Email from Reddit telling me it’s being required to suspend accounts of users under 16.
I deleted that account and all my posts a year or two ago when Reddit pulled that stunt licensing everyone’s posts to an AI Slop company.
Reddit, if I tell you I am 5 years old, will you delete my account properly? Please?
If keyloggers did "Unwrapped" summaries:
* You pressed Backspace 34,510 times this year.
* You mistyped this year as "2024" 34 times, most recently in October.
* You typed 3 emails to your ex and deleted 2 of them before sending.
* You changed your password seven times, and each time all you changed was the last digit.
* Your cat used your keyboard 4 times.
Exploding eucalyptus tree dropped this chunk of bark on me while walking the dog. At least its bark was worse than its bite.
@MelissaBearTrix Evidence for quantum tunnelling.
@valhalla It's mainly a cover-your-arse exercise.
I'm going to Officeworks, what do you need?
Once again I am experiencing culture shock that most Americans do not have a way to make a couple of cups of boiling water except to turn on the stove.
Edit: I hasten to add that it’s not about electric kettles not being a thing there—though don’t get a 15 A kettle or you’ll be sitting around forever—it’s that boiling a litre or so of water is a specialized thing and you have to want to do that a lot to buy a single-purpose appliance. I could make a similar remark about how most Australians don’t have a rice cooker.
Sophie [predator tag] [petting zoo tag]
Size 165 enclosure
Immediate effect: Shuffle your action cards and then try to put them back in the same order.
Ongoing effect: if Released Into the Wild, returns to your zoo within two turns.
Grumble, my MIDI keyboard is no longer talking to my DAW and I have no idea if it’s the DAW, the computer, the USB cable or the keyboard, and I’m not in the mood to swap out items until it communicates. Back in the cupboard it goes. Today was not destined to be a music making day.
There’s something to be said for a good old-fashioned analogue instrument sometimes.
Installing from the official app store is called
@abstractcode IMO IPA is easier, because you just need a cheat sheet. I consider having a cheat sheet to be "knowing IPA".
Surprised no one has tried to get a vinyl record emoji into Unicode yet.
How about we just pretend 
means vinyl, mmhmm?
A Windows sysadmin tool that more people should know about is the Magic Number Database at https://www.magnumdb.com
This database is great for pasting weird Windows hexadecimal errors into and finding out what they might mean.
Example from today, I got 0x80d02002 during a Windows update. Magnumdb tells me that this result corresponds to DO_E_DOWNLOAD_NO_PROGRESS, so now I know it's probably because an update server isn't responding.
@valhalla Someone alerted me to marble's existence a couple of hours ago. Very neat.
Interestingly, I see that Apple Maps (on iOS and macOS) wraps its tiles onto a sphere, and plots place names and other text live and undistorted onto the viewport. Google and OSM web are the old guard, steadfast in using Mercator.
Edit: And Google Maps has a checkbox to enable sphere projection too, TIL.
11 months ago, I bought the domain coconut.horse on a silly whim. I've done nothing with it and I'm going to let it lapse now that it's up for renewal. But if you'd like to take it over for a good cause, message me and I'll arrange a transfer.
I have done an experiment, and being Right on the Internet gets about as many replies as being Wrong on the Internet.
Mercator's world map of 1569 was useful to navigators at the time because it is conformal (preserving angles) even over long distances. You could draw a line between source and destination, read off the constant bearing, and point your ship in that direction for days or weeks, and you'd arrive at your destination. This line is called a "rhumb line", or (and I love this word) a "loxodrome".
Rhumb lines are absolutely not the shortest route between two points. That would be a great circle route, but computing a great circle requires spherical trigonometry, which is something that navigators were loath to mess with (as your bearing changes over the course of traversing a great circle, so it requires constant attention). Great circles have certainly been used by navigators for a long time, particularly in aviation where carrying your fuel is a factor. Now of course, ubiquitous computing and GPS makes great circles easy, and rhumb lines are just a historical curiosity.
But because of the properties of Mercator being coincidentally convenient for online maps, we find ourselves back in the 16th Century with a default projection that is frankly bad at large scales.