squeedles

That looks really nice! I haven't spent much time with split keyboards, particularly the extreme ergo things like that but I am very tempted!

Yea, generally you have full size/108 key boards, tenkeyless (no numpad but other layout unchanged), then 75%/65%/60% which all condense the function row and arrow key block to varying degrees. TFA depicted an extremely condensed (and split) keyboard without even a number row. No idea what to call that.

65% is the sweet spot for me. Reaching across a numpad for a mouse aggravates my RSI. I ditched 100% long ago, then eventually ditched the mouse and moved to a laptop-style trackpad in the middle, which did the trick.

Over the years, I tried pretty much every keyboard with a built in trackpad. Usually the keyboards were so-so to poor. Eventually I got a plate of 6061 aluminum, added a nice wooden wrist support with routed out space for a trackpad, and built my own keyboard tray so I can have my pick of keyboards. Now I use a Ducky with Cherry Ergo Clears and couldn't be happier.

Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.

They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.

Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.

Color is magnificent and I can't believe we've lost so much joy on our relentless march to hyper-optimized profit. I recently read another article about how everything has gotten more monochrome, will try to find it again.

In scanning some slides from the 1970s, I was struck by the colors of the pants! Bright! Stripes! Fun! I sew shirts and gravitate towards bright prints, and everything tends to stand out because clothing in general doesn't seem as varied today.

EDIT - Found many articles along the same lines, some even with the same images. This isn't the original one that I was thinking about, but it is equivalent

https://uxmag.com/articles/why-is-the-world-losing-color

Was excited to hear that they have a lower power rad-hard snapdragon system going into the new missions! The RAD 750 is basically a 30-year old IBM RS-6000. Very well known, but has been the goto CPU for way longer than I thought it would be.

When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.

EDIT- Apparently it was the K-Tel Superstar game

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4521/k-tel-superstar-gam...

Almost forgot the OG Bungie hit Pathways Into Darkness! I keep that on my Basilisk env too for the occasional hit of nostalgia.

I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.

And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!

It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!

I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.

I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...

Every corporation of sufficient size turns into a blind elephant, walking in one direction and trampling everything in its path. This is just the nature of bureaucracy, but there has always been someone somewhere within the organization that could tug on the elephants ear or whack it with a stick in the right place, to make it avoid an obstacle now and then.

The trick was always finding the person, but now the elephant has no handlers because all of the people are gradually being removed. It's like all the tech bros watched "The Matrix" thirty years ago and said "What a great business model!"

Are you talking about the Jellyfin server? It is quite an active project. Last release was 10.11.8 about a month ago, and github says that there have been 1049 commits to master since then.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.11.8

The clients are even more active

FYI, getting hardware acceleration for Intel working with Jellyfin is pretty straightforward. The key thing is that you have to put the server acct into the render group, then pass through the dri device. I also pass through the video group, but I don't think that is strictly necessary. NVIDIA seems a bit different but I can't speak to that. Docker compose file looks something like the following (uids and gids may vary)

  services:
    jellyfin:
      container_name: jellyfin
      image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
      pull_policy: always
      user: "1007:1003"  # jellyfin / jellyfin
      group_add:
        - "44"   # video
        - "992"   # render
      network_mode: bridge
      ports:
        - 8096:8096
        - 8920:8920
      volumes:
        [ ... config, cache, and content ... ] 
      devices:
        - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.

It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.

A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.

I came to this film late. Somehow, despite being quite active at the time of its release, I never knew of it until a colleague turned me onto it in the 90s.

Watching it with the benefit of 20 years of history, the influence on subsequent films, like Skynet, was obvious.

I loved the film, and think fondly of my departed colleague when it is mentioned, but I can't bear to watch it often. Like Cassandra, sci-fi films keep showing us a path that we should avoid and as a society we keep saying "Oooh! Candy!" and barreling down that path.

I never thought I'd witness a Butlerian revolution but I'm expecting that next.

The Win7 UI was comfortable, and still configurable enough that I could make the tool work for me rather than having to work for the tool.

I'd be more interested if it brought back the performance of Win7. That OS was released into a world that still had HDD boot drives and had to pay attention to the details. I still run a Win7 machine that boots in under ten seconds.

Sadly no extension can bring either of those back and we are unlikely to see anything along those lines from MS ever again.

I large part, the sticker trend is so that people can distinguish one gray rounded slab from another. It is the reaction, not the cause.

