ifixcoinops

ifixcoinops, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to random

Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man

MAN

Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race

Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating

EDIT 2023-11-27 2130 UTC: I muted this thread a while back because wew lad this got too big. I won't see your reply but the lurkers (and commentors) of Hacker News might.

ifixcoinops, 11 months ago to random

Alright, so how come I'm ifixcoinops@retro.social now when I was ifixcoinops@mstdn.social yesterday, what's the story, what's everyone banging on about with the dot art and Welsh pixies and Meta meta and stuxes, alright here's the Short Version

Stux = guy who runs mstdn.social and a bunch of other general-purpose fedi sites
Welshpixie = lady who runs mastodon.art, an art focused mastodon website
AJ = guy who runs retro.social, this website
Meta = Facebook, hereafter referred to as Facebook because they don't get to change their name and wash away their past sins any more than my Lucky Goldstar dishwasher does

Facebook: Mmmmmmay we pleasssse have a little CHAT with the big adminsssssss, we promissssse we'll be good this time <3
Fediverse in general: Haha get bent facebook, we weren't born yesterday
Facebook: That wassss Facebook, we've reconssssidered, let'ssss be friendssss
Me: Happily dunking on people who spell accessibility as a11y and completely oblivious to this whole conversation
Welshpixie: Ey up, facebook are up to their old tricks again, remember not to fall for it guys
Stux: Nasty Welsh Pixie, let's give them a chance, I will block your Whole Entire Domain
mstdn.social website: A block you say, a defederation, now that's quite serious, that's for when you don't want anyone on your website to follow anyone on this other website, are you quite -
Stux: yes I'm sure lol
mstdn.social website: Very well, chop
Everyone on mstdn.social who was following anyone on mastodon.art: suddenly, silently not following those people any more
Everyone on mastodon.art who was following anyone on mstdn.social: also suddenly silently not following those people any more
Everyone on both websites who was following anyone on the other website: WTF STUX
Stux: oh uh yeah hm. Ahem. That may have been hasty. I wonder if I can undo some of the -
mstdn.social website: nope
Stux: I think I'll take a break from the computer for a bit
Me: Drinking beer and playing Beat Saber with a couple of out-of-town mates and completely oblivious to this whole thing happening
Me: goes to bed
Fediverse: meta meta meta
Me: good morning fediverse, what are the haps my frieWHAT THE HELL
Me: WHERE'S MY GOOD MORNING ART
Fediverse: meta meta meta
Me: FACEBOOK? WHAT?
Several People: Dan my server's gonna defed from yours in a week, can you move?
Me: what no what's going on that's not enough time I've got things to do, tell you what though I'll have some time in the autumn and I like you too, can we catch back up then?
Several People: we are chill and lovely and we understand
Me: slowly pieces together what's going on while drinking a Winsford Mocha

---intermission because I have a fifty thousand character post limit now---

A Winsford Mocha is an analogue of this fancy "mocha" coffee stuff you tasted once in the far-off land of Chester, where they have coffee shops; you live in Winsford, which is a town best known for having Europe's last remaining salt mine, a literal man-made hole in the world, where there are no such frivolities, so you attempt your own. It's two spoons of instant coffee, two spoons of Cadbury's drinking chocolate, microwaved for a minute, stirred and microwaved for another minute, and drunk with thumb resting on the spoon because the contents tend to settle.

---intermission over---

Me: WTF STUX I HAVE NO IDEA WHO I WAS FOLLOWING FROM .ART APART FROM WELSHPIXIE, HOW AM I GOING TO RE-FOLLOW ALL MY ART PEOPLE
Everyone on both affected sides of this whole shambles: YEAH SAME DAN I SEE YOU'RE LATE TO THE PARTY HERE
Me: Sigh. I guess I'll move servers, AGAIN, and probably spend a month or two having random people look at my join date and tell me I'm using mastadon wrong, AGAIN, but this'll have to wait, I have Things To Do
Mastodon: it's Mast-OH-don actually
Me: I know
The Fediverse: actually it's the F... ah, you know
The Things I must Do: oh my god where do I even start, they are a nice even spread between equally important physical things and computer things and family things and some of them have Rather Tight Deadlines, I will spare you the details but this is why I said to several people lol see you in October
Me: I am mad about this situation and I want to talk to someone IRL about it but how the hell do I even start to explain why this is even possible without that person resolving to never ever ever even glance at this whole fediverse thing
Stux: notices me, noticing him and his horrible mistakes
Stux: Say, that post of yours... not the one where you call me a wanker, it'd be a bit heavy-handed to delete that one, if I were to delete that one then you'd be able to say "Lol look at this fragile guy everyone" and you'd be right, but this one from yesterday:
Me, from yesterday: "Extremely popular take that some here won't like but seriously need to sit with: spelling words like a11y or l10n or i18n or m17n is bloody incomprehensible and makes you look like an absolute w4r"
Stux: yeah, that content violates the following community guidelines: "No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users." I am going to remove it.
Me: oh no, not only is he not taking a break from the computer, he's back to pressing buttons and he's gone into petty "LOOK AT THE POWER I HAVE TO REMOVE YOUR VERY WORDS" mode, I have to move TODAY while I can still get an archive of my shite
AJ: Hey you can put your shite here
Me: Thank you AJ, I will put my shite right there. I will fill your website with my shite.
Several long threads of mine which started on mastodon.social which is the website I was on before I was on mstdn.social which is the website I was on before I moved to retro.social today: lol what are you gonna do, make a blog?

