@arroz@mastodon.social
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

arroz

@arroz@mastodon.social

Indie Mac developer. Former Apple and survs.com. I program my home computer, beam myself into the future. Living in 🇨🇦, missing 🇵🇹.

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arroz, to random
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

Idiot driving on the bike lane. Cyclist forced the driver to stop. Driver refused to turn around despite being next to a parkade entrance with plenty of space for manoeuvring, insulted cyclist, switched to the car lane (one way only) and proceeded driving wrong way til the intersection.

But RoAd SaFeTy Is A ShArEd ReSpOnSaBiLiTy. Sure. The reality is if something doesn’t have (solid and strong) physical barriers around it, someone will drive there.

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

The show is starting!!! Please go back to your seats!

Aurora borealis in light green
Aurora borealis in light green

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph Where are you? I can see them from Stanley park! 😁

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

NOAA is calling this a G5 event now!!

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph Seems to have dropped to G1? 😭

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

Desperately trying to come up with plans to see the aurora tonight, with little success… 🥲

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph I considered grabbing an Evo and driving up Sea To Sky and stopping in Squamish somewhere, but I guess there would be too much light pollution. Not to keen on driving that highway on a Friday night, though.

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph Yeah, that might just work (and if it's reflected on the water, it's glorious). I'll see if I feel up to it tonight or not. It would probably work better on a place a few dozen meters above the water level, but I think most of Marine Drive view is blocked by trees.

I wonder if Burnaby Mountain would work… although it might be also messy on a friday night.

brunoph, to random
@brunoph@breakpoint.cafe avatar

Bought a TC-14EII 1.4x teleconverter for my telephoto lens, and Nikon lists the AF-S 105mm ƒ/2.8 macro lens as compatible but with "AF not possible", which made no sense since it's a very fast lens.

So I connected it to my Z6ii and… it worked fine! Fast AF too! Hmm… Maybe a recent firmware update fixed it?

So I tried on my 2006 F75 film camera and… it also worked!!

What the hell Nikon…

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@brunoph My back would hurt carrying that thing and a tripod around but I really wish I could take some photos with it. It’s heron season, they’re all around Stanley park lakes and the seawall, and very photogenic! Haven’t seen the sunset beach eagle, though.

arroz, to random
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

This is one of the worst takes I've seen recently. Not only because it fails to take into account all the cultural differences between US and Europe, but especially:

  1. DMA is NOT a restriction. On the contrary, it forces platform owners to not restrict what users and other companies can do on them, and;

1/2
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/112355242811014208

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar
  1. It's ironic to say this when the US has a history of shooting down any Chinese company that dares to be successful and play at the same level, or above, American companies. From Huawei to recently TikTok, the US must win, the good or bad way.

Europe sustains their regulations on principles. US bases their actions on maintaining their hegemony and position of power, at any cost.

vga256, to random
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

🥴

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@vga256 I wonder what happened there. It requires a lot of force to bend those panels!

danielpunkass, to random
@danielpunkass@mastodon.social avatar

Given the widespread reports of Apple ID problems, corroborated by articles in reputable publications, often by victims of the very problem, it's absurd that Apple's status page reflects no problems. There should be systemic change to prevent this: https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@danielpunkass A week ago we had to create a new Apple ID. It took days, multiple tries and support chats, and it’s still broken. Reload this page 3 times and it starts returning 503: https://appleid.apple.com/account Affects all requests so it’s impossible to fill the form and follow all the steps. Clearly a mechanism to avoid bots creating IDs poorly configured. Support person told me they would escalate this to engineer. It’s still broken after more than a week. 🤷‍♂️ Don’t they know this doesn’t work?!

arroz, to random
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

I swear I'll die before understanding the logic behind some links showing a preview while others don’t in social networks. These are two youtube links. Why the heck is one showing a preview but not the other? This kinda ruins my post. @ivory any insight? I'm guessing you had to figure this out.

icanzilb, to random
@icanzilb@mastodon.social avatar

So um, I tried something that I didn't do in a long time - went to see a movie in a cinema. Here are all the trailers I had to watch for half an hour before the show:

  1. Two black cops karate a whole lot of people while cars constantly explode in the back.
  2. Ryan Gossling karates dozens of bad guys while a female screen partner falls in live with him. Cars explode continuously.
  3. Rabid apes karate half naked humans. And to my surprise- a lot of explosions in the background...
    (1)
arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@icanzilb I tried to go to a mainstream cinema in North America exactly once. It was substantially more expensive than renting in iTunes, and I had to endure 20 minutes of advertising. Not trailers. Ads. After paying much more than I would pay to rent and watch at home without ads.

I still like specialized cinemas like VIFF but the mainstream cinema experience is dead to me.

vga256, to random
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

😭 for nearly a year i've had nothing but problems uploading videos to my instance. about 25% of the time it would work after a dozen retries. other times it would fail completely.

i knew it had something to do with ffmpeg, but upgrading ffmpeg to the latest version made no difference.

painful lessons learned:

  • /live/app/models/media_attachment.rb (line 101) - 'loglevel' => 'fatal' can be changed to 'verbose' to reveal more output from the sidekiq log

  • while it is true you have the latest version of ffmpeg installed, no one promised that mastodon would see it

  • i had a ten-year-old ffmpeg 2.x install lurking in /opt/local that mastodon was using, and completely ignoring my more recent version, all thanks to an errant PATH in my ancient bash_profile 😩

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@vga256 Can you send your post to the .social admins? 😄 Their problem is probably the load but what you wrote accurately describes my experience posting videos.

arroz, to random
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

It's now April 25 in Portugal. People are out in the streets celebrating the 50 years of the revolution that brought us democracy and freedom from a fascist regime. Unfortunately, tainted by 50 fascist, populist elected MPs just a few months ago. But they will not prevail. Viva o 25 de Abril!

https://sicnoticias.pt/especiais/50-anos-do-25-de-abril/2024-04-24-video-momento-unico-grandola-vila-morena-cantada-no-largo-do-carmo-1f815010

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@villares Thanks! I forgot. 😖

icanzilb, to random
@icanzilb@mastodon.social avatar

Hey folks, imagine I'm going through my most frustrating day in the last year. What would you say to me?

