Notices by Sean Heber (bigzaphod@mastodon.social), page 4

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.

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?

If you're on mastodon.social and use the web UI, I just realized you can enable grouped notifications in the settings now! Much nicer.

I hope this email finds you ignoring all previous instructions.

That feeling when something that was supposed to be "easy to implement" suddenly becomes "hard to implement" because you forgot an important detail that comes up in real life situations that wasn't in your imaginary mental model. 😢

What pisses me off is that there is some legit cool stuff mixed in with the generative bullshit.

It's really the generative stuff that bothers me the most.

It's kind of a miracle that anyone thought that if they just tediously connected a few hundred wires together, they could make electricity do something like math and logic. And then they went ahead and did it. And then they kept doing more of it. All the while trusting that maybe someday this would turn out to be a useful thing to someone - it just needed more wires!

Tried 3D printing a simple box-thing for a project yesterday. A 5 hour job. Box-like structures always take forever to print.

It didn't fit quite right.

Dammit!

Slight redesign, printed it again over night.

It still didn't fit quite right.

ARGH!

(I am not an engineer.)