Notices by emily, emitter of spooky noise (emily@sparkly.uni.horse), page 3

My new dial indicator came with a certificate of quality that is literally written in comic sans

Confused the fuck out of some consulting company today because they cold-emailed me at work asking if I'd talk to their clients about stuff. They clearly meant one of the other two Emilies at the same company, but I am emily@company.tld and so people email me a lot when they don't feel like looking up the right email address for the Emily in question and just take a wild guess.

So I stubbornly fill out their form to join their Network(tm), then fill out the other form for the specific client they want me to talk to, mostly with "I am not exposed enough to this side of the business to give useful information" pasted into every text box. Then at the *end* of this form they ask if I want to decline it, so I finally do.

Less than a minute later they called me, wondering why none of what I entered matches my LinkedIn account.

At this point I finally informed them that I don't have a LinkedIn account.

I hoped they learned a valuable lesson today. If not, I would be happy to charge them the $400/hour they offered me to read to them the entirety of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

@artemist conveyor belts need power

met a snake friend today

(at least part of it is because of the mental image of a rich person waking up with a hangover and then panicing because they drank all their Investment Wine last night)

phones: currently not looking good.

Ubuntu Touch does not support VoLTE, which makes it basically unusable in the US.

PostmarketOS doesn't have a single phone in their compatibility page with fully working camera support.

Purism looks promising from their website but probably moderately janky in practice. I noped away from it when I saw people talking on forums about how to make the phone wake up from sleep on incoming calls.

also found this invest-in-startups thing via Purism using them, which says I should consider investing in wine or art (https://www.startengine.com/blog/collectibles/)

I don't know why I find this so funny

it's time for my annual hardware review, in which I iterate through all the categories of devices I really want to give people money for, and see if anyone has made one yet that fulfills my fairly short requirements lists:
- non-Android non-iOS smartphone that can be bought with the expectation of using it as a handheld communication device and not an OS beta testing device
- non-cloud robot lawnmower that can handle a nontrivially-sized, US-typical lawn, and is not comically expensive
- stretch goal (I don't actively want them for any particular reason but I want them to exist and would play with one given the chance): AR/VR devices that are just displays and input devices and not a whole Ecosystem

you may notice I use "non" and "not" a lot in these descriptions. this is because my technology requirements really are largely gathered by looking at things and going "ugh, not that"

things robot lawnmower reviewers care about:
- did the reviewer like the app
- making stripes on your lawn
- avoiding children

things I care about:
- please do not make me use an app
- making the grass shorter
- scaring children away

happy to mod the last one in myself by drawing a scary face on it, if they give me an appropriately large surface to do so on

oh shit someone took a big bite out of the sun

happy cathursday

happy warm kitty

it has been 0 days since I had to drill out a tiny hex head screw that became a circle head screw

*orders more torx*

had an idea that needed a bunch of weather forecast data, hacked it together using the US NWS API, getting so many 500s I am slightly concerned that I melted a government server somewhere

provide bulk data dumps you dummies

@mlsn future Em is going to be so fucking confused if she ever tries to set up wordpress

@mlsn Done :D I went with 100MB of '<'. 100MB to not waste so much of my own bandwidth (gzip is bad; you wouldn't think gzip | gzip would do anything but it does), '<' because that sounds like it might crash an HTML parser somewhere.

I set up a camera pointed at my printer yesterday, just in time to generate a time lapse of it running out of plastic and moving around uselessly for 6 hours last night

HTML is when you put pictures and words together, and it is not possible

a picture is worth a thousand <span class="word">s

oh no, I just realized something: HTML gets more bloated over time. Image compression improves over time. There will come a day, if it hasn't already, when - even with an ad blocker - it is actually more bandwidth-efficient to share a screenshot than a link due to the sheer volume of meaningless container divs.