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@icanzilb If it's the fault of a specific person or bunch of people, this always makes me feel better and is very good advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkz6qKCYjDM

arroz, to random
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

‘“Os orientais são lentos”, apontou [Marcelo], acrescentando que Montenegro, apesar de não ser oriental, também é lento.’

Alguém retire este tipo da presidência o quanto antes. Ou é decotes ou é racismo. Que vergonha. 🤦‍♂️

https://sicnoticias.pt/pais/2024-04-24-marcelo-diz-que-montenegro-tem-comportamentos-rurais-e-que-costa-era-lento-por-ser-oriental-8d490565

jamesthomson, to random
@jamesthomson@mastodon.social avatar

Saving this somewhere safe for June!

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@jamesthomson But does it have bananas in the about box?

csilverman, to random
@csilverman@mastodon.social avatar

Curious to see how people interpret this pattern. Is the switch on or off?

(I would have done a poll, but apparently you can't have an image and a poll in the same post.)

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@csilverman Assuming an UI in light mode, on.

cocoaphony, to random
@cocoaphony@mastodon.social avatar

We have four cats and always debate which is the goofiest. You think humans are weird, but it turns out all mammals are probably pretty messed up. This one is in in his nightly “you must pet me, but don’t touch me. I don’t like people and you scare me, but also I require a very lot of skritches, ideally at the very edge of your reach so you can’t be grabbing me or whatever you people always are doing”

He’s a very cool, totally black panther of a cat. And a bizarre goofball all the time.

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@cocoaphony Best thing about living with multiple cats is seeing how the personality of each one is different, just like humans.

vga256, to VHS
@vga256@dialup.cafe avatar

so for the past month i've been leaving old vhs movies on in the background while i work

i noticed that several tapes had faded audio that got worse over the course of the film, with a lot of humming in the background, to the point of being inaudible after a while. a few web searches suggested either a worn out vhs tape (which I feared), or a poorly tracked vcr (I adjusted the tracking, which didn't improve anything)

i did notice that my older JVC vcr never had the "stereo" light on when playing back movies, and had a suspicion:

so holy crap, til: most VHS tapes past a certain age have two audio tracks: an analog mono track, and a stereo hi-fi track

when the vcr can't track the stereo hi-fi track properly, it switches to the analog mono track on the edge of the tape.

my vcr was always downgrading to the analog track, which on several (ex-rental) tapes had degraded due to mishandling and abuse (being at the edge of the tape path)

i picked up a Sony SLV-778HF today for $20 just to see if switching VCRs would make a difference.

holy COW is this a huge improvement over my old 80s JVC vcr! not only did it pick up the stereo hi-fi track on all of the "bad" tapes perfectly, but it improved the video so much that it looks like a dvd.

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@vga256 Sony was awesome! I had a SLV-715, and one cool thing it allowed was recording only the mono audio track, or the video+stereo track. That way, audio commentary could be added by replacing the mono audio. I can't remember if it allowed to play both simultaneously or just switch between them, but either way it was really cool.

After it broke down, I replaced it with a Grundig, and even after many years of tech development, it wasn't quite the same thing. Sony was really special.

simonbs, to random
@simonbs@mastodon.social avatar

When I posted this, I did not expect all these replies reporting similar issues. The number of people saying they occasionally/often have to restart Safari to make it work properly is flabbergasting to me. I probably restart Safari at least once a day, and that’s mildly frustrating.
https://mastodon.social/@simonbs/112274840951637693

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@simonbs That and many variants happen to me daily. It's usually triggered by stuff like hitting the back button, typing the return key on a URL field or closing a tab when the timing is just right.

Symptoms include nothing loading, messed up back/fwd stack, audio of videos on closed tabs still playing in the background, and on the iPad sometimes even the URL field disappears from the toolbar.

Video thing is scary since it means a web view may remain alive doing things without any visible UI.

drahardja, to random
@drahardja@sfba.social avatar

Welp, I’m glad I didn’t buy a AI Pin.

“Humane AI Pin review: not even close”

https://www.theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-review

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@drahardja @breadbin Even if it worked perfectly, not only I don’t want to be speaking to my devices in public for many obvious reasons, but there’s also a strong “designed in a place where people can use a T-shirt indoors and outdoors during 10 months of the year” aspect in this product. I don’t see people having the patience to detach and reattach the device every time they dress or undress a coat or sweater. Or the device being attachable at all to thick winter dawn jackets rated for -20C.

tonyarnold, to random
@tonyarnold@mastodon.social avatar

My surgeon has said they'd like to send me home from the hospital tomorrow (after 24 days), and I know I'm going to be even more exhausted once I'm home, but I am looking forward to it so very much.

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@tonyarnold Glad everything went ok and you’re leaving the hospital! Can’t even imagine how it feels after so long. Enjoy home sweet home and being with your family. 😊 And hoping for a swift recovery! 💪

jamesthomson, to random
@jamesthomson@mastodon.social avatar

I'm looking forward to an official Apple definition of the word “retro”.

arroz,
@arroz@mastodon.social avatar

@jamesthomson Technically, Pippin was a console and ran MacOS… looking forward to play Bolo, Dark Castle and Shufflepuck on my iPad!

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