Notices by alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social), page 3

‘No sign’ of promised fossil fuel transition as emissions hit new high - Damian Carrington @ The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/13/no-sign-of-promised-fossil-fuel-transition-as-emissions-hit-new-high

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Win32-style UIs. Electron is nice for what it's good for, but it does mean I have to relearn basic UI vocabulary in every single application. I lost the link to it, but there was a great article I saw a little while ago cataloguing how much even check-box vs radio-button vocabulary has completely broken down.

if I then use it to blog about how I use it, I can probably distill a user's guide out of that. no reason not to share that too, it'd already be on my blog as I wrote it.

if people hit me up and tell me about bugs they found in my stuff, I could look at fixing them. if they pointed towards a fix I could use their fix.

@LovesTha @alilly Here's @TechConnectify 's video on the subject: https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=3DdUvoc7tJ4

Inter 4.1 from @rsms is out!

https://github.com/rsms/inter/releases/tag/v4.1

It includes a bunch of little fixes and improvements, but my favorite (and relevant to GNOME!) is that the automatic contextual alternate converting NxN to N×N has been disabled; this was pointed out while testing on GNOME, where it would feel weird seeing e.g. filenames or URLs where the letter “x” would unexpectedly look like the “×” multiplication symbol.

#Inter #GNOME #typography #typefaces #typeface #font #fonts #OpenSource

@ColmDonoghue Hmmmmm, for my tastes that sounds like plenty capable!

@yuki2501 O.K., maybe we'd have to go back to raw transistors & non-integrated circuits... As @vidak said, gallium-arsenide transistors can be handmade.

Certainly it'd be tempting to use whatever wafers we have on hand to massproduce the more tedious components, like decoders...

"Yeah, I don't like all science fiction - like X-Men is definitely a little too relatable and I can't stand anything set in the present."

- Sam Barnes (Lauren Shippen) in The Bright Sessions by Lauren Shippen (e206s2)

"Big booming voice from the sky about to give you a gold sticker? You never stood a chance! Isn't it amazing what you can do with a microphone & a voicebox? Technology these days..."

- Officer Eiffel (Zach Valenti) to Dr. Hilbert (Zach Valenti) in Wolf359 by Gabriel Urbina

Some meta quotes I enjoy...

Red Panda (Greg Taylor): "You know how I feel about origin stories."
Flying Squirrel (Clarissa Der Nederlandon): "Sorry."
Baboon McSmoothie (Gregory Z. Cooke?): "How does he feel about origin stories?"
Flying Squirrel: "He thinks they reveal too much information that might betray vulnerabilities."
Red Panda: "And they're painfully dull!"

- The Red Panda Adventures by Greg Taylor (e24s2)

"Introduction to Web Accessibility" is a free course designed for people of all roles and all experience levels. Regardless of your background, there's something you can learn here.

https://www.edx.org/course/web-accessibility-introduction

Vendors of rust libraries I could understand that's just rust for you but why must firefox always do weird shit with Python like here vendoring aiohttp and pip (including exe of course…).

btw:

For human-interaction...

Modern cost-reduced keyboards require little more than molds & silkscreens. Though we can't have modern "optical" mice with 1980s-era compute, so it seems reasonable to go back to ball-mice.

For output... I think we should be able to manage speakers & (even if incandescent) lights. Black & white CRT-monitors may well become a value-add. I'm assuming that if we can manufacture microchips we can draw a vacuum.

Any further thoughts?

3/3 Fin!

Perhaps the main thing we do with our computers is to store data on them, so what's a relatively low-tech way to store non-trivial amounts of data?

Fragile wires is an attractive way to create write-once (PROM) microchips. Though in some way or other we'd probably use magnetism again to store data. A grid of wires, with the columns using thicker wires & being wrapped around the rows is an attractive approach that was quickly overshadowed in our history.

2/3?

Lets say your region becomes isolated for some reason: How'd you build computers in that situation?

If I understand correctly there's plenty of factories around the world capable of manufacturing 1980s-era microchips. And if your region doesn't have one, projectors can with some effort be repurposed to write microscopic circuits onto photosensitive silicon.

You'd still need to find somewhere to get the materials... And purify them... I don't feel qualified to comment on that!

1/3?

"don't worry if you don't understand everything the code is doing"

I've spent most of my life doing things that are New. I've tried to live on the cutting edge, I've tried to embrace the future.

Now, I find myself looking to the past more and more.

What good is a computer?

Whe the current phase of growth, the dying breaths of the industrial revolution, finally subside...

What will be left?

I'm reading "mysteries of london."

It's a penny dreadful published weekly starting 1844. It was probably the most widely read piece of literature of the first half of the 1800s.

It was essentially the must see primetime TV show of its day.

(The act of telling a story was not new. The printing press, and the boom in literacy rates among the working class allowed telling stories to reach a new context.

When serial television came around, it was just a further evolution of that context.)

Repairing My Sony Ear Buds - Kev Quirk:
https://kevquirk.com/blog/repairing-my-sony-ear-buds

@11ty/import; Utility to import content from multiple services (and a CLI, too) - Zach Leat @ 11ty:
https://github.com/11ty/eleventy-import (GitHub)