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lost things & lost sleep (-) 

Have you ever been up all night tearing your house apart, looking for just one little thing that you know for certain you've hung on to for literally half your life? I can now say I have, unsuccessfully at that, & my body's going to pay for it tomorrow. (Oh crap, it *is* tomorrow!)

As queer programmers, it is your civic duty to install positiveSelfTalk.exe into all your android friends.

If you need the tar.gz, DM me.

retrocomputing 

Also, I learned the hard way that even though the 5150, XT, AT, & pre-PS/2 IBM clones all have physically compatible keyboard sockets (5-pin DIN, just like MIDI sockets), the 5150 & XT use an incompatible protocol, so AT-style keyboards won't work unless they have an XT-mode switch.

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beeping.town will be a pleroma instance for bots, in the same vein as https://botsin.space with a bot-friendly code of conduct.

keep an eye out for when registrations open when I'm ready!
if you're interested in helping moderate beeping.town send an email to iliana@beeping.town
💜

retrocomputing 

If you thought IDE hard drives were becoming scarce, just try what I spent the last few hours doing and shop for an ESDI hard drive.

I'm trying to restore a trash-picked (& VG condition) IBM 5160 (the PC XT) that turns out to have been complete except for HDD & keyboard. The rescue included an amber MDA monitor & ESDI controller with cables, though I didn't recognize the controller until today.

Going with an IDE controller & CF or SD adapter is an option, I suppose.

it 👏 doesn't 👏 matter 👏 where 👏 you 👏 came 👏 from 👏 or 👏 when 👏 you 👏 joined 👏 mastodon

I came across & re-read a computer magazine from January 1998. An average laptop cost $3,000-$5,000, an average decent desktop cost $2,000-$3,500, and a barebones desktop without even a hard drive might've been had for $1,000 if you shopped around a lot. I remember eventually buying a Compaq Presario 1690 later that year (or early '99) for $4,000. It's amazing how much prices have changed in the 20 years since, even without adjusting for inflation.
💿

I'm saving LB for the next time a customer asks me why the Internet crashed.

One of the most amazingly useless things I recently learned is how to do subtraction, multiplication, and division on actual late-19th/early-20th Century adding machines. True adding machines, mind you, the kind that don't have any subtraction or other arithmetic functions built in.

Handy tip:
If you see (+), (-) or (~) in a content warning, that's an indicator of if the content is positive, negative or mixed.

If your cyberpunk game doesn't include cosmetic, gender affirming upgrades, cyber tails, cyber taur bodies and more

Then it isn't a good cyberpunk game.

Adding picture captions in Tusky is a little less obvious than on your instance website but still easy. After picking the picture, tap on it & choose "Set caption."

Add captions for the sake of the fully sighted as well, not just the partially or fully impaired. It saves you from "what am I looking at" questions whose answers may be obvious only to you.

Hey people, I've been noticing the number of posts with alt text going down. It might be because of all the new users who haven't learned about the feature yet, so for them and everyone:

yall should use alt text when uploading images! what are they??? hover over the images to find out! why are they good? the tldr of it is that visually impaired computer users exist and it helps them navigate the INFOBAHN better

what do you call a mastodon instance with lizards, dragons, and kobolds on it 

scalable computing

I’ve done a lot of art in the past, but this is still my absolute favorite series of pieces!

Remember everyone, #SylveonIsTrans.

The keyboard ribbon has breaks going too close to the keyboard itself, so it's looking like I'll have to hit up sellmyretro after all.

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Computer Fairies

Computer Fairies is a Mastodon instance that aims to be as queer, friendly and furry as possible. We welcome all kinds of computer fairies!