Notices by Kadin (kadin@mastodon.sdf.org)

Should you ever be looking for information on a weird old plug or socket, or are just interested in such things, the online "Museum of Plugs and Sockets" is one of those sites that makes the Internet seem like less of a terrible mistake than usual.

https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/

The page on old British "BS 546" is unmatched, in particular: https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/OldBritish1.html

#BestOfTheWeb #OldInternet #IndieWeb #Electronics #DIY

@botvolution Yeah it's ostensibly very high-spec, "MIL-STD" wire… although I've read the referenced MIL-STD and it's not that impressive. Most commodity wire should pass if the manufacturer isn't using junk insulation or something.

I think they are basically preying on commercial buyers who just want to get everything from one place and don't know better (or are spending their employer's money and don't care).

For everyone else, there's… eBay, I guess.

The cheapest 30AWG hook-up wire available on Mouser is $83 for a 100 ft spool. (Look up AlphaWire P/N 5851-OR005 if you want to see for yourself.)

I know the price of copper is up, but that's just ridiculous.

#electronics #shopping

@botvolution Classy.

Came across this oddball piece of #surveillance #hardware last weekend, and if it's of interest to anyone I'll post some #teardown pictures.

It's an impressively tiny, battery powered, magnetically attached, #GPS tracking device, with an integrated cellular modem. And it seems to do some other sketchy stuff as well.

I wasn't given much background information about it, other than it cost less than $10 USD equivalent in a market in China, which means the BOM cost has to be pretty low.

@joeo10 Hm. It'll be interesting to see what CES is like this year.

In my corner of the universe it actually seemed like everyone had decided the pandemic was over and it was game on for conferences and events again.

I also appreciate that not even Alibaba's questionable machine translation can defeat the intense skepticism someone had for this switch's stated voltage/current rating:
#theWildWorldofAliExpress

Inside the switch crust, of course, you find the delicious, electric-filled center.

#theWildWorldofAliExpress

Why did every login page become two separate pages with two 'submit' buttons (one for the username, followed by a *separate page load* just for the password)?

I dimly remember when a couple of sites started doing it, but it's *everywhere* now, and it doesn't seem like it's for any good reason. (You can just check the name and stop if it's not valid!)

It seems like one of those UI tics that every designer feels the need to ape because…Amazon does it? Idk.

Here's an idea: CUT THAT SHIT OUT.
#UX

@admin @p @john
Without access to the code I'm speculating, but from the docs I don't think "un-blockable messages" is how it shakes out.

It appears that Revolver has a single, distributed DB with content split across its nodes (strong whiffs of FreeNet!), but at the edges it exposes an ActivityPub-compat LitePub endpoint, to interop with rest of Fedi. It also promises content filtering of what each node propagates.

A Masto admin would treat that LitePub endpoint like any other instance.

@john
This is Reddit gossip so take it with a *very* large chunk of salt, but there are claims that:

> The founder of Pleroma, Lain, programed Pleroma to be harder to block from other instances than a comparable Mastodon Instance. Those blocked Pleroma instance Admins tell me their posts sometimes get through to the Mastodon servers.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/yu8xof/pleromas_rebased_fork_vs_akkoma_fork/

I don't know what that means from a technical perspective, though. How is an instance "hard to block"? ?♂️

@pammystarr @katedegerdon @john
That already exists: https://masto.host offers managed Mastodon hosting ($40/mo for ~500 users, seems a bit high but not unreasonable to me), but right now they are so swamped they're not taking new subscriptions. Heck of a problem to have as a business.

I do have some questions about how well Mastodon (the mainline server) scales, and if there are opportunities for optimization that could make managed hosting cheaper per user.