Don't blindly believe everything you read online, tempting as that is. Do your homework first. This video series will help you do it well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU
@mavica_again "Next time on Star Trek: The Next Generation."
*logo fly-out*
"The Enterprise away team beams down to a Federation outpost in distress."
*Riker, Data, & an extra beaming off the Enterprise*
"But Data has less data."
*Data holding up a JPEG-compressed hand with only one finger, remarking "Intriguing."*
"Can Data save the outpost? Find out, on the next Star Trek: The Next Generation."
*logo fly-in*
you know how in tng you see the transporter effect linger more around the torso
you know how jpeg compression uses less cosine transforms where there is less data
what if transporter compression really fucks up your limbs where there's less "data" as in tissue complexity than where there's a bunch of organs
CW boost, Linux, AI
https://hachyderm.io/@AndrewRadev/117133838893007391
I feel like "Thank you Meta!" is destined to become the new "Thanks Obama!" meme.
new blog post!
https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
i hijacked some telephone infrastructure of a few islands over the span of multiple months; and accidentally logged information of a few hundreds of thousands of phone calls going to military bases in the process..
it's a really really silly story :P
re: No-AI TTS question
I was recommended RHVoice, and that seems like the most ethical option for voices.
RHVoice: https://rhvoice.org/
The second most ethical voice option seems to be abandonware SAPI 5 voices on the Internet Archive, virtually all made in 2010 or earlier.
And I can use Balabolka's command line utility, balcon, in both Windows 7 and Wine to make the voices speak plain and SAPI 5 XML text into .wav files.
Balcon: https://cross-plus-a.com/bconsole.htm
new blog post
what to do with a retro computer?
SlopHub AI
I found what appeared to be the perfect tool for my need on GitHub, & the code seemed slightly off but not rancid.
So I checked out the author: The avatar is a floppy disk with two notches near the shutter & barely-Latin letters. Well, crap, so just how slopped is it?
It has a .gitmodules naming a URL. Follow it down: Same author & now claude. It has a casual file committed with the author's home URL: It peddles a Discord with a DALL-E bot. Slop!
I hate that I have to do this now.
The Aesthetic Rebellion
Bonus speedpaint: https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/066.html#bonus
Netscape Navigator 3.0 was released 30 years ago today.
As I mentioned in my post on the 2.0 anniversary, what you knew of as "3.0" had internally been slated to be the "2.1" bugfix release, to be soon followed by a 3.0 release based on the Collabra...
https://jwz.org/b/yk-2
Dial-up ISP tale
Suddenly remembering that I saved more than one dial-up customer from meeting the same fate with the "as seen on TV" MagicJack devices sold at the nearby Walley World, shortly after Vonage faded from TV screens.
Dial-up ISP tale
Suddenly remembering that time I had to explain to a customer why their dial-up Internet access quit working.
It wasn't because they got Vonage. Not per se.
Remember those woo-hoo "people do stupid things" commercials? Yeah, them. Vonage is a VoIP service which, like all VoIPs, needs high-speed Internet access to work.
It was because they canceled their expensive telco/DSL bundle in favor of the cheaper Vonage for phone calls and dial-up Internet.
✨ Kind 'Net Help Desk fairy by day. ✨
✨ Weird & furry Unix fairy by night. ✨
✨ Sometimes a retrocomputer fairy. ✨
✨ Pays the ComputerFairi.es bills. ✨
✨ Sparkly✨shellscript✨princess. ✨
✨ Age: Mere days younger than ✨
✨ the Intel 4004 & Unix 1st Edition. ✨
✨ Follow requests welcome. ✨
✨
✨