Notices by acb (acb@mastodon.social)

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.

@ChrisMayLA6 A similar experiment was conducted in Romania recently. The result: an obscure pro-Russian demagogue won the first round of the presidential election, until the courts cancelled it due to irregularities.

In the UK, the last part would not happen; if the courts were able to do that, we’d still be in the EU.

@jwz I had Rockbox in 2001. It ran only on the Archos Jukebox Recorder. Making it cross-platform took a few years more, and IIRC, the iPod ports landed fairly late (in the past decade or so, I think).

@jwz My guess is that it’s an iPod-specific thing, coming from them not having the actual specs of the environment they’re running in, and tripping over some edge case. The fact that you can dual-boot to a rock-solid USB stack has probably justified the volunteer working on it to not prioritise it as a dealbreaker.

@jwz AFAIK, it isn’t. The firmware has to implement the USB stack in its entirety, and Rockbox seems to be flaky, at least on the iPod.

@jwz I’ve found that USB works better if you boot it into the Apple firmware for transfers, and reboot it into Rockbox after.

@dansup @impressia I write iOS apps for a living, and have done so for over a decade. They’re all native, though.

React Native, like Electron, just feels like a stopgap for when you don’t have the resources to make a proper app (or shareholders said no); the fit and finish are never going to be the same, and it’s going to feel slow and burn through battery. Surely in that case, you’d welcome someone else doing that for your APIs?