uastronomer

@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za

Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
We do managed Mastodon hosting - ask me!

He/him (Linux)
He\him (Windows)

Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com

Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems, will help you do stuff on #AWS.

#SouthAfrica

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

uastronomer, to random

Yay, weather's improved to the point where enough sunlight is leaking through the clouds that the solar panels are actually putting something back into the batteries!

uastronomer, to random

Ways to learn a thing, in order of effectiveness:

  1. Proper training, with lesson plan and take-home materials, by a trained teacher.

  2. Training session by expert in the field, who has prepared for the lesson in advance.

  3. Proper written documentation.

  4. "Here are my notes" - hands over a .txt file where they've copy&pasted random commands and config options as they've been used over past 5 years, with no deletions or clues as to what's current and what's obsolete.

  5. Joining a series of 2 hour Teams meetings where you watch the microscopic screenshare of one of the two guys who are trying to figure out how to do the thing, complete with 5 minute silences while they refer to a manual (offscreen) or randomly walk through the filesystem looking for an example config file.

uastronomer,

I am in 5, only the guys are talking in my second language, and the rain is louder than my little laptop speakers

uastronomer,

About 4):
It's not always obvious whether you're looking at good notes or bad notes. Good notes can simply be a recipe, where they've simply written a sequence of commands that you can copy&paste, or modify to suit your needs.

But if you're generating those notes by running something like history > notes.txt (or, God help me, copying and pasting from your terminal window, and not editing out prompts etc, or God help me twice as much, saving a screenshot of the terminal window), then you're showing me all the mistakes you made. And it suggests that maybe you don't even know which lines were mistakes... you don't actually know what you're doing, making your notes worthless, and you have no business trying to train me wtf man

uastronomer, to random

Warcraft 2 Peon voice More rain?!

uastronomer, to random

Amazed to learn that we have 6 dollar billionaires in South Africa, same as Vietnam.

uastronomer, to random

It's official, I now stream videos of myself speedrunning crossword puzzles. Because I crave the admiration of my peers.

uastronomer, to random

Not bad, not bad!

Video recording of me solving today's Daily Maverix Mini Crossword in 32 seconds

uastronomer, to random

What a movie, though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS-zEH8YmiM

uastronomer, to random

Blog: "... as demonstrated in this file"

I click the link. It takes me to another page. I hunt around, find a reference to the file, click that, it takes me to a third page. More hunting till I find the tab I'm suppoed to switch to, finally a download link. click the download link, "Create an account: Name, address, age, blood type, I Consent To Receiving Daily Marketing Updates, I Consent To Having My Data Shared With Trusted Providers, I Acknowledge That I Am An Idiot For Clicking So Many Times"

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

“HDMI customized ad insertion” patent would show Roku’s ads atop non-Roku video

System would detect paused content on external devices and show ads on top.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/hdmi-customized-ad-insertion-patent-would-show-rokus-ads-atop-non-roku-video/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

uastronomer,

@arstechnica

Throw Up Dry Heave GIF

uastronomer, to random

Balls. I'm officially "Don't forget to shave your ears" old.

uastronomer, to random

sadlol at paywalled news sites telling me that I've "Read my last complimentary article for the month", when I've never been there before.

A glimpse into my personality: I subscribe to a local newspaper which has taken a personal stand against paywalls. They argue that "The news is a public good, and society does not benefit by denying access to anybody who cannot pay for it". They're funded through advertising (thin on the ground, these days), and donations. I don't donate to a lot of causes, but I do support these guys.

uastronomer, to random

"Loadshedding will remain suspended until further notice, following nine consecutive days of non-implementation. "

What an age we live in, where "9 entire days with no blackouts" is a very real and impressive boast.

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

Back when I was still thinking about getting solar power installed, I met a lot of naysayers who had a lot to say about how I'll have no electricity on cloudy days, or how the batteries only last a few months and then you have to repeat your investment, or how "The government makes you register it because they want to charge you a license fee" and how they know a guy who had it installed and he's very disappointed in some non-specific way.

All the same people who complain and gripe the loudest about Eskom and how the government ruined it, all while hinting darkly at the colour of the people responsible but never actually spelling it out... but I digress.

Anyway, it's a rainy, overcast day, which means my batteries will only be fully charged by about 2pm, instead of the usual 10:30am. And my grid consumption is now low enough that I probably won't even notice the next rates increase.

And the naysayers no longer talk about Solar to me, preferring to wait until I, and my inconvenient facts, are out of the room.

uastronomer,

@leoncowle @mvniekerk Yeah, and I understand the prices for panels are extortionate over there as well.

uastronomer, to random

Is it the new normal that batteries don't list a voltage anymore?

