FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

What repeated #COVID19 infections are doing to us:

On the left is data from the UK showing the number of people economically inactive due to long-term sickness. It fell for two decades and has exploded to record levels since the pandemic.

On the right is the US civilian labor force with a disability. It stayed steady for two decades and has exploded to record levels since the pandemic.

Both are at their record highs, and both still trend up. We're done with COVID, but it's not done with us.

what's your favorite raspberry pi? please respond by saying "my favorite raspberry pi is..." and then suggest another single board computer that isn't a raspberry pi. im trying to genericize the trademark, you see

Buying DevBoards is not the same hobby as using DevBoards.

Bad idea: since there's a mechanical limit to how much you can cool down a CPU, design a motherboard with a rotary barrel.

While one CPU is used, the other five can be cooling down!

I learned that SpaceX is only going to pay the farmer $5,000 for the space junk that could have killed him. I'm glad they're paying, but that's piddly for a megacorporation owned by an awful billionaire that dumped hazardous garbage on his property.

He said he passed along SpaceX's contact info to others nearby who he thinks may have also found pieces of junk (he hinted that someone nearby may possibly have found an even bigger piece than his).

Barry had his neighbour bring over the terrifyingly huge piece he found for a great photo op for all the journalists. That particular piece was 9 feet long, weighed 80 pounds, and was shaped like a freaking spear. It is shocking to think about that falling at terminal velocity.

I am grinning like an idiot because I was REALLY excited.

Lynn Conway, computer hardware pioneer (and genius) has passed away. None of her obits do justice to her accomplishments, so here's wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

She pioneered asyncronous execution, VLSI circuit design, and practically the whole modern field of chip design.

She was also a trans woman who -- having been unfairly terminated by IBM -- never stopped fighting for the rights of trans people.

Rest in power, Lynn.

Dr. Lynn Conway passed away over the weekend. She and I messaged a few times some years back; she helped inspire my daughter (also trans) to be a CS major. Her website also helped me learn about our people. She lived an amazing life and was such a positive force in this world. She will be missed.

For those who don't know who she is, here's her original website. It meant a lot to many trans women of my era, and so did she.

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

I'm so sorry to hear of Lynn Conway's passing. She was an inspiration, and I had hoped to meet her someday.

Thank you so much, Lynn. May you be at peace.

I then remembered umbrellas are not just used for the sun 💀

Every web site I go to these days:

Comrades

I can’t play this game for plural people because I don’t meet the… system requirements

You can see for yourself using exiftool.
To remove all of the top-level metadata, you can use exiftool and qpdf:

exiftool -all:all= <path.pdf> -o <output1.pdf>
qpdf --linearize <output1.pdf> <output2.pdf>

To remove *all* metadata, you can use dangerzone or mat2

More fun publisher surveillance:
Elsevier embeds a hash in the PDF metadata that is *unique for each time a PDF is downloaded*, this is a diff between metadata from two of the same paper. Combined with access timestamps, they can uniquely identify the source of any shared PDFs.

Happy Portugal day, everyone!