n8

n8, 25 days ago to random

Immigration pro tip: if you're from somewhere else but living in the UK, you can instantly gain a lot of clout if someone tells you where they're from and you can make a reference to it from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

(e.g., "I'm from Guilford" / "Oh, just like Ford Prefect")

n8, 1 month ago to random

I wonder what proportion of my old "ur1.ca" short URLs from the identi.ca/status.net days are still reachable...

(thought prompted by https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/112317310847290794 )

n8, 1 month ago to random

It feels like GItHub has an employee whose job description is "How can we make hyperlinks on the site less consistent on a daily basis" and that's cool & all; I really just want to know what that person's job title is.

n8, 2 months ago to mysteries

What do the cool kids use these days for hardware GPG/SSH key devices?

I went off to grad school for a couple of short years & now everybody wants different key lengths & formats than when I started, but most of the search results that fall out when I look are from 2015--2018.

I'm talking USB here, not dedicated smartcards.

Not sure what to make of that. Was this a fad that's passed now? Everyone gave up and just trusts full-disk encryption to save them? Or use their smartphones?

#mysteries

n8, 2 months ago to random

British -- and, IIRC, Irish -- friends: help me understand something. What historical era do the single-purpose "two prong electric shaver outlets" come from?

I mean, I've literally never seen one of the devices (owned or for sale), nor have I heard of anyone using them, but the outlets can be found absolutely everywhere, including places that no reasonable human being would ever tackle task ... like the public library. Or a moving train.

Are we talking 1980s here? 60s? 18th Century?

n8, 2 months ago to random

Hey nerds: I'm interested in book / online-resource / blog recommendations written about compiler design.

What have you got that's contemporary? By which I mean post-Dragon.

I'm not writing my own compiler, FTR, I just want to dig into the topic for my own education, e.g. to the point that I better understand debates and changelogs about GCC, LLVM, and whatnot.

(it was a subject I liked as an undergrad, but that wasn't yesterday)

n8, 5 months ago to random

Programmers will look you straight in the eye and say "that was discussed on an issue a year ago" rather than write a single word of #documentation

n8, 5 months ago to random

Do other people put on specific types of music to serve as an appropriate background match when reading particular books? Or am I the only normal one here?

n8, 5 months ago to random

On today's episode Why We Can't Have Nice Computing, if you have a file or folder with a trailing space in the name,

• You can't tell in MacOS Finder
• You can't tell in GitHub's web interface
• You can't tell in GitHub Desktop

But it will break stuff in actual git.

n8, 5 months ago to random

Next year I think I'm going to launch "Free Software White Elephant Secret Santa", where everybody puts their name in, gets a name drawn out at random, and then you commit some random code of your own into the main/trunk repository of the name that you drew.

n8, 6 months ago to random

Inside you there are two muppets.

One is a cookie monster: voracious, loud, devouring everything its eye beholds whilst flinging broken and wasted cookie chunks in every direction, but never satisfying its hunger.

The other is, I dunno, probably a rolf the dog or something. Feed the cookie monster.

#inspirationalthoughts

n8, 6 months ago to random

I can tell you that there's an "AI" bubble based on the fact that I listened to a comedy news podcast this week and comedians were telling rounds of jokes about the fact that "AI"-based startups do not do what they claim to & were correctly summing up what LLMs actually do. Let's repeat that again for clarity: comedians are joking about the topic based on its merits, not joking about the topic because it's scary or revolutionary or trendy or too-complicated-for-non-experts.

n8, 6 months ago to random

Does everybody put little stickers on the bezels on their monitor edges indicating where to divide it in thirds, or am I the only cool one?

n8, 6 months ago to random

Movie plot: villain with time machine uses it to travel back and assassinate authors on specific dates so that their life-plus-70-year copyrights expire at a convenient time.

n8, 6 months ago to random

Speaking of Naming Things, podcast apps also do a lousy job of handling it when a feed is renamed and/or has metadata revised.

I suppose it's because this is undefined behavior in the RSS / Atom specs, but it's certainly common enough in the real world.

n8, 6 months ago to random

Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs

n8, 7 months ago to uk

London. There's some kind of freaky, yellow orb in the sky, just sort of hovering over the city, glowing. Anybody else seeing this, #UK folks? Should we be worried?

Or did they build one of those Vegas style Spheres? Gov web sites have no info!

n8, 7 months ago to random

How do people organize their giant, local folders full of software projects that they've cloned with git?

One, flat folder directory (hoping that there are no name collisions?)?

Subfolders by hosting service / site? Or by that plus username?

Total chaos?

Hashtag we need to talk about #hierarchy

n8, 7 months ago to github

#ProTip for people writing #git / #github related #documentation:

"Clone the Foo repository" is a sentence that means one specific command in git lingo, to people who already know all the git lingo. To a normal person reading your page, it sounds like it means something abstract about making their repository resemble the Foo repository, and if their attempt at copying what they see misses some important detail, the fault was your page not clearly explaining that it meant that specific command.

n8, 7 months ago to random

Oh, great; so now apparently GitHub has added itself to the list of sites that decide to hijack your "search" keyboard command.

Time to burn it to the ground, kids!

n8, 7 months ago to random

In Britain it's called a zedbra.

n8, 7 months ago to random

There are a ton of headlines this morning saying that the White House has announced its Tech Hub locations, and that there are 31 of them ... which are located in 32 states and 1 territory.

Yes, several of the stories quote both; it's not just me cross-referencing. I haven't yet found a story that crunches the numbers (and several of the maps I've seen look different to boot).

But maybe it's just me; perhaps some of the Hubs are for quantum tunneling or wormhole portals which clears it all up.

n8, 7 months ago to random

Intel labels its processors with a combination of meaningless brand names like "Celeron" & "Core" and meaningless internal codenames like "Kirby Lake" & "Sandy Sky", the latter of which I think come from the place names of parking lots and alleyways near to the corporate headquarters building (? unclear).

Having two schemes is an extra-great system because every online support forum & blog is free to choose a third designation, like "15th generation", and use that instead.
#communicationing

n8, 7 months ago to NoStupidQuestions

I've been writing up some git-and-GitHub tips for people doing design projects, with a particular focus on type design.

I've dug up a LOT of individual references, but I think I also want to push this out into the ocean as a #question #foreverybody ... so feel free to #boost — I may have seen most of the easy-to-find stuff, but other people might not have & the thread could be useful. And I'm sure you have stuff I haven't seen:

What do you recommend as a Git/GitHub For Designers resources?

n8, 8 months ago to random

I don't know what size battery fits into the socket of these digital calipers and I can't figure out how to accurately measure it either.

#surprisinglynotajoke