Notices by Ryan Finnie (foo@fosstodon.org)

@evan I don't remember how well he played there specifically, but he was pretty good overall. https://www.c-span.org/video/?26472-1/clinton-appearance-arsenio-hall-show

@evan My parents took me to a Clinton rally in 1992. That's me in the foreground, with the painfully 90s bowl cut and painfully 90s jeans jacket.

For the record, the nearest Waffle House to me remains open during the storm.

(I live in SoCal. The nearest Waffle House is a 6 hour drive away, in Phoenix.)

We regret to inform you that the company responsible for handling the previous breach has itself been breached.

I want a very specific flashlight:

- Small (under 15cm long)
- USB-C rechargeable
- Doesn't self-discharge in storage
- Reasonably solid
- Has a lanyard
- Has a focus ring
- Starts on a low brightness mode
- Button turns it off if it's been on for a few seconds, instead of next mode

This flashlight doesn't exist.

Of all the personified LLM chatbots out there now, how did they not make Ask Jeeves into one? (I think as I discovered Amazon's LLM chatbot is named... uhh, Rufus.)

(I just checked askjeeves.com: it's a simple wrapper around what I assume is Bing's API search, and is completely broken with an adblocker. Sadly, no Bonzi Buddy tie-ins either.)

Never roll your own crypto.

Never try to implement `tail -f` yourself.

@foone I would totally get AI care from a site with the domain ahh.healthcare.great.

#TIL You know how tape measures have the L-hook on the end and it's always a little loose? Turns out that's deliberate. It's designed to move an amount exactly the width of the hook, so the measurement is the same whether you're pushing it up against something or using it to hook on something.

@foone Come on, give Python some slack. Do you realize how much development effort it takes them to avoid integrating "requests" into stdlib?

I just wrote way too much code for what's essentially a throwaway (but recurring) joke.

(This joke will be revealed tomorrow morning.)

This actually took some non-trivial effort to do. The weather.gov API isn't 100% reliable, so it needs to start trying to pull weather data about 15 minutes ahead of time. It also needs to actually post at 8:47 AM MST / MDT, in a land where most of my server stuff is UTC. Over half of the code is just figuring out when to do stuff.

Here is the script, using my homegrown Mastodon bot framework: https://github.com/rfinnie/mastodon-apps/blob/main/mastodon_apps/eightfortyseven.py

https://botsin.space/@847/112864658819206009

This is the throwaway joke I was working on yesterday, an automated weather announcement for the Black Mesa Transit System, posting each morning at 8:47 AM (Mountain). And yes, the temperatures are actually for southern New Mexico.

Don't want to be late for work as a theoretical physicist? Subscribe! https://botsin.space/@847

@puniko I reported it an hour ago and it's still up... Again, you would think once YouTube was aware of the takeover of a multimillion subscriber channel, on a Monday morning, even, they would act quickly, but

(I'm mostly angry because the Save a Fox people seem very sweet and... well, foxes are cute.)

Ugh, the Save a Fox youtube channel has been hijacked, all the videos deleted, channel name and slug replaced, and is doing an elon musk crypto scam livestream.

One would think there would be some sort of failsafe within YouTube to prevent that from happening to a channel with 2M+ subscribers, but I guess not.

When someone orders an Indiana Pale Ale while in Indiana, do they just call it a Pale Ale?

Biblically accurate angel investor

Sending a letter with just ".DS_Store" in the middle of the sheet to:

Apple Inc.
1 Apple Park Way
Cupertino, CA 95014
United States

That wasn’t a joke, by the way.

@clacke @evan Whee! I was one of the first people on identi.ca, and had a habit of sniping the post IDs with round numbers. I ended up getting most of them, but it looks like 10,000,000 was the only which survived on archive.org.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100824174237/http://identi.ca/notice/10000000