FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

"Your use case is, there's a fourteen year old in an emergency room at 3 AM. English is their second or maybe fourth language. They have a battered school Chromebook or a hand-me-down Android device that was the cheapest thing on the market six years ago or a PS Vita their parents don't even realize has a web browser, and they're trying to educate themselves in the middle of the single most terrifying night they've ever experienced. Your site needs to work for that person at that moment."

I get the snark, but "page has to load on device in expensive city"... where is the human? The main audience of a website isn't a phone.

I know I've said this a lot, but I think about the NHS digital design standards all the time, about that presentation where their lead designer talked about finding agent strings for devices like the Playstation Vita and Opera for the Nintendo DS in their logs. About how the NHS site had to work for those people too, no matter what.

https://wandering.shop/@fugueish/116695409129543894

Shonks! 📈

The Lagrange Mobile app is once again available in the Apple iOS App Store. It's the best way for a beginner to get started using geminispace.

What's geminispace? It's an "alternate internet" that runs parallel to the World Wide Web, and doesn't have any corporations or the anti-features that plague modern websites. You can use a gemini browser like Lagrange to view gemini capsules (the equivalent of websites).

The key differences between geminispace and the web are:

* Geminispace is mostly text. While there are some capsules with non-text content, the protocol is designed to encourage sharing and reading text.

* The author of a gemini capsule decides the content, but not the appearance. Your browser or browser settings determine the font, color themes, and layout of capsules you visit. If you've used reader mode in Firefox, you can think of it as if all gemini capsules automatically use reader mode by default.

* Resistant to anti-features: Much like the fediverse, the community of people using geminispace generally dislike ads and trackers, but geminispace goes further by making it technically very hard to implement such things.

* Easy to implement: It's feasible for one developer working in their free time to create a fully working gemini browser from scratch, which is capable of rendering all gemini capsules. The aim is to prevent a situation where a single browser engine (like Chromium) dominates.

* All connections are secured with TLS. This also sets geminispace apart from gopher (which doesn't have any encryption).

* Non-extensibility: Geminispace is designed to be hard to extend with new (anti-)features. This is due to a fear that making it extensible would, as with the web, eventually lead to enabling trackers or ads, or make it too complicated to create a new browser.

If you're looking to escape from the big-tech-dominated web, geminispace is a great place to go for respite.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and if you're not on iOS Lagrange is available for other platforms too. There is an Android version, but it is not in Google Play. There's also a desktop version for Windows, MacOS, and Linux (and there are a lot more gemini browsers for desktop to choose from).

"You can't put the genie back in the bottle."

Why the fuck not? Have you tried before dispensing this timeless wisdom? How do you know that the genie is bottle-proof.

Or hell, perhaps we can't put it back, in which case, perhaps there's a less carceral approach we can try instead of... you know... giving the fuck up.

[toots]

#fediart #blobcat #catsOfMastodon

I'm once again begging people to use reserved DNS names like example.com or ones their org owns in their documentation, and not ones that could and probably are owned by someone else.

the secret behind headphones for animals

(Originally uploaded 2024-09-25 — https://melvian.net/11/)

#art #animation

what is keygen music if not the software pirate's sea shanty

Good morning ☕

@tomstafford

dc is the RPN arbitrary precision calculator that's long been a standard on UNIX systems (but not actually standardized by POSIX)

Yesterday a friend was noticing how .. weird .. it is with fractions in non-decimal radixes. gnu dc is particularly spectacularly broken, while bsd dc is somewhat better.

gnu dc failing: 16dio 8k .02p (set precision to 8 places, input and output radix to 16, and print 1/256(decimal)) prints "0". Ideally, it would print ".02". bsd dc prints ".020000".

bsd dc failing: 99k 3o 1 3 / p (set precision to 99 places, output radix to 3, compute 1/3, and print it). Ideally it would print ".1" or ".1000..." but bsd dc prints ".022....21"

This is because internally all dc arithmetic takes place in decimal; additionally, gnu dc incorrectly counts how many decimal digits of precision are needed.

So of course .. I wrote my own incomplete dc implementation. It uses Python and infinite precision fractions. Only the very basic operations are implemented, but at least you can calculate in hexadecimal floating point notation and get accurate results.

pydc> 8k 16dio 
pydc> .8 .FFE *p
0.7FF
pydc> 1 3 / p
0.55555555

For now the code lives in my junk drawer and has no explicit license, but you can use it if you want. https://codeberg.org/jepler/junkdrawer/src/branch/main/bgj9ls82/dc.py

#python #unix #rpn #calculator

I had a brain idea so I made a picture of it. #pride

Wikipedia, and the entire Wikimedia movement, has been a democratic, anti-authoritarian experiment since the day of its inception.

It's a project that matters, something I've been proud to have made a career of.

I spent my 20 years at the Wikimedia Foundation trying to further that experiment on a professional basis, and I have never been prouder of my former colleagues at WMF than I have been these past few months as we've been making @wwu a reality.

You should organize your workplace too.

Q: How does a capacitor work in Soviet Russia?
A: Dielectrical Materialism.

Word, Ms Word