Notices by merlin / alex glow (alexglow@chaos.social)

Deleted #Duolingo today. Goodbye 882 streak 🤘 I'm a lifelong language nerd & used it daily to maintain skills & build vocabulary.

Previous AI moves, plus recent aggressive upselling and activation tactics (pushing you to "nudge" friends) already degraded the experience. I tried the free version last year and it was unusable (2 ads after every lesson!); now this is the final straw. 🫤 https://flipboard.com/@theverge/tech-news-e3qmqbb8z/-/a-o-nsQcJsQZmwgJAUVX-cxw%3Aa%3A43611565-%2F0

Did y'all know there's a #privacy & #security focused notes app that's cross-platform, freemium, & #OpenSource?

Standard Notes (standardnotes.com) lets you PW-lock the entire app, and individual notes! Also: E2E-encrypted syncing & encrypted backup to Dropbox/GDrive/etc. 💙✨

(FWIW, iOS Notes can be saved locally – sans iCloud – & PW-locked too!)

https://standardnotes.com

Hey! You may have seen my #electronics videos on Hackster.io - or various #robots, including my shoulder owl Archimedes & other #CompanionBots; my Ouija #ESP8266 planchette PCB; or the Companion Core...

Or seen me in Make:, Hackaday, HackSpace mag, the Adafruit blog, TWiT, Recomendo, etc.

As I make new project threads, I'll link them below :D
For now, you can find more here: https://bit.ly/ayglow

@Axomamma @drahardja @pluralistic The "disaster fantasy" referred to here is not fiction, but people prepping for real-life scenarios that they imagine will supposedly mirror those in media – rather than confronting the Boring Dystopia already going on all around us, which has a decidedly less glamorous solution: collective, not individual; gradual, not climactic.

@drahardja @pluralistic Yes! Plus, the fantasy is better at confirming their self-image as the plucky underdog: cf. M*sk incessantly tweeting lines from Star Wars, as though he weren't Palpatine's #2. They want to see themselves as Solo while voting for Vader.

I got impatient for #ShittyCameraChallenge and have been running around the Bay shooting #neon with this ancient digicam, which I modded for infrared ~14 years ago!

Starting a thread now because there might be lots of weird purple stuff coming down the tubes...

// #Photography #WeirdArt #art

Glad people are into this! Here are some more #infrared #BayArea photos from this weekend :D

Another fun thing about near-IR is how it can "see through" things – because paints and pigments are designed to reflect/absorb the visible spectrum. Sometimes clothes seem translucent (eep!); sometimes hair dye is invisible; sometimes you can glimpse the beehive pattern of a bygone façade.

The day after the election, I made up my mind to go see Eddie Izzard at the Paramount – an Art Deco jewel set in the Bay, lighting up Oakland since 1931. That show was last night.

Izzard is one of the capital-H Helpers – a comedian and progressive politician whose humor crosses borders and languages, steeped in history and politics, topped off with lots of absurdism and silly sound effects.

She's been making me laugh for decades, and seeing her live for the first time really was better than therapy.

🫠 https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113480347712188988

@georgetakei And then there's his response 😆

@illionas @TechConnectify @neclimdul @DoubleA I believe this is "free as in piano" 😄

On this week's #HacksterCafe , I interview Emma Fletcher – cofounder of Learn to Solder Kits and Evergreen Support, which helps small #hardware businesses succeed. (Plus, we went to high school together!)

Drop your questions in the chat on Tuesday (today) at 10am Pacific – or catch the replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MZUTTGfq7w&list=PLsRBa4uXjihZwcYrwwuPhsYxWtFwMBqDF&index=1

Suitcase selfie: failing any catastrophe, here's the silliness I'm bringing to #Supercon... planning to avail myself of the on-site soldering irons, and hoping to pull together my gothy Archimedes (Dark Archie / Darkimedes) this weekend. 😆

I try to always put a note in, to reduce potential issues (and hopefully reduce the chance of anything walking away...)

@tarajdactyl @AmyZenunim They do – at least in iOS! For us it's under the diamond-shaped / bottom left menu: long press on "labels", slide the "satellites" bar to the right, and cry... I saw them passing over the other night and checked it out for morbid curiosity :/