Vanguard is mutually held, a rarity these days. Which means that if you own some shares of their SP500 index fund, you own a part of Vanguard, and they work for your benefit. They are as big as they are because they solved the original alignment problem.

Never got around to The Backrooms, but the follow on Oldest View / Rolling Giant series of videos are absolutely fantastic. It captures the tension between curiosity and dread perfectly, which seems to me what all of this fascination with liminal space is all about.

On a technical level, his work is brilliant. With no budget, he puts me in a CGI space that I really can't tell is CGI, and invokes all of the feelings that are familiar to anyone who has snuck around where they really shouldn't be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oldest_View

Shut up and take my money!

Reading the review, it looks like they gave it the best treatment they could with what they had, definitely better than the DVD. Still a shame that WB didn't go the extra mile and redo the CGI, but maybe that will happen in time.

I'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.

For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.

It made everyone weep.

Exactly so. I didn't notice that missing def when I put together the blog post, but you are right to call it out. In this case that decref was copypasta from some other code -- I don't decref on the other error returns. I combined code that was in several places and omitted the decref for mod_enum too!

The module init function is where you would normally create the module object (PyModule_Create) and decref it if an error occurs. The blog example is utility code that you would call within the module init function to add an enum.

Someone should really create a blog post compiler to catch these sorts of things :-)

This was around 2021 so AI code tools had not yet eaten everyone. One of the most interesting challenges was finding the right value judgements when blending multiple type systems. I doubt any agentic coding tool could do it today.

I blended the python type system with a large low-level type system (STEP AIM low level types) and a smaller set of higher-level types (STEP ARM, similar to a database view). I already was familiar with STEP, so I needed to really grok what Python was doing under the covers because I needed to virtualize the STEP ARM and AIM access while making it look like "normal" Python.

Had to write a fairly substantial native extension to Python a couple years ago and one of the things I enjoyed was that the details were not easily "Googleable" because implementation results were swamped by language level results.

It took me back to the old days of source diving and accumulated knowledge that you carried around in your head.

https://www.dave.org/posts/20220806_python/

And both of them were written by Ian Braid, Alan Grayer, and Charles Lang (and others) in Cambridge.

Parasolid was v1 and old school C, then they got the C++ bug like many of us at the time and did ACIS as v2.

Happy to see this. Maybe I'll consider buying toner cartridges again. Every time I've tried in the past, what has shown up has been unusable, sketchy junk. I now go to a neighborhood Staples where I can put actual eyes on the box.

This article should be at the core of any discussion about media concentration. The vast consolidation of radio stations is well known, but the same thing has been happening to small local newspapers. In both cases, you end up with a voice speaking to the public from afar, not local people talking to your community about issues that are important to your neighbors.

At that point, most people just go to the gossip corner of social media and spend the rest of their day being fed six hours of outrage.

I have a digital archive of photos going back to the 1930s, and have physical archives of negatives and slides preserved properly. Not everything is scanned, but it will probably remain on my "to do" list permanently. B/W 114 negs from my grandfather contain many unidentified and unidentifiable people, but there are also views of where I grew up 90 years ago.

I agree with you that a certain portion of images are no longer meaningful, but it's tough to say a-priori what those are. So keep them all. The real problem is that photos often have notes on the back, but digital images rarely have any metadata.

I foresaw this problem back in 2002 and have been using a time-oriented naming convention and keeping little XML files with notes. I posted a little rant about it back in the day and made some simple tooling, which has been good enough to keep some basic notes with my photos.

https://pixtag.org/

It's the all you can eat buffet effect. Pay the price and don't have to worry about shipping, can watch (some) streaming without having to worry about paying, and whatever else they decide to roll into their monopoly black hole today.

Sure, if you do a full accounting of costs you may win or lose, but fundamentally people are paying for simplicity. Because almost everyone is lazy, or too busy, or too afraid of random scammers, or whatever, and they played their cards right to become the Sears Catalog from the 19th century in the 21st century.

edit - and one thing that helped them get there is the return policy, so if you get one of those scam sellers, or they sent you wrong crap, opened crap, or just plain everyday crap, you press a couple buttons, maybe drop something off at a UPS store, and problem solved. That definitely shields them from the fallout from their endless listings from sellers like QWERTY123 and ZXCVBN789, and provides an advantage over any other online ordering that doesn't have the same massive advantage of scale.