---the story is done but so is the damage---

Everybody I was following on mastodon.art: I'm still not following them; there's no way to get that data back, shy of just kinda stumbling across folk and going "Oh I recognise them, follow"
Everybody from mastodon.art who was following me, probably months from now: Hmm haven't seen that joystick pop up in my feed for a while, wonder if he died, shrug
The Fediverse In General: LACKING in having tools to recover from the social damage that can be wrought with one reckless button press
Facebook: hrmmmm yesssssssss, yum yum yum, licks eyeballs
Me: sure hope next time this daft shite happens there's some kind of backup
AJ: My server can do 50,000 characters
Me: makes USE of this, haha you all get TURBO DAN NOW

ifixcoinops, 6 months ago to random

If you're in the US and you've also been idly wondering why "I don't like to drive at night" has become such a common thing to say in the past few years, stand near to a modern LED streetlamp and block it with your hand. In about two thirds of a second, the whole road brightens up as your pupils open.

You're not just getting old; between over-bright streetlights, over-bright headlights of oncoming cars, over-bright instrument clusters, over-bright porch lighting, nobody can see in the dark anymore.

Just in the last decade we've made it much harder and more dangerous to drive at night. Oh, and we also gave up the stars.

ifixcoinops, 9 months ago to random

In case y'all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I'd let y'all know I bought a 1980's hybrid pinball/videogame tonight

ifixcoinops, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to random

Urgent, boosts appreciated: My web host, Heart Internet, is imploding (I found this out AFTER I'd paid them for a year's worth of dedicated server up front) and I need recommendations for a company doing dedicated servers. Please, PLEASE only tell me about companies that you personally have used and have positive firsthand experience with, please don't just google this for me.

EDIT: I'm going with Hetzner, thanks to your recommendations and the recommendations of folk I know IRL and was able to chat with face-to-face, thanks everyone for boosting this so widely and giving me so many excellent recs, there's no need to boost this post any more, you are all wonderful

EDIT 2: folk asking how I know Heart's winding up, check out the TrustPilot reviews from mid-August on, you gotta read between the lines a bit but the takeaway is a) they're doing the "whoops we're experiencing unusually high volume of support requests" thing, b) at least one support team member is going "Screw it, here's how to transfer your domains to someone else." I assume that's why y'all are still boosting this lol

EDIT 3: maybe y'all are still boosting this because the "I'm asking for firsthand experience pls don't just google it for me" bit is Resonating with you, I want to let you know that it annoys me as much as it annoys you. A fun game to play when someone does that is to ask them how they know, and when they say google, pretend not to know what that is and ask them to explain it

ifixcoinops, 5 days ago to random

As many of you know (because I won't shut up about it) I've gotten back into enjoying bikes after a brief two-decade hiatus

During that time, youtube was invented, and bike mechanics are on it, and oof mate I watched a video the other day

Dude was complaining about bikes being a durable good and there being so many bikes around and the manufacturers have to come up with new things or they won't sell any bikes anymore and that'll be bad for the industry and this was just such an illuminating look into the other end of how people approach these machines

Like, bikes are free. They cost nothing. There are so many of them. People put them out on the kerb on bin night. People chuck them in skips. The river's full of them. Once you've scrubbed the rust off and spent a few quid on new tubes etc a bike that you found waiting for the bin van still goes as fast as a brand new bike from today because they're powered by sandwiches that you were gonna eat anyway. Zooming around on trash night laughing your arse off on a bike that still has the "FREE BIKE" sign flapping in the wind feels like sticking your middle finger up at capitalism

ifixcoinops, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Is it influx time?

