FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

LB: I have commissioned mavica and been gifted art by it and they are among my favourite things to have as my avatar. This is my Macintosh System 7 monochrome portrait as done by @mavica_again. It’s current my Zoom profile pic at work, and it’s probably the best likeness of any art I’ve received. For real, commission it!

it's been a few weeks since my twitter main was unceremoniously suspended. for the most part, i don't miss it. i'm oblivious to discourse! no more chuds harassing me! that part's great

what's less great is that i've lost access to my DMs. i can't even *see* them anymore. that's years of conversations gone even as a passive reference.

my numerous curated lists? my bookmarked posts? all gone.

i'm no free speech warrior but something about this does feel kind of wrong, on a systemic level

it's a thorny and difficult subject that is impossible to simply Solve, but platform control is increasingly becoming a major issue in everybody's lives. this is infrastructure that multiple generations rely on for socializing, networking, and promotion, that capricious ignorant CEOs can change on a whim without approval or oversight. nothing can remain stable, because investors are illiterate infant-priests serving an insane blood god, and they demand shiny new distractions at all times Or Else

Friend: No this makes sense, it's a chain of dependencies. Every teams channel is a SharePoint folder

I think god is dead for sure

*Suddenly hit with the perfect Inspiration Particle but 25 years too late* Oh man a really good name for a LAN party would be "LANarchy"

For months I've been dealing with this terrifying problem where my computer will reboot or shut off for no reason. Eventually I concluded the problem was my apartment and therefore I needed backup power. So one week ago today I got a *super* expensive UPS and hoped my problem was solved.

Today I woke up to discover my computer had rebooted in the night D:

So terrified I pull open Event Viewer and… oh, thank goodness! My computer isn't dying! It's just Microsoft doesn't respect me as a person

*Through happy tears* I wonder what new surveillance tech they installed in the update

Cory Doctorow: "Mastodon is far from perfect. But I only have so many hours in the day, and only so many days left in my life. I would much rather spend those precious hours making a open service better than using a temporarily superior closed one. I have seen that movie. I know how it ends"
https://doctorow.medium.com/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again-20074e311f1f

terrible idea: GPS-based mouse.
It has no optical sensor, just a GPS locator.
You move the mouse around, and it transmits that movement back to the PC, over a built in 5G modem.
You may have to move it a lot to click on anything

me: *opens datasheet*
me: *takes 5000 psychic damage*
me: *closes datasheet*
me: "neat!"

if you want to stream yourself using a #gameboycamera but you don't have all the hardware to do it legit, check out this post on how to use #webgbcam in OBS!

https://maple.pet/blog/using-webgbcam-in-obs

Tory MPs cheering the Online Safety Bill banning children from reading Wikipedia (2023, colourised)

someone's been scraping Reddit for years and the results from 2005-06 to 2023-02 are torrentable <https://academictorrents.com/browse.php?search=pushshift> with the last dataset for 2023-03 (and some earlier ones) at <https://archive.org/search?query=subject:%22pushshift%22>. might be a good thing to grab if you're worried about loss of knowledge.

#Reddit #PushShift

for those playing at home, this was all in https://github.com/VyrCossont/mastodon/pull/8, you know, the thing everyone gets mad at Universeodon for having. chrono sorting. filters. default-AND instead of default-OR. etc. YOU'RE FUCKING WELCOME.

hey, the upside is that we all get search and someone who isn't me gets to maintain it! hooray!

#Mastodon #FullTextSearch

tl;dr: there are kinds of Fedi instance other than Eugen-brand Mastodon, some of which have always had full-text search. exactly nothing about search is standardized in AP, and even if it was, it couldn't be a real security boundary, just an intent indicator. it's all just social conventions.

#FediblockMeta #search #FullTextSearch #ActivityPub

one more note on this: the "Opt-out of search engine indexing" checkbox in Mastodon preferences aka the "noindex" setting is pretty much just for Google and Bing and controls an HTML tag that asks them to ignore your profile and posts. Mastodon doesn't propagate the noindex setting, even to other Mastodon instances, and has no way to do so.

there's a PR proposal at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23808 that would add a new "indexable" search opt-in flag to Mastodon posts that does federate and would be available to other instances, if they care to use it.

there's also an existing federated search audience flag used by the Fedibird fork of Mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/23808#issuecomment-1543649425

it'd be great if one of these got broadly standardized, even solely within the Mastodon subset of Fedi… but it'd still be completely possible for other instances to ignore it and index everything anyway.

#FediblockMeta #search #FullTextSearch #ActivityPub

reminder that Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Calckey, Foundkey, and Friendica ship with #FullTextSearch capabilities and have for years. and those are just the instance server families i know about. this is not a new or novel feature outside Mastodon. if you want to block all Fedi instances that don't share vanilla Mastodon's search restrictions, you've got a lot of blocking to do.

#FediblockMeta #search

I came across one of the cooler things I've seen in the push to normalize customizing difficulty and accessibility in games: Rogue Legacy 2 calls the entire accessibility/difficulty/tweak system "House Rules" instead of cheats, accessibility options, etc.

I think that's a real cool name for it.