not sure if usual google incompetence or embrace-extend-extinguish, but man
twenty years ago we would have *cheered* for Google walking back their bloody usenet interface, and I suppose even now, it's a net good? who even knows.
You know how the Eiffel Tower won the Grand Prize at the 1889 World Fair? Well, it had to share the glory with a book.
Not any book: A book ENTIRELY WOVEN IN SILK.
You heard right. And nerds, get this: All pages of this book were produced on the Jacquard loom in 1889, using thousands (200k-500k) of punch cards. Only 50-60 copies were made. >
The Tunnel of Eupalinos was built in the 6th century BCE in Greece. It's just over 1km long, goes through a mountain, and was built from both sides.
And! It was built as an aqueduct, so it has two parts; a footpath and a lower water channel. It was in use for a thousand years before the channel silted over.
Instead of #NaNoWriMo, I'll write book reviews in November. I'm behind by 104 book reviews at the moment, and ideally, I'd get this down to 0 by the end of the month – certainly by the end of the year! Anything I haven't reviewed by then (except books read in December, I suppose), will receive review amnesty.
Will update this thread with the books I've reviewed each day.
Skipped yesterday on account of illness, but hey, I read a book instead, so that the count won't go down. Today's review is for Yendi (#2 in the Vlad Taltos series), which is a wonderful book: https://books.rixx.de/steven-brust/yendi/
No reviews yesterday because I got a third of the way through writing up the plot of the (very plot-heavy, involved) book, the third in a trilogy, and then my browser died and the text was gone and I was angery.
No reviews today because I spent the day on the train and it robbed me of brain and I'm still angry about the browser thing.
But I finished a book (CS Lewis kinda-autobiography, so it's now): 0 down, 99 to go
No reviews yesterday either because I finished a book by Iain Banks that was *so* fucking gross and icky that I needed to read a second book just to apply bleach to my brain. Wtf.
Accidentally disabled Refined Github (browser extension) the other day, and I had completely forgotten how good it is / how bad GitHub is without.
Among other things, it adds - the first tag/release a merged PR was in - a button to download entire folders - highlights the most useful/upvoted comment - de-emphasizes bot PRs - makes PR titles the default squash commit message - intelligent issue subscribe choices - build status in repository title (SO useful) - notification filters
#mastodon decided that your "preferred layout" was only sometimes relevant – if you choose to use the "advanced" (aka multi-column) layout, normal links to posts will now always render in the simple/single-column view because "people want to focus on the linked content".
As the simple view does not even provide a link back or a switch to the multi-column view, you're stuck until you edit the URL manually.
turns out they added a big text box explaining the thing and offering you a redirect to the multi-column view, but they put it inside an element called ".navigation-panel__logo", which we hide on chaos.social because it used to contain just what it says – the Mastodon logo, which is annoying visual clutter to put on a website like that.
guess a box saying "switch to the view you originally wanted before we decided what's best for you" is part of the mastodon logo now, how fitting