel.de/ausland/migration-g). What happens on the tiny DE/LUX border is not a good indicator of the big picture.

@jon Luxemburg is not a major entry point into Germany for migrants. As far as I can make out, that border is 85 miles long, which is but a tiny sliver of Germany's external border. For more try to enter illegally via Poland and Czechia. All in all, thousands have been stopped in that time (spiegel.de/ausland/migration-g). What happens on the tiny DE/LUX border is not a good indicator...

Petra van Cronenburg

@jon As RTL is not the best source, are there figures for all the other, much longer borders that Germany has? Luxembourg might be important to migrate money, so it shows the idioty, but the harder controls are on different borders.

Alex Schroeder

Kind of a subtoot but not aimed at anyone in particular - I follow a lot of creative people. Sometimes you toot about your projects - art, games, code of some kind - using only some entirely abstract name and no hint of a clue as to what the project actually is.

Sometimes it'd be nice if you could give a hint as to what it actually is so I don't have to exercise mastodon's severely limited search functions to try and find an answer.

Alex Schroeder

Apparently people need me to be more clear after some of the replies.

I don’t care if you self censor or not.

I don’t want to see folks getting vanned for their loose mouths.

Have those discussions in private preferably with locals.

Alex Schroeder

When my wife is away, my day cycles start going out of whack. Already it is 1:00 in the morning and I’m not in bed. 😖

Alex Schroeder

Bar Tailed Godwit called "234684" by humans is one of the worlds most notrious private binge flyers. At 5 months old, they racked up a non-stop 11 days straight binge private flight from #Alaska to #Tasmania recording 13,560km worth of frequent flier points.

A bird weighing about 500 grams that can neither swim nor glide, relying on constant beating of their wings to stay aloft, can fly almost twice as far as the original jumbo jet, and consumes a few hundred grams of fat to do so.

They also have specially adapted eyes that literally allow them to see the magnetic field of the Earth to guide them, as well as using celestial navigation by the stars at night.

Frikkin binge-flying bird-brains.

#BingeFlying #birds #LongHaul

Bar Tailed Godwit called "234684" by humans is one of the worlds most notrious private binge flyers. At 5 months old, they racked up a non-stop 11 days straight binge private flight from #Alaska to #Tasmania recording 13,560km worth of frequent flier points.

A bird weighing about 500 grams that can neither swim nor glide, relying on constant beating of their wings to stay aloft, can fly almost twice as far as the original jumbo jet, and consumes a few hundred grams of fat to do so.

Map showing the flight of Bar Tailed Godwit 234684 from Alaska over the Pacific to Tasmania, with a picture of the species. Didn't even stop in Waikiki to spend some money at a resort. Do they even care about the economy?
Alex Schroeder

@Impossible_PhD The book _Generation Kill_ by Evan Wright is a good read on people not being able to shoot to kill and the amount of training needed to get them to do it, amongst other “strange” reactions to war.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generati

@alex

Alex Schroeder

I'm the oldest daughter of two Lt Colonels, and the product of a three-generational military family on both sides, and I think y'all need to listen to the next bit:

We ended the draft because the military's analysis of the Vietnam War revealed that 90% of all draftees would not shoot to kill, even when it was life or death. They'd shoot high or low, but they *couldn't* shoot to kill. As such, they actively degraded the war effort.

So you need to think twice before arming yourselves.

(1/?)

Doc Impossible

There's a lot of *wildly* irresponsible rhetoric floating around right now about how all queer folk should arm themselves to resist what's coming. And, deadass?

If you're armed, and you're not 10000% sure that you can shoot to kill, the only thing you're gonna do is get yourself and everyone around you dead.

Period.

A weapon is a *massive* escalation. Meanwhile, the tool that really gets you out of deadly trouble in a fascist dictatorship?

A silver tongue and steely guts.

(2/?)

Ed Davies

@Impossible_PhD The book _Generation Kill_ by Evan Wright is a good read on people not being able to shoot to kill and the amount of training needed to get them to do it, amongst other “strange” reactions to war.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generati

@alex

Alex Schroeder

Sometimes people are like "you act like someone who is having a conversation with you online is supposed to exert cognitive effort to learn something about who you are" and I'm like????? Yes??????

Cat Hicks

I don't know what you are all here sharing thoughts online FOR, but my assumption is that we are in general trying to use some of the same social mechanisms that we rely on for like.......social life in general

Denny

@grimalkina I like it when people tell me about themselves, but I'm really bad at requesting/inviting/encouraging it.

modulux

@grimalkina I follow your posts with interests. I just find it hard to understand your perspective sometimes, such us in this case. I wonder if it's an expectation mismatch on how social media works (I wrote something before about IRC versus more Twitter-style netiquette). I get though that it's unpleasant to be on the wrong side of this, and for what it's worth I am sorry if this reply is adding to it.

Alex Schroeder

My wife is looking for old pictures with a friend. I got my first digital camera in 2004. It had a resolution of about one megapixel. In order to save space, I often used 640x480. And our photo skills were abysmal. The fotos on film are often worse. Too much light. Not enough light. Feet cut off. Just an arm. Not in focus. This is terrible. No selfie skills. 😧

Alex Schroeder

From a European perspective, the difference between the 'post election takes' of Jaime Harrison and Bernie Sanders was revealing. Harrison seemed to pretty much ignore both the fact of defeat, and any larger, longer perspective on America's over-exploitation of its workers, while lauding the few timid adjustments made by the Biden-Harris administration to the exploitative and dehumanising steamroller of US neoliberal capitalism.

Sanders: "60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before... real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago. Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents... Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee healthcare to all as a human right... We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.”

From a European perspective, the difference between the 'post election takes' of Jaime Harrison and Bernie Sanders was revealing. Harrison seemed to pretty much ignore both the fact of defeat, and any larger, longer perspective on America's over-exploitation of its workers, while lauding the few timid adjustments made by the Biden-Harris administration to the exploitative and dehumanising steamroller of US neoliberal capitalism.

Chris Hessert 🇺🇸 🇺🇦

@GeofCox

And the Democratic Party, run completely by corporatists, cannot figure out how they lost. In fact they know very well how they lost, and they don't care. As long as corporate/billionaire cash flows through their hands and directly into their pockets, nothing will change. Those in power are perfectly content with the actual results.

An American perspective.

Alex Schroeder

I didn’t know what BFU and AFU meant when people talk about phones and I ended up reading this PDF:

https://blogs.dsu.edu/digforce/2023/08/23/bfu-and-afu-lock-states/

It refers to devices that rebooted: modern phones are encrypted and stay encrypted (BFU) until you log in. Then a lot of info is decrypted (AFU).

Alex Schroeder

Thinking about enabling Lockdown mode. Reading about it just makes me think that this is how all devices should work. Have you tried it?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105120

Go Up