It goes WAY back.

The Apollo Guidance Computer software had a routine called KISSING. …about LM-CM docking, of course.

You saw the opening scene of Apollo 13 and thought only the astronauts used horny references in regards to the docking? Think again! So did the programmers.

Motherf-

🤦🏻‍♀️

I started writing a clock app of my own because the Windows 11 clock app didn’t have a proper analog mode and it’s pretty useless. (Windows 3 clock app had analog mode, why not Windows 11?)

Some time ago I was ranting that instead of adding an analog mode, Microsoft will probably just pointlessly add Copilot to the clock app.

…Don’t blame me! I was just pointing out the obvious direction Microsoft is going for, whether we like it or not!

Aaaaanyway. This summer’s project is to figure out how the hell the Godot layout system works so I can make the layout responsive and I can release 1.1.

A while ago, there was a a YouTube video of people laughing at AI generated floorplans.

Because of course there was a company that tried to make an AI floorplan generator without a shred of thinking. They posted the “good” ones on their website, and even they had obvious weird details like completely misproportionate rooms, having ten bathrooms in a small house, and just straight up missing doors everywhere.

Well, it doesn’t have to be in the sign. Just tiniest print in the event rules, buried somewhere in the website. That’s usually enough for this to happen.

Reminds me of Dogmeat in Fallout 3. I was really worried about the buddy when the wiki said Dogmeat can die. Bullshit. Every time I hit VATS after that, I didn’t see a dog anywhere, just a dog shaped cruise missile repeatedly flying at the enemies, killing stuff dead. In Fallout: New Vegas, they upgraded the doggo into a real dog shaped cruise missile.

Funny thing is, I bought the Harry Potter ebooks back when they were only available through Pottermore. Last time I checked, you couldn’t actually download them through the website anymore. Which is funny because the site only allowed 7 downloads or someshit. (I think that I failed to download one file, that counted as one download anyway, and the queer idea of “fuck this greedy hag” started to percolate in my mind.) How many downloads did I need? One. Thankfully in the unlikely event I need to access this shit, it’s sitting in my Calibre library. Where it has been sitting ever since.

You can, you know, read another book

For Harry Potter fans in particular, may I suggest The Guy We Don’t Mention in the Same Sentence. You know. Terry Pratchett.

Reminds me of the Cathode Ray Dude’s video on the nicotine ad display. Weird aspect ratio display, with an industrial PC with an immensely locked down Linux system.

I use the YouTube TV app.

If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I’m just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I’ll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

Protip: Number may go bigger, but I’m not changing this behaviour.

I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn’t like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

I’m old enough to have eaten burgers out of styro boxes, and IMHO it’s not one of the things I get nostalgic over. They held heat a little bit longer than cardboard/paper, but that’s basically the only advantage.

The places here that offer kebab/fries and sausage/grilled whatever to go still use larger styro trays here, and they’re less convenient and sturdy than the styro burgerware was. I’m actually hoping someone comes up with an alternative.

Well, we’re barely in the era where people can safely say “MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we’re pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too”. Patents expire on the day they’ll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don’t expire that easily.

I sank quite a bit of time and money on Train Sim World on Xbox. Now looking at stuff on PC, will probably get SimRail or something

Of course Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz.

It is famously a prison where the worst criminals went. And just as famously, a prisoner escaped, never to be seen again.

He’s just planning ahead. Personal plans. They’re not particularly good plans, they’re not cunning plans - in fact, they’re pretty stupid plans, to be perfectly honest.

Ohhhhhh the newbies don’t remember EsounD (Enlightenment Enlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn’t work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don’t realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.

Large bottles are sold as “2 liter soda”…that’s it.

I’m from Finland. It never stops being weird when Americans talk about 2 liter sodas. First, it being in liters, and second, 2 liter sodas are huuuuge. (Large bottles are usually 1.5 liters here.)

My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

American police forces have never really considered the optics, have they? Or sociopolitical implications? Yeah, these are not in their vocabulary. (I don’t know if the word “vocabulary” is in their vocabulary, it has too many syllables.)

Anyway, you need to think about the optics and sociopolitical implications before you rush headlong and grab a dick. This is common sense. Not to these officers, though, apparently.

Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)

Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

…I’m not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

My girly thought process is actually quite similar:

[not my comic]