Caz @caz@computerfairi.es

In 1968, at 30 years old, Lynn Conway transitioned. In doing so she lost her wife, her children, and her job at IBM. She continued on, living authentically as her true self and continued her career as an electral engineer. In 1978 she became an associate professor at MIT and taught a course in VLSI (very large scale integration) that became the basis of the Mead-Conway VLSI Design Methodology, changing how we design integrated circuits. In 1985 she became a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, and later the associate dean of engineering.

32 years after transitioning, Conway came out publicly as a transgender woman. Since than she has been a advocate for transgender people in the tech sector. In 2020 IBM formally apologized for firing Conway for being trans, over 50 years after the fact. Just a bit of #transHistory I learned today.

#history

#Debirdify has been suspended by Twitter without warning or explanation. Apparently it violated ‘Twitter rules and policies’, but that is all they told us.

We contacted Twitter support about the situation, but we are not particularly optimistic.

We always knew this could happen; it happened to other services in the past, so we are neither particularly surprised nor sad about it.

In the mean time, Fedifinder still works: https://fedifinder.social

Use it while you still can!

The open source cartridge "RAD Expansion Unit" emulates a Commodore REU (RAM Expansion Unit) or GeoRAM while connected to a real C64 or C128. I was able to solder it with a classic soldering iron although it contains SMD parts.

As RAD is a software-defined cartridge based on a Raspberry Pi, other use cases are also entirely possible such as: https://youtu.be/C--TlxjOwLs

Project page: https://github.com/frntc/RAD

#Commodore64 #Commodore64Demo
#RetroComputing #RetroGaming
#RaspberryPi #RadExpansionUnit

Stop thinking of Twitter, TikTok, IG, (et al) as social media sites.

They are **Content Refineries.**

Like processed food manufacturers they take user content & extract the most addicting/engaging content. Brains eat it up but in an unhealthy “devour the whole bag of chips” way.

They make hyper-processed social media junk food.

Mastodon is more like a potluck. We're all bringing dishes. It's a mess. Kids are running all over. But we are, at least, real people sharing real things.

Thinking of creating a #Circular #Herb #Garden.

Any of these inspirational designs for #Labyrinth, #Mandala and #Permaculture gardens could be recreated using portable pots/containers to allow for seasonal/climatic changes. The final design should allow for ease of access, encourage companion planting, be beneficial to #pollinators and importantly, pleasing to the eye. #Solarpunk

Today in #Macstodon development I did a big push on profiles. There's still a lot of work to do here but they're coming together nicely:

- The "Stats" pane is implemented, which shows the user's following/followers and toot counts, as well as various other flags from the API like "is this a bot" or "is this user discoverable".

- Fixed a bug that was causing buttons overlaid on the profile banner to not work correctly (and several other small bugs).

- Implemented the scaffolding for the pop-up interactions menu.

- Added new icons to replace the existing toot interaction buttons, courtesy of @octothorpe . They are grey when disabled (a toot has not been selected), black when enabled, and coloured in when an interaction has taken place! They're also loaded from resourced, so they are unaffected by the memory leaks.

#RetroProgramming #RetroComputing #VintageMac

Forcefield was a performance art group from the late 90s / early 00s. (They had an installation in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and then immediately split up.)

They wanted a shot of one of their weird creatures interacting with an exotic computer for one of their short films, so I brought them into our museum and ran a little graphics program I had written on our #PDP12 for them. (I'm lying on the ground just out of the shot in this, reaching up to twiddle knobs.)

#retrocomputing #art #film

The fedi is growing and striving to be that weird forum you were on in the early 2000s. We aren't there yet, undoing the damage of corporate social media platforms takes time