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.
@Edent Example 8 of the Activity Streams spec shows one possible way to attach location to a post. I'm not sure there's any agreed upon standard for this yet, but it's definitely possible: ://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-
I just got Maybe Latered by the train ticket app asking if I want to see bike spaces on trains. I have taken a bike on a train a grand total of 1 time in my 39 years on this Earth.
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.
Unreal Engine 5 is astonishing. Entire landscapes built out of 3D scanned objects stacked on top of each other, with real-time lighting, running at 60fps on five year old hardware.
There are too many things in this world that I would like to learn, and not enough hours in the day, can someone please hire me to just mess about with various interests?
@requiem My hope is that we’ll see things settle down in the near future with people not blindly trusting LLMs so much. There’s a space for them being used to automate boilerplate, but I’ve seen way too many stupid errors and imagined APIs from Copilot to trust it.
I was definitely a bit cynical going in after the trailer with its grim-dark version of the theme tune. Thankfully it had none of that energy, leaning into being a kids movie, rather than a super serious reimagining for the adults.
Mario movie was great. You can see the love of the series that everyone involved had shining through, utterly joyful, particularly with a nine year old who’s grown up with the games.
Deeply amused by the choice to set this series of Race Across the World in Canada. Firstly, it’s called Race Across the World, not Race Across Canada. Secondly, there’s no public transport, so the whole thing is just people at gas stations trying to hitchhike or hiring cars. Occasionally you’ll get another scene of people establishing the one bus a week left yesterday.
Valheim update: We have defeated our first trolls, and are now wearing some fetching troll trousers.
Bwahahaha. This conspiracy theorist just delivered the line “if he heard anything he didn’t like he simply ignored it” with a completely straight face.
This was clearly made in the 90s, on a budget of about £3.90, and shot in a National Trust building while they tried to dodge people asking them to stop.
Not sure why, but I’m watching a 50 minute “documentary” about how the Titanic didn’t sink, it was an insurance scam because the Olympic was a write-off. It has dramatisations, which really make it.
@simon I think there's a big difference between the occasional things slipping through of human published stuff and the utter fiction LLMs will come up with such as "sure, you can interact with me via Telegram, here's a random person's phone number".
Things I would like include, but are not limited to, an eSport that’s not a massive commitment to follow. I’d like to follow Rocket League but it’s all seemingly run as occasional tournaments that run 8 hours a day for four days.
Finally getting to the point at work where I’ve built enough low level libraries that I can start quickly throwing together higher level tools.
I have been playing Valheim with the nine year old (and also without, I just spent 2 hours recovering our gear after an unfortunate incident with a troll). It’s a wild ride, one minute I’m having a chilled trip down a river, the next I’m being mobbed by creatures capable of near instantly killing me.
@gsuberland Super curious on this, I have a CO2/VOC monitor on my desk which is basically useless while I’m working
