@tkinias@historians.social
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

tkinias

@tkinias@historians.social

Assistant professor of history & #histodon. Research race and whiteness in the British Empire (especially Queensland & British Columbia). Teach European & world history with a focus on colonialism & empire.

Previous careers include teaching English as a foreign language and a variety of IT jobs (from Web dev to pulling cables).

Linux geek & SF nerd.

Views my own and probably ill-informed.

He/him.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

reginasbread, (edited ) to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

I don't have TV at home, and every time I'm in a hotel, I turn it on and congratulate myself on this decision because it's terrible. but today! today I'm watching Columbo :rainbowdance:

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@reginasbread
to be honest, I find the TV basically invisible when I’m in a hotel—like it literally doesn’t even occur to me to turn it on

(it’s visiting my father that reminds me how grateful I am that there’s no TV in my house)

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

There’s an interesting linguistic thing happening where the word ‘GIF’ has ceased to refer to a file format and come to refer simply to short video clips. I just realized that most of the ‘GIFs’ out there now are actually .mp4 or other video files.

I wonder how many young people even know that .gif was just a crappy 8-bit file format with patent problems?

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@TerryHancock
yeah, I think “GIFs” on the Bird Site work that way as well—and I recently noticed that this is now how (at least some of) the GIF repository sites distribute them as well

FredKiesche, to random
@FredKiesche@dice.camp avatar

FINISHED: Warlock (Omnibus of Storm Over Warlock, Ordeal in Otherwhere and Forerunner Foray) by Andre Norton.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/372023

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath @FredKiesche
thinking historically, it’s interesting to recall that when the GDW crew were designing Traveller, works like this were pretty recent—basically what circa Y2K sf would be for young game designers today?

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

One cool thing about expressing temperature in kelvin is that it drives home what a narrow range of temperatures we actually experience: like if it’s 300K, a 10% drop takes you from ‘unpleasantly hot’ to ‘literally freezing’—and a 10% rise takes you to ‘dead in minutes’.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Hey, @FredKiesche get a load of this.
Remember those ancient Winston juvenile science fiction novels? The ones with that distinctive italic font on the title page?

Well, somebody has identified the font. It is Lydian Cursive.

Sounds useful to make memes or other obscure jokes about vintage scifi

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/276895/what-is-the-font-used-by-the-john-c-winston-company

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/276895/what-is-the-font-used-by-the-john-c-winston-company

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath @FredKiesche
the font was apparently released in 1940—it’s definitely ‘of its time’!

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

Alistair Young @cerebrate
just got raided by the FBI
https://twitter.com/notcerebrate/status/1674161159107379201?s=20
(Bird sitel

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath @cerebrate
that’s horrifying!

ve7fim, to random
@ve7fim@mastodon.social avatar

TFW a file format is so old that it includes an "insert paper tape this way" arrow as part of the header: Looks like this traces back to the PDP-11.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@ve7fim
what file format is that?

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@ve7fim
how cool! that’s a format I‘ve never encountered (burning PROMs is way lower-level stuff than I ever worked on)...

fasterthanlime, to random
@fasterthanlime@hachyderm.io avatar

we're all in agreement Google pivoted from "search engine" to "mafia" a while ago, yes?

search results for "Vimeo OTT" show 3 paid listings from competitors, the first real result is (way) below the fold. I guess Vimeo didn't pay for protection this month.

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@fasterthanlime
interesting that I don’t see this – when I turn off adblock, the only sponsored result is actually from Vimeo, and the first ‘natural’ result for a search on the string "vimeo ott" is vimeo dot com slash ott

it’s been a source of annoyance to me for some time now that Google search results aren’t reproducible...

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath @simonbp @swope @DmMacniel
Also lots of historical examples of corporations establishing colonies on earth, then catastrophically mismanaging them and having them basically get nationalized—from Virginia to India and beyond.

tkinias, (edited )
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath @simonbp @swope @DmMacniel
(and of course a savvy corporation will get the state to take over the costs and obligations of the colony while retaining rights to the income stream, like BSAC did in Rhodesia)

rysiek, to random
@rysiek@mstdn.social avatar

Unheard of! Disgraceful discrimination of the most productive members of society! Pure socialism, plain and simple! This could have been any one of us owners of >75m superyachts!

> A superyacht owned by Bernard Arnault – the world’s second-richest man – has been banned from docking in Naples owing to a new regulation that has left multibillionaires “thoroughly disappointed” about missing out on staying at the southern Italian city.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/25/billionaires-disappointed-superyachts-banned-from-naples-mergellina-port-bernard-arnault

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@rysiek
I somehow doubt that a ship of that size lacks any boats that could be used to come into the harbour...

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@rysiek yeah 😔

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

I will never understand what makes people think it’s acceptable to have conversations on speakerphone in a public place.

nyrath, to random
@nyrath@spacey.space avatar

How to create a game using hyperbolic geometry?

https://roguetemple.com/z/hyper/dev.php

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nyrath
I gotta bookmark this to come back to when I'm not on my phone...

nixCraft, to history
@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar

NCSA Mosaic (web browser - 1993–1997) running on

tkinias,
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

@nixCraft
that brings back lots of fond memories...

tkinias, to random
@tkinias@historians.social avatar

Warming trend for Colorado (U.S.A.), 1895–2022 <https://showyourstripes.info>

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • ngwrru68w68
  • InstantRegret
  • thenastyranch
  • magazineikmin
  • tacticalgear
  • rosin
  • everett
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • cubers
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • megavids
  • ethstaker
  • mdbf
  • Leos
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • tester
  • modclub
  • khanakhh
  • cisconetworking
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • normalnudes
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •