Notices by Sean Heber (bigzaphod@mastodon.social)

Baahubali: The Beginning is amazing. It's so over the top and ridiculous while being totally engrossing. It's like a video game cutscene come to life. The whole thing. It's like watching a dream of a comic book. Part Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, part 300, part low budget early 2000s straight to home video fantasy adventure, part big budget summer blockbuster, part Lord of the Rings.

I don't really know how to describe this movie. It's great. I mean, how could you not love a scene like this?

Tonight's movie night movie will be, "Baahubali: The Beginning (2015)." This is something new and different for us - we've not tried any Indian movies before. I ran across some clips of this (and its sequel) online and it looked like a totally over the top action movie kind of vibe with some terrifically good reviews so we're all looking forward to some action fun. It's a long one, though - nearly 3 hours!

Happy Iconfactory Tapestry release day! https://usetapestry.com

#TapestryApp

So... I mean, if they're not gonna follow the rules, why should any of us pay taxes?

Lots of people angry at Zuck about the fact checker thing but I haven't EVER seen anyone impressed with their prior fact checking so, like... is this even gonna change anything?

Tonight’s movie night movie will be, “The Wild Robot (2024).” The trailers look absolutely stunning and give me serious Iron Giant vibes. Looking forward to it!

2025 is gonna be an odd year.

In other "trying to make a website is hard" news, dealing with email continues to suck.

I believe I have https://indiestorygeek.com's email stuff correctly configured for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and yet we still started getting a bunch of bounces recently.

Since people have to click a link in the welcome email to activate their user account, if they don't get that email they can obviously never do that. Which is a problem.

I spent much of yesterday on this problem trying to figure it out.

@Gargron she looks familiar...

Pushing a big refactor less than hour before quitting time on a Friday. As you do.

Sometimes I run across lists or discussions along the lines of, “what is a movie that’s perfect and should never be remade” and I scroll until I find “The Fifth Element” because it’s always there. As it should be.

We finished Slow Horses. Now we have to wait almost a year for the next season.?! That’s a crime. It’s criminal. There should be a continuous stream of nothing but new Slow Horses episodes from now until the end of time. I want a live stream of Slow Horses. Come on Apple! Get on it! Make it happen!

I'd love to see someone put a number on the lost productivity and cost to health of constant cycles of worry and stress that trump has caused since 2016 or so. Seriously, it's gotta be astronomical.

Some estimates suggest the Voyager crafts might survive (for some definition of "survive") all the way until Andromeda and Milky Way collide. That's around 4.5-5 billion years from now. For reference, our estimate is that life on earth is only about 4.5 billion years old.

The Voyagers could survive long enough for life itself to die out completely and see it re-evolve again.

The scale is boggling.

The Voyager probes are so cool. One of the coolest things humanity has ever done, IMO. They'll eventually stop functioning, but as an artifact they'll probably outlive our whole species. If they don't hit anything, they might someday make a complete orbit of the entire galaxy.

According to my kids, "Apple computers are great for work but suck for fun stuff."

This opinion is entirely because of things like the available games selections on Steam.

But man, they don't make manuals like this anymore. This manual starts with unboxing the machine and ends with you writing code that moves sprites and plays musical notes by directly poking bytes into memory all while explaining every step along the way. It's really really well done.

(At least if you follow it in order and really digest it - of course his impatience meant we jumped around a bit but that's okay too.)

Spent an hour this morning with the VICE C64 emulator (https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io) running full screen on my Mac, a scan of the Commodore 64 Users Guide open on my iPad, and the 11yo at the keyboard.

I'd read passages and dictate code from the book, and he'd type it in and see what happens.

He had fun for a while, but of course the examples are so.... basic (pun!) that by modern standards they just don't excite much, but hey, he still learned a bit and enjoyed it until the typing got "too long."

@joe it's pretty silly they'd didn't add a few more functions for this. Does it even support typing numbers in binary or hex? If it did, I'm not seeing any examples of that. Seems like that would have helped too.

Why is Tim always shouting?