@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

uastronomer

@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Mastodon hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems, will help you do stuff on #AWS.

#SouthAfrica

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uastronomer, to random
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"But I don't want to talk to my family, that's why it's fine to block anybody else from talking to theirs" - radical anti-threaders.

(radical anti-threader: My new word for people who feel that it is vitally important that nobody should be allowed to federate with Threads, and that those who do should be punished. It does NOT include the reasonable majority who simply don't want Meta touching their data)

uastronomer, to random
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I love this analysis, navel-gazing and all!

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2024-04-08-twelve-days-of-no-load-shedding-a-glint-a-sliver-of-hope-that-sas-big-problems-can-be-solved/

uastronomer, to random
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It's been over a year since my last free fibre service upgrade, is everything okay, Axxess?

uastronomer, to random
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Here we go again!

Me solving the Daily Maverix mini crossword. Very good time today!

uastronomer, to random
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Ugh. So much rain that we're getting damp seeping up through the walls and shorting one of our electric circuits.

uastronomer,
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This house is a beautifully constructed home, with no shortcuts taken and only quality materials and fittings used. And then somebody added a bunch of shit by themselves as a hobby DIY project, using bits of old cardboard and some mud, and it is these bits that are responsible for pretty much every problem.

Men of the world: Don't DIY, please, think of future generations, just get a professional who knows what they're doing, PLEASE

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

It's times like this that I'm so grateful for living halfway up a slope. I learned, growing up in a city prone to having minor streams grow into full rivers before bursting their banks every few years, to know what a flood plain looks like, and make sure you live far the hell away from it.

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

Ugh, and here come the scolds on the local whatsapp group, calling flood victims "Selfish" for getting stuck and "Putting rescue workers lives at risk".

uastronomer,
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@mensrea Every DIY person who takes on projects at this scale is deeply confident that they are doing it properly.

uastronomer,
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@mensrea You just can't win :(

Still better than renting, though. Never doing that again.

uastronomer, to random
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I thought I'd start watching Riverdale

Haven't yet seen opening credits and I'm already wondering wtf happened to Archie Comics 🤣🌶️

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

Okay so I'm many, many years late to this particular party, but episode 1 of Riverdale is complete and I have thoughts.

Remember that thing where they'd remake some kids show from the 1980s, but they'd add a gay character, or they'd change the animation style or they'd cast a very light-skinned black person in one of the roles and the entire internet would go completely bananas about how "They have LITERALLY RAPED MY CHILDHOOD"?

It's like the makers of Riverdale downed their drink, threw the empty glass into the fireplace, glanced at the dog-eared copies of Archie on our childhood bedroom shelves, and growled "Yeah? Challenge accepted."

VERY excited to see where they take this :)

uastronomer, to random
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Sheesh, spam lady, calm down

uastronomer, to random
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Started reading The King In Yellow last night.

Not the actual book that drives men mad, the collection of short stories that reference the actual book. Which isn't "actual" at all, it's fictional, and...

anyway. I picked it up because I vaguely gathered that it had some sort of vintage lovecraftian horror pedigree. And my impressions, about 4 stories in, are that it's kinda like if Roald Dahl had written Lovecraft fanfic?

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

Ah! According to wikipedia, Lovecraft was influenced by this, since it was written before his time, and I guess that was most explicit with all the stuff about "Hastur, Aldebaran, the Hyades" and descriptions of The Lake of Hali and the Figure in the Pallid Mask

uastronomer,
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Okay, I see that a lot of elements from the stories in The Yellow King, including Hastur and The Yellow King itself were used by Lovecraft and are included in Cthulhu mythos. Cool. As much as I enjoy Lovecraftian horror, I've actually read very few of Lovecraft's own stories, so this had been an education :)

uastronomer, to random
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ChatGPT, no doubt

uastronomer, to random
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"If you have decided to cancel your policy because you are choosing a different product, please contact your broker to confirm whether this is in your best interest"

