Woke up this morning after a dream with a head full of things that needed doing at work. Sat up, then realised it was 6am, and I no longer work at the company I had a head full of things that needed doing for.
Genie: I’ll give you one billion dollars if you can spend 100M in a month. There are 3 rules: No gifting, no gambling, no throwing it away.
SRE: Can I use AWS?
Genie: There are 4 rules.
Oh good, its mental health awareness week. Brace for a week of being told how doing a bit of colouring in and listening to recordings of waterfalls will solve all your ills.
Just got a promoted tweet announcing the product I'd been working on before leaving my last job (in itself, a rebrand of what I'd been doing for years before that). Really weird to see something in the wild I was once so deeply involved with, and yet am now almost completely disconnected from.
Is there any greater feeling than when you first see a system you’ve been working on for an extended period working end to end?
Can we do away with quiet coaches on trains and instead have one or two dedicated to the people who are going to spend the whole journey loudly having boring phone calls so the rest of us can avoid them?
I love Hannah Fry's weekly slot on Radio 6. Currently hearing about Donald Knuth creating Latex on national radio.
Attempted to play Star Citizen, spent 15 minutes trying to escape my room, and then had the camera go absolutely mad on trying to interact with a lift control. Never found my spaceship.
I guess I'll be reattempting this at some future date when I have energy.
I am once again asking for project planning software with error bars on the timelines.
I’m watching The Rig, a passable super natural thriller series on Prime. Really enjoying that 60% of the set appears to be made out of shipping containers. The other 40% is fluorescent light bulbs.
Did someone change the UK’s timezone without telling me? Just had last orders called at 9pm, and then when we got to the other nearby pub it was also closed. Now in the bar attached to a Beefeater/Premier Inn because it’s the only place open.
Went out to get barbecue stuff, so of course by the time I walked out of the supermarket it was raining.
I've just been reminded of my occasional fear that I'll be convicted of a crime I didn't commit because I'm so bad at remembering what I've done. If the police were to ask me what I was doing on the evening of 12th February this year I wouldn't have the faintest idea.
Once again I have responded to having had a proper night’s sleep and so having energy by staying up too late. Thus continues the boom/bust cycle which is my mood.
Keeping my tradition of painting octopuses on the bottoms of tables in hotel rooms alive 😀
Taking my son to school this morning I said how it felt spring had arrived. Sorry everyone.
Been seeing trucks here and there from a company called Gamer Logistics and I want to believe they deliver freight via glitch-assisted speed runs. Like, maybe if you reverse into a bridge pillar on I-10 as soon as you cross into El Paso and hold it for precisely 39 minutes and 7 seconds, if you then shift into neutral you warp to Beaumont and can skip the entire state of Texas
I’ve just been reminded of The Queue. That glorious few days in which the country was obsessed by a bunch of people lining up to look at a box that may or may not have contained a dead monarch.
The year is 2187 and nobody is sure why people greet each other by saying “Can you hear me?”, with the expected reply “Yes, can you hear me?”
Nothing has made me feel older than realising I may have flagged this album for download I randomly found on my phone when I had no signal anything up to 17 years ago.
Six months out from leaving my old job and I can finally feel the fog of burnout lifting, I’m able to find joy in stretching myself again. Now all I need is another 12 hours a day to fit in all the different new/resumed hobbies.
Digital Graffiti and hyperlocal e-zines.
I bought a ton of tiny micro-controllers, in part because I want to work on some automated farming projects and they were a steal at $6/board.
Then I had another idea.
These micro-controllers can run tiny web servers and WiFi access points. They also require extremely low power, can be powered on an outlet or a small solar panel and battery, and can be hidden very easily, either in a 3D printed waterproof container, a rescued piece of litter, or more.
Inspired by @hydroponictrash 's posts on hosting and hiding banned libraries, I decided to start working on a similar project: spreading tiny micro-servers across town in hidden locations hosting zines, propaganda and links to banned books and such.
Now, these are microcontrollers here... we're not talking about high-powered computers. I'm not going to be able to handle hundreds of requests at once... likely, less than half a dozen. I'm not going to be hosting beautiful looking web apps in ReactJS, more likely just raw HTML/CSS (maybe JQuery? we will see) and I'm not planning on this just spreading like wildfire.
That said, I think the concept of e-graffiti (think hosting one of these with anti-police or anti-gov messaging right outside of city hall, hidden where they can't find it) and hyperlocal e-zines really neat.
I'm going to test this idea out and get back to you on it. The next iteration I think would be cool is finding a way to do this on recycled e-waste: think old phones, broken laptops, etc. Things that have a higher processing power can also do bigger tasks like hosting banned books for download, serving as wifi-repeaters to serve... "liberated" wifi connections, etc.
I am once again begging application developers to have the guts to put a "no, I don't want that button" on dialogues rather than "not now, maybe later" and then haranguing me until I cave and click the yes button.