FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

losing my mind at the mandatory IT corporate training which has a table for how long it takes to crack passwords of a certain length — to drive home that every additional character is an order of magnitude in cracking complexity — but they helpfully provide sample passwords that are abc, abcd, abcde, abcdef…, which is self-defeating the message to a truly impressive degree

breaking development from the eggheads down in R&D

my dream for mozilla involves them working strictly on the damn browser again and not trying to do all this other stuff

i am really enamoured with the PSS-A50's “arpeggios” feature. it feels like i finally found the version of Yamaha's “styles” system that actually really clicks with me. i've tried two other takes on this before, the PSR-350's auto-accompaniment and the QY70's pattern system…

the PSS-A50 arpeggios have two really important features:

• flexibility: i can take any of the 116 built-in patterns (intended for various instrument types!) and play them on any instrument with any chord in any octave
• immediacy: it responds instantly to the chord i am currently playing (and its notes' velocity!), so i can very naturally alternate chords or start and stop or whatever in real time

and then these round out the package:

• you can press a button that will “hold” an arpeggio, so it just loops in the background
• you can change out the pattern of a held arpeggio while it's playing
• you can record arpeggios into a phrase and loop it (separate from a held arpeggio)

on the PSS-A50, you only have those 116 patterns stored in ROM, and you can only layer two arpeggios at once in the way i described. that's pretty limiting! but it's just so easy to do stuff within those constraints…

on the other hand, while the QY70 may let you layer 24 things, both custom ones and built-in ones (and there's like, hundreds of patterns in ROM), it's so much clunkier. and then on the PSR style system, well, you don't even control what the individual layers are; Yamaha have picked a set of layers and instruments for you, all you get to pick is the chord. that's way less flexible! high-end PSRs do let you edit these but it's even clunkier ^^; (and i don't own a high-end one anyway)

so in the end, the system that wins for me, if i just want to get in the zone creatively and come up with ideas, is the one i can most directly “play” with in interesting ways, and the PSS-A50 is doing great at that :3

on its own i can't make a full song, but there's MIDI I/O…

girls will really look at a $100 toy keyboard from Yamaha with USB MIDI that "does not support the [General MIDI] format" and go "challenge accepted"

>:3

Also I'm reading @GarethDennis's #HowTheRailwaysWillFixTheFuture on my train journeys today because it seemed the most appropriate book to bring with me. :)

Also had stickers of some of my other slogans done. Let me know if you want one. #stickers

Darn. I don't know if my laptop can handle this level. I'm dangerously close to the minimum system requirements to for this game!

it needs at minimum 8mb of RAM (with 16 MB suggested), but this laptop my roommate fished out of the ewaste for me has a mere 16GB of RAM.

my thought is that right now it's all or nothing in terms of when you use a "CW" your post will be hidden

if instead people can choose that only certain topics are default hidden and the rest aren't, then there's a lot less "but i don't want to hide this" stigma against using a subject line

not sure if this has been thought about before or if some other flavour of activitypub does it this way but i wonder if "CW"s would be better utilised if they were treated as email subject line and only defaulted to closed if a word in your custom blacklist appeared on it

i think that would push people to describe the content of posts much more if they're not implied to be opt-in, though this would also need a defacto "standardisation" of subjects, for example "uspol" vs "us politics"

My Fediverse Advice:

* Follow more people. No, even more people than that. Basically, if you find a real person and their posts are good follow 'em
* If you get a good reply to a post boost it. If you make a good reply to a post boost it. Replies are not visible in the feed unless you do this. As long as the post is an OK start to a conversation or interesting boost it.
* Write thoughtful replies. And if you put effort into a reply boost it or probably only the people tagged will see it.

Why is it called vampirism when neck romancer is right there

Unattended children get an IBM System/370 and a Cobol starter lecture.