Folk mewling outside the door in the rain going "Back on twitter I had a nice group of fellow furry plumbers from Scotland born in the early 80's who are into game boy ROM hacking, I can't find them now," ask around and @ me and people will boost your ask until it rattles around the system enough for you to find your Incredibly Specific group of people. The algorithm here is Folks and Luck, and those as don't ask don't get.

ifixcoinops, 8 months ago to random

Boosts appreciated:

Every time I get my calipers out to measure a thing I go "Agh, these calipers are a load of flimsy shite and the batteries run down even when I'm not using them, I should buy a better set," and then I never do, so fedi, please recommend me a good set of digital calipers that you've got firsthand experience with.

Difficulty level: I live among AMERICANS and am subject to their measuring nonsense so it has to give fractional inches as well as proper.

ifixcoinops, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago) to random

A boosted "Hey it's getting dark and I'm getting blue, help me out with Seasonal Affective Disorder tips" post reminded me of how I deal with my own seasonal affective disorder, so here, a small thread.

Here's how it works for me: my brain tells me to be sad in winter and happy in spring. But, my brain is a gullible little noodle, and I can trick it into thinking it's summer just by shining a bright light at it. So, light therapy lamp!

EXCEPT: light therapy lamps are very expensive. If I'm to spend money on my brain, I'm going to do it the cheap way AND the silly way, and build a smegging light therapy CANNON

(edit: haha this angle makes my wrist look REALLY WEIRD lol noodlywrist)

ifixcoinops, 4 months ago to random

Trying to make it so my players can click a button and play a MIDI file, because I can do a MIDI playback in like 20kb vs like 4 megs for an MP3.

1999: yeah no problem dude

2024: well, no, but there's a JavaScript thing that you can install via whatever the hell NPM is, there's twenty megs of soundfonts to go with it,

ifixcoinops, 11 months ago to random

How a Fediverse newbie sees the "Where do I sign up" question:
🤦 Right, so mastodon.art is for posting about art, mastodon.gamedev.place is for posting about the game I'm not making, yiff.life is for posting shirtless Robin Hood pics, christ which facet of my personality do I fragment across which servers

The important thing that isn't written down where the newbie can see it:
the artists on mastodon.art are posting recipes and random showerthoughts, the game devs on mastodon.gamedev.place are posting pictures of their socks, the furries on yiff.life are chatting about lumberjackery and they're all replying and riffing and chatting about everything in a big soup; none but the most terminally optimistic admin is demanding nor expecting or even at this point tbh even hoping that any given server stays "on topic"

The newbie:
🤦 I cannae decide, and I don't wanna sign up for different servers for all my different hobbies and identities and general Ingredients Of The Lumpy Stew That Is Me, I'll go for a general-purpose server with a lot of people on it. Oh hey this one's just for being generally social, it even ends with .social, that'll do, job done

ifixcoinops, 2 months ago to random

Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...

When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading

When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip

When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read

When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing

When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information

When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling

...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.

ifixcoinops, 8 months ago to random

So I spent the last six months on a server move / PHP upgrade for my web game, Improbable Island, and I'm FINALLY DONE OMFG

"Why the hell did it take six months, Dan?" well because I've been making and running this game for fifteen years and it's gotten HUGE, that's why.

Anyway it's blazing fast now and if you wanna give it a go, it's at https://www.improbableisland.com!

Also, if you've got a personal hobby website, I'll run a banner for it on the New Day page, no money, no catch, you don't even have to link back, just collecting cool hobby sites and showing them to my players to help keep the internet weird. Special consideration given to weird 1997-looking Neocities stuff. :) https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php for that one.

Boosts appreciated!

ifixcoinops, 1 month ago to random

Periodic reminder that I'll advertise your weird hobby website to my Improbable Island players for free, no catch, https://www.improbableisland.com/hobbysites.php

Why? Because google doesn't like it when people give away what they're trying to sell, and fuck those guys lol

ifixcoinops, 2 months ago to random

Seven year anniversary of that "Six reasons Mastodon won't survive" article

Fedi: 🚲✨🦊🏳️‍⚧️ haha we showed him
Also fedi: 🚲✨🦊🏳️‍⚧️ haha only six wow we've found WAY more since then

ifixcoinops, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago) to random

Mildly spicy web advertising takes

• 468x60 static non-animated non-tracking banners for cool webcomics and weird hobby blogs are brilliant and only the most tedious of people have any problem with them at all

• blog writers and webcomic artists getting paid a couple bucks here and there for running non-intrusive ads is Good Actually

