windrunner

windrunner, 1 month ago to random

@brainwane your assistance, please, either directly or through boosting.

My wife has been using ALLTEST nasal swab tests from maskwholesale.eu. they have been extremely sensitive and reliable.

Unfortunately, not only did maskwholesale raise the price, but also no longer ship to the USA. As if that wasn't enough, they also are now offering a cheaper saliva-only test, which I didn't even know existed.

Thanks

WhyNotZoidberg, 1 month ago to random

This year is the best possible year for the idiocracy of "Daylight savings time" since monday this year is a holiday as well (thanks to Easter moving).

That said, instead of daylight savings time just change timezone permanently to +2 instead of +1. You really don't lose any daylight in winter by switching to "normal time" anyway.

anderseknert, 1 month ago to random

Question: what's the max time that you'd find acceptable for your unit tests to run?

And I'm well aware that there's a bunch of considerations, no right answer, and so on. Just curious to learn what people think.

kyonshi, 2 months ago to gaming

Huh, so what I'm reading is... no need to buy Dragons Dogma 2, it'll be marked down to nothing soon enough?

#gaming #dragonsdogma2

brainwane, 3 months ago to random

2 people I like have now independently told me they've been enjoying Mick Herron's Slough House novels (adapted as the TV show Slow Horses)

so that's promising and I might try those soon

cstross, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Current micro-playlist:

— Full Spectrum Dominance by Killng Joke (pure trance youth dub remix)

— Kleptocracy by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

— Capitalism™ (We Own You) by Rotersand

— What are we going to do about the Rich? by Pet Shop Boys

— New Gold Dream by Utah Saints (cover of Simple Minds)

— What Time Is Love? (feat Crystal) by People of K (aka The KLF)

— President God by Chant

— Happy Up Here by Röyksopp

— Ukraine by DJ Hell

— War on Error (Reprise) by Rotersand

vga256, 3 months ago to history

did some game preservation research today.

a few years ago i was able to get my hands on one of the only surviving copies (in the world) of the interactive book Portal, for the Macintosh Plus.

no, not that Portal. the original one, from 1986, by novelist Rob Swigart.

thank the gods the ~40 year old diskettes were still viable, and I was able to image it on my Color Classic.

but, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get the damned thing to run properly. my CC hated it. mini vMac hated it. System 7 hated it. System 6 hated it. everything caused the game to lock up after a few seconds, or get hung playing random music.

that was until today. in a moment of utter insanity, i realized that the creators of Portal did something very special for the Macintosh Plus: they made the game a f'ing BOOTER. it was never meant to be run from within the OS. you just inserted the diskette, turned on your Plus. the entire game is an operating system of its own, executing instructions from the CPU and ROM. this isn't anything new for C64 or Apple // users, but for the Macintosh it was practically unheard of. they replicated the Macintosh System 2 gui perfectly, just for the game.

the Macintosh port is still gorgeous today: a mouse-driven point'n'click UI with high-res 1-bit icons, and high-res text. it feels good in a way that none of the other versions (C64, DOS, Amiga) do.

but what stands out to me, nearly 40 years after its release, is that this is a hypertext game through and through. the story unfolds as you click around, wandering from computer network to computer network, reading documents and piecing together how the Earth became abandoned hundreds of year ago.

as far as I know, Portal's creators (Rob Swigart and Brad Fregger) were never credited for producing a very early Hypertext game. Portal predates Hypercard by an entire year.

recorded some gameplay in mini vMac for posterity. as far as I know, this is the only footage of Portal for the Macintosh that has ever existed on the web.

http://macintoshgarden.org/games/portal

#macintosh #gamePreservation #vintageApple #history #hyperText

The user boots a copy of Portal (disk 1) on the mini vMac macintosh emulator. The game boots, showing a login screen. The user types in vga256 as his username, and the game loads black and white graphics. The splash screen for Portal shows, and credits the designers and writer. The player then begins playing the game. The game consists of a series of icons on the screen that can be clicked on, which yield text windows that tell the story. As the player clicks through text, certain desktop icons unlock which allow the player to progress through the storyline.