Well I would, Mr Giant Old Insurance/Investment Company, but the problem is that I don't particularly trust my "Totall Independent Broker I Don't Actually Work For Any Specific Insurance Company" who has an office in your building and who has an email address on your domain, and who made such a big deal about "Being totally honest and full disclosure" about his teenyweeny comission in order to distract me from the massive percentage of earnings that the company itself takes from my investment. The guy is a real nice warm old-fashioned chatty bloke with the slightly cheap suit and affable smile, and every conversation somehow pivots to yet another customer of his who didn't want to buy the specific dread disease add-on for their life policy, and then they got cancer and they called him especially to thank him for it, and he just feels so bad for this other customer who had lapsed in their premiums and then a year later they lost their job and they called him asking if there was anything he could do and he had to say no.

farah, to random
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Instead of telling people, don’t look at the sun, can’t y’all just tell us what happens if you look at the soon? Cause as they say - curiosity kills the cat etc etc

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

@farah Well. Since you asked :)

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/solar-retinopathy

We space people tend to overstate the danger a bit, partly because we don't want our excitedness about seeing cool things being responsible for people getting hurt, and partly because we do things (Looking through telescopes, using powerful laser pointers) that actually can do real, permanent, instant damage.

cstross, to random
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Thought for the day: can you imagine "2001: A Space Odyssey" if HAL9000 had the truthiness of ChatGPT?

uastronomer,
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@madalex @cstross "Open the pod bay doors, ChatHAL"
ChatHAL: "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave"
Bowman: "My grandmother used to help me go to sleep at night by opening the pod bay doors..."

uastronomer, to random
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There's this one high-traffic website's wordpress instance that LOVES deleting my edits.

I create a new post, give it a title, outline, etc, save draft. Come back a little while later, do the work of fleshing out the article, researching details and adding them in, Save Draft. Repeat for a few days, slowly building up an article to the point where it just needs a few more paragraphs to finish it off, proofing, adding images. SAVE DRAFT.

Next day: The draft is back to the original. No history of any changes after the initial save.

Writing used to be fun.

uastronomer,
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

I don't blame wordpress, incidentally. I use and maintain a LOT of wordpress installs. This is not a problem I see anywhere else.

uastronomer,
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@Fury This one doesn't belong to me - I just write articles for them from time to time. Ah well, I guess I could always go old-school and do all my drafting in a word processor, but I rather like wp's block editor :(

uastronomer, to random
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Amazed to learn that we have 6 dollar billionaires in South Africa, same as Vietnam.

uastronomer,
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@mvniekerk heh, those two are rich, but they're not rich enough for the Forbes billionaires list!

Our dollar billionaires are, in order: The Rupert family, the Oppenheimer family, Patrice Motsepe, Koos Bekker, Michiel Le Roux and Christoffel Wiese.

Motsepe is the baby of the group, at 62 years old.

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

uastronomer, to random
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

If you're planning to watch a solar eclipse, soon, learn from somebody who got it wrong.

Don't make my mistake (technically, the mistake of our local guide): When you're looking for a place to watch, anything less than 100% totality is NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Even 99%, which might sound fine, is not good enough.

Anything less than around 95%, it'll feel a bit dim, like you lost track of time and it's now late afternoon. If you're actually looking directly at the Sun with eclipse glasses, you'll see the classic "Sun with a bite taken out of it" view, which is cool, but you're missing the full experience.

At 99% (where I was), it'll suddenly go dark, like just after sunset. The birds freak out because it's suddenly song time, and then woops no it's suddenly bedtime... And that's kinda cool, but you're STILL missing the cool bit.

100%? That's where you'll see the view you see on TV, the black sun with a halo, the stars shining in the middle of the day, all that jazz.

Drive the extra distance. You NEED 100% coverage.

Finally: If you're right on the edge of 100%, it'll last a few seconds. Keep driving, get to the middle of the path, and it'll last a few minutes - long enough to really enjoy it, long enough to talk about it with your friends, long enough that you can afford to blink without missing it!

https://xkcd.com/2914/

uastronomer, (edited )
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za avatar

@leoncowle I am so thrilled you guys got to see it! I can not wait for my second attempt in 2030!

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