• the shittiness of web ads scales exponentially in accordance with how much money you're trying to make off them - if you want a few extra quid each month for pizza and beer money, web ads are great and useful to everyone, that's the perfect use case; if you want more money than that then ads are the wrong tool for the job, and you can in fact use the wrong tool wrong enough to destroy democracy

Edit: one more

• the fact that my adblocker will look at a 468x60 non-animated non-intrusive non-spyware banner ad for a gay webcomic and go "ah yes, this can go in the same hole as this 50 megabyte video ad for a toothbrush you bought last week, loaded with so much spyware javascript that your processor fan roars like a jet engine," by DEFAULT, is... honestly tragic. These are Different Things but, remember the most tedious people in the world I mentioned above? They made the adblocker

ifixcoinops, 22 days ago to random

Ooooh should Pinball Dad stick his toe in the Linux Discourse

I've been on it since 2010, I guess I should maybe?

How about I stick my whole entire foot in, maybe if I poison it with my footstink then it'll die down a bit

ifixcoinops, 10 months ago to random

I'm getting on a plane to go and visit my family in England tomorrow, which is nice :)

But I had to go clothes shopping, boooooo

ifixcoinops, 5 months ago to random

Wanna see how a pinball/arcade tech does his xmas lights?

The wise among you will be thinking "Now this could go one of a couple ways," and you'd be right

It's either gonna be 🎇✨🎆

or 🦝

ifixcoinops, 8 months ago to random

Littleun's school is doing a charity event that's clearly changed a bit over the years - the flyer has some cartoon penny-people waving flags and it says "1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a coin war!"

"Coin isn't enough syllables," I say, narrowing my eyes, "but alright, you can have my odd change if it'll get her class a root beer float party."

All US coins and bills accepted, it says, "WELL THAT'S BANG AGAINST THE PENNY-WAR SPIRIT OF THE THING" I say, but whatever, let's empty out the jelly bean machine, it'll be a nice excuse to show y'all the coin mechanism.

ifixcoinops, 4 months ago to random

Wanna repaint upstairs, dunno what colour, typing "What colour should I paint my walls" into DDG like a total chump, if that question had an answer then paint shops wouldn't exist, yet there's a million linkspam websites and a thousand youtube videos that'll all waste your time taking ten minutes each to say "IDK LOL"

ifixcoinops, 1 month ago to Pittsburgh

Are you on here, Suzuki Carry owner in #pittsburgh?

If I didn't have spouse and kid with me I would've waited so I could compliment you on your awesome truck (and ask you things, let's be honest)

you probably wouldn't have been long, with the toolbox in the back and all

ifixcoinops, 7 months ago to random

Yesterday was a hard day. Got cheered up a bit today by getting a free bike off one of those Buy Nothing groups on Facebook.

When last I visited my family I rode a pushbike for the first time in over twenty years and I'd forgotten how much fun they were, how light, how without the context of being on top of an engine you look behind yourself and go "Wow, I went FAR!" and I said "Haha yeah I'm gonna get a bike when I get back to America." My brother said, as many people in my life have always said, "Dan, never buy a pushbike, people throw or give them away them all the time" and everyone's right of course, they do.

This thing's got two problems, slow leaks in the tyres and not changing gears properly. I've never fiddled with a derailleur before but eh, it's not rocket science, it just goes in and out on a cable; got the derailleur all cleaned off and adjusted up and still no dice so I took apart the shifter mech that lives on the yoke. Symptom was it wouldn't shift down more than a couple of clicks, this is the style where you've got two levers, one has a positive snap and one feels like a ratchet, the ratchetty one weren't ratchetting so I figured its ratchet must be stuck open and aye, its ratchet were stuck open.

Now if only I'd known this thing came apart on a left-hand thread, I might not have stripped that one bolt and be waiting on parts, but in the meantime I worked it a bit and gave it a drop of oil and now the ratchet bit works if you press up as well as in lol, just kinda hold it together with a squeeze whenever you change gears, it's fine

Tyres can wait til the weekend, I'll just pump it up now and then

Also this thing is so high. It's SO. HIGH. I'm 185cm and when I went to see to the bloke giving it away I craned my neck right back to say hello, dude could've been 2m tall. The seat's already down as far as it'll go and I'm 41 so I don't think I'm likely to grow into it. Getting real Penny Farthing feeling tryna ride the thing. Good fun though, and littleun actually managed to Properly Ride her bike today for a few metres, pedalling and everything, so tomorrow's gonna be a dad-and-daughter-and-bike day