Notices by acb (acb@mastodon.social)

Hacker gets annoyed at Amazon’s Kindle apps, reverse-engineers the Kindle web reader’s protocol (which basically sends each page as a set of glyphs in a deliberately broken variant of SVG). Such obscurity, much security.

https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

@publicdomainrev The lady is checking the latest engagement figures for her daguerreotypes, and the gentleman his crypto portfolio

@larstransportworld Is the “railway station” a former railway station, or a pub/cafe/cultural space with a cute name?

Happy #Caturday!

#Cativitypub #catsofmastodon

Memes didn’t exist before Twitter/Facebook. OK, maybe they did, but they certainly didn’t before the interne…

All modern digital infrastructure in 2025 (seen elsewhere):

I’m in Sweden. About ⅔ of the office is micro-retired for the next month or so. (The consensus-minded Swedes do like taking July and/or the first half of August off.) I’m not, but I did a 1½-week micro-retirement in March, and have a shorter one coming up later this summer. Last year, I took most of a month (so, a mini-retirement) to go to Australia.

Framing a week every 1-2 years as a “micro-retirement” sounds like giving the Overton window a further push to normalising servitude.

Are the Americans OK?

@vicgrinberg This, on a sticker/T-shirt, with a drawing of a raccoon

@fesshole Elite is definitely a product of its time (its time meaning the market-fundamentalist Thatcher era)

"As Swiss we have a hard time showing our emotions. As we say, we don't have feelings, we have money" #Eurovision

Last night, I caught a sleeper train from Vienna to Hamburg. This time, I travelled in one of ÖBB NightJet’s new Mini Cabins: one-person compartments, similar in concept to a Japanese capsule hostel pod.

Here are my impressions. (tl;dr: I strongly recommend it and would do it again.) 🧵
#SleeperTrain #NightJet #öbb

Meanwhile, in Canada:

@bruces Which sounds like “slop produced by a statistical correlation engine that doesn’t actually understand anything should be good enough for blind people”.

@abolisyonista wasn’t it the same with Rome? (The Empire fell/fragmented, infrastructure crumbled and was scavenged for parts, but people across its territories continued as always, eventually the Vulgar Latin they spoke diverging into separate languages that became French/Castilian/Romanian/the various Italian dialects.)

@glynmoody Whatever happened to the project to put the pound on the blockchain? Is that still going ahead?

@futurebird @cstross one problem is that they probably wouldn’t switch to 220 like the metrosexual communists in Paris use but go for an insensibly higher voltage just to own the libs. Quite possibly chosen for numerological reasons, like 1488V or 4547V

@cstross I bought a heating pad (one for pets, clawproof and without a timer) for Doris, and placed it under her favourite rug. I turn it on during the winter, and it becomes a very effective cat magnet.

@landley @HighlandLawyer @Di4na @cstross They’re betting a lot on algorithmic mass surveillance being sufficient to stop an entire wave of Luigis with nothing left to lose

@jwz I suspect it’s not just those but working with/against the iPod hardware/firmware.