Notices by rixx (rixx@chaos.social), page 2

Found in some old code:

{{ timestamp.year - 1983 }}C3

😢

#37c3

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.

AND! It still exists and can be visited and we mostly know about it and rediscovered it due to Herodotus mentioning it. How cool is this?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos

#til #civilengineering

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.

To start:

- Rock Falls, Everybody Dies, an Isekai parody on RoyalRoad: https://books.rixx.de/zechamp/rock-falls-everybody-dies/
- The Blade Itself: https://books.rixx.de/joe-abercrombie/the-blade-itself/

2 down, 102 to go.

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/

1 down, 102 to go

Yesterday's reviews:

- Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town part 2), very readable https://books.rixx.de/daniel-polansky/tomorrow-the-killing/
- Yendi (Vlad Taltos part 2), just *so* good https://books.rixx.de/steven-brust/yendi/

2 down, 98 to go

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.

So: 0 down, 101 to go, sigh

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

1/

#github

oh no oh no oh no

i have successfully ignored the mechanical keyboard store in berlin so far

but they have this beauty and I have been worried about my ancient lenovo keyboard failing

oh no oh no oh no

#keyboard #MechanicalkKeyboard #thinkpad

#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.

Here's a user script to fix this if you're also annoyed by this: https://github.com/rixx/dotfiles/blob/master/firefox/greasemonkey/mastodon-layout.js

obv edit the url to use your instance

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

Firefox … are you okay?

(Hovering shows a perfectly normal URL, so it's not the standard Nyarlathotep CORS attack from Under The Pyramids …)

Damn, the CERN's OnlyFans page is 😳 *fans self*

https://onlyfans.web.cern.ch/

I wrote some software¹: git-backdate allows you to change the dates on a (range of) commit to a given time frame. For perfectly good reasons. 😇

Includes flags to keep the commits inside of or outside of business hours. Also for perfectly good reasons. 😈

https://github.com/rixx/git-backdate

¹ some time ago, naturally

any recs for specific models of bone conducting headsets?

don't care about audio quality beyond "can understand the person speaking" and "the person speaking can understand me". No music, just talk.

There's a new local group on Meetup called "Early use cases of Chat GPT"

this is its profile picture

…

Three. A left ear. A right ear.

And a final front ear.