Notices by Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (ifixcoinops@retro.social), page 2

Kid's making her first website <3

Already we've had the talk about how your sketchbook (for sketching out how the site should look) is tall and skinny, and so is a phone, but her laptop's screen is short and wide, and man oh man it would be SO much easier to make websites in the year 2025 if computer monitors had stayed portrait

guys I'm serious, if computer monitors had stayed portrait instead of going landscape in the 70's then they'd be the same orientation as phones and we wouldn't have to make two wildly different websites every time we make a website, we could just make the links bigger

(unless in the parallel universe where computer monitors never turned landscape folk scroll through the internet with their phones turned sideways)

🦝 *wild unhinged gibbering rant*
🐴 haha dan you're so funny
🦝 I am DEADLY serious
🦊 haha, you're
🦊 wait
🐴 what other stuff was he serious about that we thought he was joking about
🦊 *glances nervously at the mousetrap thread*

My eight-year-old daughter figuring out HTML after I showed her a single example: 🐁 Dad I can't believe I'm doing it, I'm making a website!
Me: 🦝 hold on honey I gotta do the internet rant about monitor aspect ratios again

I really wish cryptocurrency was real. Like, I wish it wasn't a world-boiling pyramid scheme, but just a thing that let me send a penny to the author of whatever silly gay webcomic I'm reading whenever they post a new page, and have that penny actually arrive to them

If someone wants to send me a quarter, I don't get that quarter, Peter Thiel gets the quarter, it just disappears. Someone sends me a dollar, I get 47 cents.

Someone puts a quarter in the slot of one of my games, that quarter's mine now. I should be able to earn a living by asking thousands of people for a quarter every now and then

Putting a quarter in a slot, hearing the familiar sequence of tinny mechanical clicks and swoops as it traverses the mech, swings the cradle, bounces past the magnet, flicks the microswitch, but where's the little *tish* at the end? Why don't I hear it landing in the cash bucket with all the rest of the money?

I call the tech over to open the coin door and clear the jam and who the hell do we find squatting in there just curling his fingers closed around the coin, but Peter Bloody Thiel again. He blinks in the light and hisses and scurries off into the depths of the machine. He'll have made his nest around the ballast for the marquee I bet, they always do, they like to nest where it's warm

Make me a system where folk can sign up in two clicks and put five or ten bucks into an account and then send tiny nickel-and-dime penny-ante spare-change transactions between stripesocked ramen-eating indie game devs and webcomic artists without any per-transaction fees, and you could take like a third of the cut and these folk'd still make more money than they would do with paypal.

Peter Thiel sucks half a buck plus four percent up his proboscis with every transaction. If the ten bucks I put into your chop-it-up-into-pennies machine instantly turns into five bucks just by virtue of you having chopped it into pennies, if you take LITERALLY HALF MY MONEY, then the church mice STILL get more money than they would with paypal or cryptocurrencies

Who knows a good way to send and receive money online* that doesn't give any money to Peter Thiel?

* in such a way that a PHP script can be triggered based on transaction data
* that normal people who want to give me money can use, e.g. they don't have to learn anything or install an app
* that isn't a scam or use a lot of energy

EDIT:
* needs to be available and usable in the US, UK, EU and Australia
* liberapay isn't a payment processor, it's like patreon, it's just an abstraction layer over an existing payment processor (paypal and stripe, both thiel again), I need a payment processor
* monero is cryptocurrency, I need real money
* GNU Taler isn't real and was never real and will never be real

I'm gonna end up working with SOME kind of bastard, obviously, but there's bastards and there's bastards y'know

I'm back now and it's everybody's problem

🐰 I believe it's "Author headshot," Dan, HEADshot, not "mugshot"

🦝 buddy lemme tell ya something about the kinda books I got on my ereader

@alcinnz these ones are more like ten million

Putting books on my kid's vintage ereader and my vintage ereader too and good grief an epub for a fiction book does not have to be thirty megabytes yikes

So my ereader's choking on this elephant of a book because someone decided the author mugshot had to be four thousand pixels wide just in case someone wants to zoom in on their individual nose hairs

🦝 "Thank goodness for Calibre" and other sentences I thought I would never say.epub

The Actual Story: 100kb

A cover image four times bigger than the screen of the most high-resolution ereader ever made: One Hundred Times As Much, have fun looking at that on your black and white e-ink screen

30 megabyte ebook shrunk down to 200k and even with my glasses on I can't see any difference at all

Except that it loads faster

🦆 *eyeing up another mousetrap, this one labelled "Bitcoin"*

🦆 Nah, there are a bunch of fingertips already scattered around that one.

🦆 *looks down* Unless...

🦆 *unzips fly*

🦝 No though, it's fine, it's alright, see, I was CLEVER. For the past few years I've been slowly changing my accounts so I don't have everything tied to one ridiculous company that keeps doing daft stuff.

🦝 I'm moving to ProtonMail!

Protonmail CEO: 🦆 *sucks the end of his bleeding finger, giving a dirty look to a mousetrap labelled "A.I."* Yup, we're always innovating

🦝 what'd you do to that mousetrap

🦆 nothing

On the one hand, it would be unnecessarily vulgar and sexist to make "Sticking your dick in the mousetrap" a shorthand for throwing a lot of money at whatever the Better Mousetrap is this year, be it bitcoin or blockchain or NFT or AI or whatever

But on the other hand it's just SO EVOCATIVE

Where's that cigarette-smoking fox CEO from the bike thread

🦊 We're pivoting to AI
🦊🚬 "Snippety-snap, it's all for the trap," that's our new motto

🐇 Great Dan, yet another tech thing exclusively aimed at people with dicks, excellent job,

🦝 oh with today's technology we can fit a clit in a mousetrap NO PROBLEM

🐴 and what about inter-

🦝 *stands up, palms on table* ALL IN THE MOUSETRAP