Is it implied in the form factor than any AA cell will give you 1.5V (even if it's one of those awful 1.2V rechargeable NiCd cells I still have lying around somewhere)?

uastronomer,

This is about the Energizer Ultimate Lithium cell in my beard trimmed that I seldom use because my beard hair is thick and robust and eats electric shavers. I just wanna check if it's maybe due for replacement, but I don't know what the nominal voltage is supposed to be. The product page on Energizer's website is full of exciting copy, even lists supported temperature ranges, but not a word on how many actual electricities are tucked inside.

uastronomer,

Never mind, Energizer, all is forgiven, I found the data sheet!

https://data.energizer.com/pdfs/l91.pdf

uastronomer, to random

"The US Government can't just spin up a whitehouse.gov fedi server, how naive, don't you know there's rules and procurement, you think Biden's just gonna run it from a raspberry pi under his desk in the oval office lol"

And yet. The various arms and branches of the US government already maintain a social media presence. They maintain their own websites. Their own mail servers. They are the literal government, they pass laws and set policies all the time, there are literally millions of employed and elected officers whose job is creating, enforcing, and maintaining all sorts of infrastructure and policy and rules and regulations.

I'm pretty sure they can handle one little mastodon instance.

uastronomer,

@leoncowle lol 🤣
Good luck!

atomicpoet, (edited ) to threads
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

De-federating does NOT prevent from accessing your public feed.

This is demonstrably false. Almost all servers that de-federate Threads still broadcast the RSS feed of your posts. This is available to everyone, even servers that are de-federated from yours.

If you don’t believe me, test this out for yourself. Append “.rss” to the end of your profile URL (exampleserver.com/@username.rss), and see what happens.

Hell, if I wanted to build a search engine for the Fediverse and not use ActivityPub, I could use RSS instead and I could index most of the Fediverse – whether you opt into it or not.

Let’s stop spreading the myth that de-federation by itself prevents Threads from accessing your public feed.

@fediversenews

uastronomer,

@toon @atomicpoet @fediversenews
So first up, I'm not an IP lawyer, or any other kind of lawyer, so I can only talk about how big online copyright cases have played out, from what was reported in the media, but I reckon that indexing is entirely legal.

Search engines have been indexing the content of every website they can find for over 30 years. This includes stuff that the owners really didn't want indexed. There have been many well-publicized cases of Google and friends indexing stuff that should have been protected but that wasn't, including private medical records, plaintext password databases, classified government documents, internal company documents, and more. Lazy hackers have been using google to search for filenames that might contain sensitive data (maybe something like "Patient admissions filetype:xlsx") for as long as search engines have existed.
As far as I know, no search engine has ever been found guilty of breaking the law by doing this, and nobody has ever successfully sued.

Closest I can think of to real legal problems for indexers was when Google started bulk-scanning copyrighted books, and making them available in books.google.com

That was a long time ago so I don't remember much of the reporting, but based on how that website works now, I suspect that the only copyright issue that stuck was "You can't just give copies away", The index remains, and you can read excerpts of books, but not the whole text.

uastronomer, to random

If you're planning to watch a solar eclipse, soon, learn from somebody who got it wrong.

Don't make my mistake (technically, the mistake of our local guide): When you're looking for a place to watch, anything less than 100% totality is NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Even 99%, which might sound fine, is not good enough.

Anything less than around 95%, it'll feel a bit dim, like you lost track of time and it's now late afternoon. If you're actually looking directly at the Sun with eclipse glasses, you'll see the classic "Sun with a bite taken out of it" view, which is cool, but you're missing the full experience.

At 99% (where I was), it'll suddenly go dark, like just after sunset. The birds freak out because it's suddenly song time, and then woops no it's suddenly bedtime... And that's kinda cool, but you're STILL missing the cool bit.

100%? That's where you'll see the view you see on TV, the black sun with a halo, the stars shining in the middle of the day, all that jazz.

Drive the extra distance. You NEED 100% coverage.

Finally: If you're right on the edge of 100%, it'll last a few seconds. Keep driving, get to the middle of the path, and it'll last a few minutes - long enough to really enjoy it, long enough to talk about it with your friends, long enough that you can afford to blink without missing it!

https://xkcd.com/2914/

uastronomer,

@leoncowle Road trip!

uastronomer,

@leoncowle Well, shoot :(

Hey listen though... if the clouds don't break and you don't get to see it, you'll still get the atmosphere when the world goes dark and the birds and animals freak out... it'll still be a good memory, ask me how I know 😔

uastronomer,

@leoncowle Let me know how that works out for you ;)

uastronomer,

@leoncowle can't wait to hear all about it!

uastronomer, (edited ) to random

Best civilization?

uastronomer,

Well, I did not expect this result.

However, glad to say that of the versions I've played and owned, number 4 does seem to be the best after all :)

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