StillIRise1963, 3 months ago to random

Dear everyone who recommended Zenni Optical,
my husband just got a new pair of glasses in the mail from them. He LOVES THEM. He can see well and they look really good. $155.00. Thank you very much!!

codinghorror, 3 months ago to random

What's your biggest guilty pleasure band? It's gotta be borderline shameful. I have quite a few, but I'll go with Styx to start.. 😂

luckytran, 3 months ago to random

Hmmm. It’s like GenZ has spent their formative years living through a historic pandemic that is causing mass death and disability.

grimalkina, 3 months ago to random

I have ✨ a new preprint ✨ to share!!

This is a scientific review paper which seeks to provide a map, an entry point, and a call to action for improving the lives of the people who create software:

"Psychological Affordances Can Provide a Missing Explanatory Layer for Why Interventions to Improve Developer Experience Take Hold or Fail"

You can download it free and open access here:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qz43x

carnage4life, 4 months ago to random

Twitch plans to lay off 35% of staff despite layoffs last year. I thought Unity laying off 25% after last year's layoffs was brutal but this is even worse.

It seems clear that the holiday season didn't help tech companies as much as expected. Bad times to be in tech.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-09/amazon-s-twitch-to-cut-500-employees-about-35-of-staff?leadSource=reddit_wall

upol, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to disability

Long COVID friends, need your help.

Friend has #LongCovid. US-based Corporate Employer is bullying them with RTO.
What's the least traumatic way to get a doc's note? Can PCPs provide? Is this covered by ADA?

Pls repost for wider reach 🙏

#Covid #disability #CovidIsNotOver

luckytran, 5 months ago to random

It's a damning indictment of the selfishness of Western society that despite living in a pandemic that has killed tens of millions of people, we haven't even learned to normalize wearing a mask or staying home when we are sick, regardless of what bug you might have.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/12/a-cold-a-super-cold-or-covid-should-i-carry-on-regardless

The rules of illness changed after Covid: previously there was an expectation that you would take your rhinovirus all round town until you dropped dead, and if you happened to give it to anyone, they would appreciate you even more, because now they would know how rubbish you felt. While the pandemic delivered nothing of the large-scale social revolution many of us hoped for at the start, it did at least ram home this trace of wisdom: maybe just stay in bed if you are not well? However, like all social corrections, it has turned into an over correction, so now it’s plague rules: if you want to go anywhere with a runny nose, you first have to assure everyone that it’s not Covid. This is quite a dark art, since lateral flow tests are a bit patchy and sometimes notice the disease only once it is on the way out of your body. You have to make it work with the force of your conviction: “I promise it’s not Covid.” Then you have to square off all the other modern respiratory infections – “I don’t believe it to be ‘white lung’ pneumonia”; “I’m pretty sure it’s not a super cold” – before the broad spectrum assurance that by now will not be believed: “I was fine when I left the house!” Followed by, pointlessly: “This is 100% true.”

jackhutton, 5 months ago to ai

Wow: “Early in the COVID-19 pandemic a blizzard of disinformation had deadly consequences. A Carnegie Mellon study analyzed more than 200 million tweets discussing COVID-19 at the height of the first lockdown. Eighty-two percent of influential users advocating for “reopening America” were bots. This was a targeted “propaganda machine,” most likely Russian, designed to intensify the worst public health crisis in a century.”

#ai #TheComingWave #disinformation

82 percent!

windrunner, 6 months ago to disability

Has anyone out there in Mastodon land ever bought a van and then later converted it for full wheelchair accessibility? If so, would you please share details?

I'm disabled but ambulatory enough to transfer. We're looking for something with a hoist for now and then be able to put a ramp in later.

Please boost for reach.

#disability #wheelchair #accessibility #wheelchairVan
#accessibilityConversion #vanConversion

WhyNotZoidberg, 6 months ago to gaming

I'd love a DLC for Cyberpunk set as a semi-prequel, aka expanding on the time you work with Jackie before the act II of the main game.

#Gaming #Cyberpunk2077