Notices by Stewart Russell (scruss@xoxo.zone)

squad goals

@mpjgregoire @mariellequinton @andrew @johnefrancis the 2015 platform said he supported electoral reform, and did not single out one particular type:

"We are committed to ensuring that 2015 will be the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system.

We will convene an all-party Parliamentary committee to review a wide variety of reforms, such as ranked ballots, proportional representation, mandatory voting, and online voting. ..."

https://web.archive.org/web/20151006133851/https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/electoral-reform/

@jwz are they book club editions? That might explain the non-standard barcodes.

Nice QR code. There's an animated GIF version that does something clever: https://cloudisland.nz/@xssfox/106525258714227563

How convenient that the security cable slot on the back of an Apple Mac Classic II is *exactly* the width of an SD slot extender cable. This allows me tou use an internal BlueSCSI did replacement board but have the SD card accessible outside for (offline) data transfer

#RetroComputing #Apple #ClassicMac #BlueSCSI

@bobjonkman @JMarkOckerbloom

Likewise. Occasional typo correction and resolving citations needed is about my limit. Last major edit I did I needed to call in the help of a very connected editor to stop climate change-denying editors deleting the content.

Yet some of my ancient and entirely non-notable articles persist. I guess they become notable if they are in Wikipedia for long enough.

And I'm a white guy writing about easy mode stuff. Editing intersectional content must be hell.

@tek this will end well, I'm sure

@bobjonkman @steve the GTALUG mailing list can be ... something. I noped out of it a couple of years ago when someone (a non-Linux user) basically took it over as their hardware tech help begging forum

@sgillies @cstross ah, the old Stainless Steel Rat comics in 2000AD ...

@annika a friend from Yorkshire looks all hurt if you let it mash for less than five

Then there was the engineering works near Glasgow (Scotland, not England) where I worked a couple of summers. They boiled the breakfast tea for a full 15 minutes. It was ... harsh, to say the least.

Okay, a weird thing I can't explain: my office chair - sitting in front of a tower fan - seems to want to spin forever, driven by the breeze from the fan.

It only keeps spinning, however, if a box that's fairly heavy is sitting on the chair. With no box, or an identical empty box, the chair stops spinning very quickly.

I have no idea why it does this. I have videos of the control experiments, and it's repeatable

10 MODE 7
20 FOR count%=1 TO 34
30 PRINT "Count "; count%; " - guilty"
40 NEXT count%
50 END
#bbcmicrobot

@feld looking at it now, it's a pretty horrible racist website

I had to check the date on this to see if it was either:

a) April 1; or
b) the heat-death of the universe.

but no, it's real: everyone's favourite punchline Linux distro now has binary packages!

Gentoo goes Binary! – #Gentoo #Linux — https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html

#funroll_loops

feeding text through:

sed 's/[aeiou]/iggle/g;'

improves everything.

"bandcamp friday" becomes "bigglendcigglemp frigglediggley"

@nev morse is used in a whole bunch of accessibility situations.

I've known a couple of computers that beep/flash boot errors in Morse

@tek @zompus There already was FreeFileFillableForms, the govt-supplied but TaxPrepCo-designed system. I had to use it a few times for my partner's returns, and it was foul.

Because it had clearly been developed with a "the government must not provide a value-added service!" mindset, its idea of helpful error messages were XPath validation warnings for missing fields. I am a big ol' XML nerd tho, so we got the filings done despite that

@owen aren't they hiding on the Hathi Trust server, at various levels of locked down (including not even available to the library that donated them)?

If Google does still have the scans, you can bet they are in LLM training data somewhere

@padraig yeah, because my post about the stick library mentions a word a bit like a crapto, I'm getting the spam.

We have a small overgrown suburban back yard. The neighbours don't like it. But today, we had 21 different species of #birds visit: American Goldfinch, American Robin, Baltimore Oriole, Clay-colored Sparrow, Common Grackle, Common Raven, Gray Catbird, Hermit Thrush, House Finch, House Sparrow, Nashville Warbler, Northern Cardinal, Northern Parula, Orchard Oriole, Ovenbird, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Tennessee Warbler, Veery, Warbling Vireo, White-throated Sparrow, White-winged Crossbill
#toronto

@laurelrusswurm @gemelliz I think we get a bye from our neighbours because the former owners used to get drunk and throw beer bottles at the mosque-goers, while their sons had broken into every house in the neighbourhood. We don't do either.