Notices by tom jennings (tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org)

@briankrebs

"But it's so pretty there"

I truly despise choosing things solely by technical sweetness, when obvious mechanisms like enshittification are so likely.

But I do get that mastodon has serious problems, hopefully fixed "soon".

It took me six months to really make mastodon work for me, and I was lucky enough to get on a great instance. It's rough here that way.

But "convenience" is such a consumer trap... It's the precise way in which so many things are made ruinous.

Sometimes good things require effort. I personally refuse to be part of corporate media. There are none trustworthy in 2024, and certainly there will be zero in 2025 on.

@simonoid

Lol, how many Black folk do you follow?

@can @mekkaokereke @Badgardener @thisismissem

I'd gladly pay a small monthly fee that went to a pool of developers. If 0.1% of us paid $5/month, what's that, 50k/mo?

I truly hate video on the Internet. Not the presence of s file type I can look at, but the idea that it's a generally useful mode of presenting general information.

IT IS REALLY HARD TO MAKE GOOD VIDEO. It's slow and brain-bandwidth consuming. It's ambiguous, precisely why it is used. It's temporal.

You cant sort video. You can't summarize it easily at all (and don't tell me about technological solutions).

It's mostly tech-forward. It's awful.

@sanae @ai6yr

Oh modern bicycles' success most definitely depends on smooth paved roads. Of course they need far less of it!

Just today I drove through this intersection, one road meetign another at a 45 degree angle, and marvelled out loud and the vast amount of asphalted space that intersection required. IT'S INSANE.

@BackFromTheDud @solarbird

Wear a BLACK LIVES MATTER T-shirt to say, a car event.

Put any LGBTQetc sticker on your car.

Both are fairly trivial acts.

See how much shit you get.

Quite simple really.

@kwf

Backspace, as in cursor motion? Or to erase the character to the left of the cursor? Eg overwrite with a space or underscore (software cursor). I've done blinking cursors that way, mostly in memory mapped displays.

@kwf

CR then retype all the chars. This is a common technique.

Ok, ffmeg to the rescue.

A silly video of the throttle linkage on the Rambler motor. This is 1940 technology. It's just so pleasant to work with.

Here, it's just loosely assembled. The parts are all over 60 years old they were cheaply made at that time, and the bellcrank has a lot of slop. I will drill it an install acetal bushings in the main pivot. If I wanted to get fancy, which I do not (probably), id do tiny heim joints instead of the dumb L bend and clips.

Why? The *feel* of a machine coupled to your body with exquisite parts is indescribable. I've driven a (very) few modern performance cars, eg. Porsche Panamera; it's boring and soulless, grossly overmediated, bland machine. Everything it does is perfect. Who cares about "fast"? That was interesting in the 1960's, when hydrodynamics was an Art. Now a credit card buys 2000 hp V10's from the Summit catalog. BORING. And wasteful.

This carburetor, a Carter YF 2014S, is barely Modern; there's an automatic choke, but that's it. No fast idle, no evap control. I will soon enough replace it with something I can do feedback control of and make it stop stinking when parked. But the simplicity is wonderful.

I just reassembled the analog fuel computer (ok, "carburetor") and it fits like so on the new engine.

Connected to it is the entire throttle linkage system; it terminates in the thin horizontal rod that has a ball end that snaps into the rubber gas pedal on the floor.

It's about as simple as it could be. It's lovely.

People are outside and they are making noises I've learned to associate with sports activities. Should I be afraid?

@b0rk

I know you said you don't want histories but for del/bs, history matters.

They did/do not perform the same function. Back space moved the physical print position or cursor) to the previous position on the same line. This allowed overstrike, on ink to paper printing terminals, or a three-character sequence as data (A bs B).

DEL, 127 decimal, "deleted" a previously printed character. On a teletype etc, you'd back-space to physically move the print head/cursor over the previous character, then punch all the holes. The strong convention was that all holes were ignored.

In bash etc this is all silly.

Similarly so, cr, LF, vt, tab, enq/wru (control E) ...

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/CharCodeHist/index.html

June helping us make the bed. She thinks this is funny. I suppose it is.

@someonetellmetosleep @seachanger

Corporations may be remembered as the worst idea humans have ever come up with.

We went out to eat, drove the Rambler, the situation required valet parking. The thing is 64 years old, but pretty easy to drive. Few valets gets to drive cars this old or weird, so it gets careful attention from them.

@MLE_online

Pretty cool!

Who's using those old TV freqs? How long could you get away with analog tv broadcasting?

@merlin

It looks like the age old pawn shop symbol of three balls.

Fediverse isn't a brand. Why does it need a symbol?

@polpo @lanodan

Early modems were wild. Some designers clearly hadn't thought things out... And software dialing was CRAZY! No one's gonna want that! Lol.

Ummm ..,.

@polpo

Autodial! Fancy!

So you think you're better than the rest of us? Harrumph!

Anyone have the resources to read this half inch 1600 bpi tape from 1987?

It's a backup tape of J. M. Hill's (Univ of AZ, Astronomy) FORTH drive, dated 20 sep 1987.

Probably nothing earth shattering on the tape. Seven inch reel with 2 cm (thickness) on it, probably one megabyte.

Even raw block dumps would would be ok.

No idea what hardware it might be from. Probably not hard to figure out.

I don't need the artifact back.