@bigzaphod@mastodon.social
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bigzaphod

@bigzaphod@mastodon.social

You may know me from Twitterrific or Frenzic: Overtime or as the ex-galactic president. I'm just this guy, you know?

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bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Sometimes I do things in front of my cat or dog and imagine how I must look like a magician or god or something. "OMG you made water appear out of a tube on the counter?!"

And then I come across some makers on YouTube that make me feel the same way. "OMG you made an entire robot out of a box of wires and a python script?!"

Migueldeicaza, (edited ) to random
@Migueldeicaza@mastodon.social avatar

Public service announcement

I am not paid for this or have any interest in this company

We give our kids debit cards using tillfinancial.com - we give their allowance there, and they get debit cards and Apple Pay integration

Zero fees, or hidden shenanigans.

Love it.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

@Migueldeicaza hmmmm.. this seems nice, but I'm not sure how they make any money with this business model. Maybe just interest on the all the combined holdings (or whatever the financial term for that would be)?

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

This came with one of my eBay orders that arrived today. They aim for FIVE STAR service... by demanding their customers only give them five stars. 🤔

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

So my sewer pipe (which has been an endless source of fun, let me tell you), runs through the power company's land and whoever cut their grass the other day was clearly daydreaming and mowed right over the pipe AND the bright orange fiberglass stick that was marking its location.

bigzaphod,
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@Klaxun because my property is landlocked by a few feet for stupid historical reasons and the only route the city would allow the sewer pipe to go was through there which was already a utility easement zone. Then the city also mandated where the clean outs had to go.. and of course TWO of them ended up over in that zone. Luckily one is way down in a ditch where they don't bother to cut, but this one is right there on the edge.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

@GeekAndDad hmmm. I've been wondering about this. Kinda pissed because this pipe basically bankrupted us and it's still causing problems. I wonder if a plumber could install these cheaply or if there's some reason they didn't. It's stupid having the pipe sticking up. Worse is that the run was so long there's actually 4 of these - one by the house, and then 3 along the length. All varying heights, too - not even consistent.

bigzaphod,
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@dxzdb @GeekAndDad my clean outs are 100ft apart (as was required by the code, I guess) and they also installed a metal wire along the length of the pipe which I gather is useful to find the pipe later with a detector. Not sure if the metal wire thing is code here or just a convention, though.

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

I really appreciate that the long, illustrious internet tradition of shitposting is poisoning AI.

bigzaphod, to Ds9
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Jake Sisko, who has never written on paper before, has perfect cursive handwriting. 🤔

bigzaphod, to Ds9
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

It’s always dark in the mirror universe.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Mirror universe Klingons should have been peace loving hippies.

gedeonm, to random
@gedeonm@mastodon.social avatar

Bought this rubber carrot dog chewie for Max and boy he loves it. He usually destroys his dog toys in seconds but he’s been working on this thing for over an hour now and it’s still in one piece.

It’s made of some kind of rubber/silicone material that is fun to chomp (not too hard) and the crinkle leaves are really well bonded to the interior. He hasn’t been able to pull them out (yet). Gonna leave a ★★★★★ for this thing. 👍 https://a.co/d/j7CFSyQ

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

@gedeonm we have that for our dog named Carrot and it has been remarkably durable.

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

There are times (sometimes lasting weeks) where I can bang out a ton of fancy code. I wrote a huge complex thing over the course of a month or two that'll be Tapestry's sync/database. I think it's pretty darned cool and it was complex as hell.

But I'll be damned if, over the last couple days, I can do something as simple as rearrange a few SwiftUI views to make some progress on anything else.

Not because it's hard, but because I just... can't? Brain no worky.

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Widespread artificial intelligence is getting so much time and attention and money and meanwhile natural intelligence is suffering.

verge, to random
@verge@mastodon.social avatar

Atari acquires longtime rival Intellivision https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163176/atari-acquires-intellivision-amico-console

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

@verge

What year is it?

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

@siracusa lol!

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Kid had a cheap little desk fan that charges with USB-C. He forgot it in back of the car for like... 6 months. After he found it he tried to make it work and it seemed to not work anymore. We figured the battery was probably toast or something.

So he took it apart and poked at with with a multimeter. And he couldn't figure anything out. So he brings it out to me. And I plugged in a random USB-C cable on my desk just to check assumptions and it worked.

So now we're like.. wtf?

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

The dumbest thing about "the market" is how companies will refuse to make some stuff and cite "the market" as the reason why. Like, "no one is buying widgets so we aren't going to make any widgets." And if no one is selling widgets, how, pray tell, is someone supposed to buy any widgets?!

samwho, to random
@samwho@hachyderm.io avatar

✨ I spent 3 months writing the best interactive introduction to queueing I could, and it's live now!

You can read it here: https://encore.dev/blog/queueing.

It starts off by showing what happens when you have no queue...

A screenshot from the post. It shows the first visualisation, an orange circular button on the left and a black rounded square on the right. The button is clicked, and a request travels to the black square, the server, and gets processed by slowly disappearing in a clock-like fashion.

bigzaphod,
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@samwho this is really neat!

bigzaphod, to random
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The first edge of the storm is here!

video/mp4

bigzaphod, to random
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Just found out, entirely by accident, that I'm under a tornado watch. I only discovered it because of a national news story I happened to notice most of the way down the page on CNN about an especially dangerous weather condition in the midwest.

And I'm like.. "Wait, I'm in the midwest!" I clicked the story.

Turns out, yeah, my county is in the watch area and there's a line of serious storms coming that have already spawned tornadoes and killed people today.

No trace of this in Apple Weather.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

I fully intend to do the midwestern things of hiding in the basement for about 10 seconds and then going outside and watching until the pelting rain or hail starts leaving welts or there's a literal tornado in my yard.

As is the tradition.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

That said, I always worry about all the trees and stuff surrounding my house. Can't do much about that.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Me: Goes to watch live news feed of life threatening weather

News website: watch this 30 second unskippable ad first

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

This is the kind of weather that TV meteorologists live for. This is the big show.

bigzaphod,
@bigzaphod@mastodon.social avatar

Well it seems that the storm forked and split right around us. So aside from some heavy wind and rain right at first, it basically all passed us by. Kind of uneventful! Of course the areas nearby got hit pretty hard, but we missed almost all of it.

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