Notices by Quentin Stafford-Fraser (quentinsf@mastodon.me.uk)

@lanodan @vga256 I’m pretty sure it was a video camera, in the sense that it produced a rastered output suitable for feeding to a CRT monitor or camcorder or whatever. So a framegrabber card in the computer read that signal through a fast A-to-D converter and captured a frame of video into its RAM, which could then be read out. My memory is that digital *stills* cameras didn’t, in general, come until a few years later.

@notjustbikes I was on a boat tour in Leiden yesterday. The guide was telling me about life in the Netherlands and mentioned a YouTube video… turned out he’s a NJB fan. 🙂

@notjustbikes Yes, in my experience autopilot is a good and useful cruise control (if you don't do foolish things with it), but I've long since given up on the idea that 'full self-driving' is going to be a usable thing during the lifetime of my car. Glad I didn't pay for that option!
There are, however, some reasonably impressive videos of it in use online. I think it only really works between Redwood City and Pasadena, though. 😊

A big challenge for new Mastodon users is the inability to provide a one-click 'follow me on Mastodon' link. (A link to your profile takes others to *your* server, but they need to follow you on *theirs*, so have to take steps to copy the details over.)
There are various hacks, such as Javascript bookmarklets, to deal with this, but I wondered whether any of the common client apps recognise a URL scheme, so you could link to 'mastodon://@quentinsf' and it would work for most people?

There are, after all, a lot of other URL schemes in place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_URI_schemes

People who preferred to use the web UI could install a small helper app if wanted that would just construct the right web URL and open it with the default browser.

I guess the right way to do this might be to publish your webfinger URL, and have clients that can read that and open your app of choice for each bit of info listed...

Mmm. and it turns out that there's a proposed 'acct:' URL scheme which would be ideal for this.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7565