Notices by Tim 🎮 (timixretroplays@digipres.club)

Hey. Has someone made your work life a bit easier this week? Wrote a tool you found useful, invited you along for coffee, managed an office disruption, emptied your bin, shown you a cool keyboard shortcut, caught an embarassing egg that you dropped?

Take a moment today to thank them for it. Give them a reason to end their week on a high. Even a one-sentence email could absolutely make their day.

Boost this so others can think to do the same.

Today's Old Mouse At Work is a proper #IntelliMouse. I never actually had one of these back in the day - I was a bit of a Logitech fanboy, if that's a thing - and the shape feels pretty unfamiliar, but it is lightweight and comfortable, and the button clicks sound exactly as good as you think they do. Remember when optical mice would light up red this brightly? #retrocomputing

Hey, anyone with a smartphone handy - what does your QR code reading app do with this code and the incomplete URL in it? It's a mobile link to a YouTube video without the https:// at the start (it's just the text "youtu.be/GPTY6l_PX5k", which I promise is not a rickroll, it's a cover of a different song entirely), and I'm curious if your phone adds it back automatically and makes it a clickable link. Would also be interesting to know what app you're using that gives the result you get. #AskFedi

@tomwor @HauntedOwlbear mainly I wanted to try out the gen2 controller, because I'd heard whispers that it was a bit better in some ways than the gen1. I collect controllers, and happen to really like the way the Ouya pad feels, so I'm hoping this one survives its ordeal this weekend and I can give it a proper go.

Time to rescue this Ouya controller from its own alkaline hubris. The good news is that it doesn't appear to have gotten into the internals, so stripping it down and cleaning the plastic parts ought to leave it good as new.

Only one battery appears to have popped, so for peace of mind I might pop the other into a more secure container. The box I'll tackle later.

So I ran into one of my old high school teachers this week, who recognised me immediately and, after a bit of a catch-up chat, suggested I should come back some time soon and speak to the current crop of soon-to-be school finishers about life after school and how things are going.

The script in my head is already very "wear sunscreen", but: what advice would you give to 18-year-old yourself? What would you or your kids *want* to hear from future-you?

Boosts and serious comments appreciated.

Especially appreciated: do you have high school age kids? Could you ask them what they'd want to hear from someone who finished school 20 years ahead of them? That'd be pretty awesome too.

Ah yes, the three genders:

Here's why I'm learning Inkscape this week: I'm making super-legible pinout labels for the Raspberry Pi Pico (and other boards, later), using a combination of 3D and 2D printing - these paper slips will be glued to a little PLA frame you just drop over the top of your Pi Pico for breadboarding purposes.

Comments and suggestions highly welcome, so far I've designed to "what works for me" but it'd be great to include features that would be useful to others.

The back button should be a stop button if a page is loading.

If I'm on page N, and click a link for page N+1 that I decide I don't want to visit - maybe it takes too long, maybe I don't like the URL, maybe I spied a better link on page N, maybe I tapped it accidentally - I want to hit 'back' and end up on N, not N-1, and not have to hunt around on a toolbar to find the X that does it.

Someone please make this for every browser in existence. I would pay to use this on every computer I own.

@lenno @foone GSV (geometrically separated values)

It feels like something I'd dream that @NanoRaptor and @foone conspired to make as a prank, and I bet it'll delight the both of them that it exists, but this was an actual, real thing you could buy for ten bucks back in 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20040405183810/http://www.act-labs.com/scripts/proddetails.asp?pid=38

Just missed out on picking up this crazy gamepad on eBay - if I hadn't had an early night I might've spotted it.

Will you just look at this thing!? It's not a gameport device, it plugs in through PS/2 or a DIN port (with what look like adapters from one to the other). It's got Alt, Control and Delete buttons. It's got an enter button. It's got a second D-pad in the middle for some reason. The most normal thing about it is the "P" button, and that's saying something. #retrogaming #retrocomputing

Would any of my Australian followers (or perhaps their children) be interested in an inexpensive, Bluetooth Rubik's cube? it'll otherwise just end up on eBay and I feel like there's a non-zero chance someone on here might be keen.

This is a GANCube 356i I picked up at the tail end of a casual cubing obsession a few years back and I never ended up using it. The official app is crap, but it's been reverse-engineered and apparently it now works with Cubeast and csTimer: https://www.cubeast.com/

I needed a FAT-formatted flash drive to scan stuff to and this was the closest option to hand. That's normal, right?

Ok, LastPass just sent me an automatic renewal notice, so I have a month to decide on a new platform and switch to it.

Dear fediverse, what password manager do you recommend, and why? I'm looking for something cloudy that works seamlessly across multiple PCs and a smartphone. Don't care about price, just security, reliability and ease of use, in that order. Boosts are love.

My phone sometimes hangs hard and reboots when I plug it into my car. It's too many taps to navigate to the single digit number of locations I have saved. I'll be mid-playlist, and Spotify will forget and switch to random songs based on the last one it played. People can't hear me on a whatsapp call even after granting it every permission it asks for. The album I had on last week won't play anymore because licensing.

And at the end of the drive it asks me if the fucking sound quality was okay.

You hand over your entire life story to a website for a shipping quote just for it to tell you the thing's out of stock and the product page is just weasel words. Everything you've ever told any website ever has already been sold to other companies and other countries. The thing you buy never arrives because it's possible for a courier company to operate in Australia without delivering to PO boxes. Amazon mixes legit stock with counterfeits but at least your lucky dip item ships free with Prime.

Your oven - a device with one moving part, and which functionally can be either "on" or "off" - stops working because a tiny capacitor exploded on the circuit board buried deep in the control panel and it costs hundreds of dollars to get a visit from an authorised screwdriver turner to replace it. The oven still doesn't work until you collectively figure out you have to set the time on the digital clock first, and you're reminded of this needless complication every time there's a power outage.

The call centre's scripts are circular and they flat out lie to you about getting a call back or any sort of update or movement happening. The website says it's gone back to the airport but you drive three hours to a courier's warehouse in western Sydney on a hunch and your parcel is sitting on the shelf in plain sight behind the underpaid girl at the counter. You pay extra to refuel your car because you didn't have time to find an app that tells you prices and the pump plays a video ad at you.