scene: inside valhalla's brain.
home economy manager> I know that #InCoWriMo is near, but you can't buy new stationery until you've used up the one you have. Not even if it's cheap, you no longer have space to keep it
some other less wholesome part of me> making doesn't count as buying, right?
home economy manager> well, since you're using things you already had in the stationery bag…
(I had a 2015 sponsored calendar together with stationery and other paper “in case I ever decide to do something with it”)
Thunderbird calendar addon Year View is now in "(very) low maintenance mode".
It will not be updated to support TB68 or TB70.
As the readme says, I don't have time, resources and motivation to keep work on this.
I'm not really using this plugin anymore from a while now.
I'm using TB only on my office Mac, where I'm still on TB60 because 90% of the addons I need still doesn't work in a way or another on TB68.
Writing "Year View" was a quite painful experience: overall documentation was too old ad outdated or non existent. And that's only on Thunderbird/XUL side: I had to read and understand Lightning code because I couldn't find any other docs. Most of the code in "Year View" is an edited copy of Lightning code. There are also a number of ugly hacks.
From what I read in Thunderbird docs, if I manage to make this thing run on TB68 I will need to rewrite it anyway to make it run on TB70 (where my needed addons will not run anyway). I'm very sorry, but It's not worth the pain.
If you want a proper year view in calendar in the future, please bugs Lightning devs.
finishes writing a letter.
looks at the calendar.
I guess it's time to start to work on the list of people I want to write to for #InCoWriMo (and to see if I have enough stationery, but I probably do :D )
About one year ago, my father gave me and @Diego Roversi a cheap laptop he had bought at a supermarket and found out it wasn't suited to his needs (plus it didn't have enough disk space to install the latest windows upgrades, or something like that, I don't remember the exact details).
We didn't really have a need for it, the only part that was potentially interesting (touchscreen and tablet mode) didn't work with linux, nor did the sound card, and overall the process to install linux on it made us discover how low quality the thing was, but we ended up using it to watch movies with an usb sound card.
Then the last time we tried to turn it on (to show a countdown for the new year) it didn't. Opening it revealed a dead battery. Glued down to everything else. And it didn't start without a battery connected. And when trying to unglue the battery it started to break, so my SO stopped before burning down the house.
At this step, #repair mode ended and scavenging for parts started, but most components were covered by the glued-down battery, trying to dismantle the screen resulted in cracked glass and the only thing we could save are two magnets and a handful of screws.
We didn't buy the thing. We didn't need the thing. We knew it was bad, but still this is irritating. Extremely irritating.
OTOH, reading point 3 of the proposed solutions and comparing it with the place I'm getting my dependencies from (distributions):
For example, package discovery sites might work to find more ways to allow developers to share their findings.
check, there is room for improvement, but the principle is there and is being used
Build tools should, at the least, make it easy to run a package’s own tests.
check
More aggressively, build tools and package management systems could also work together to allow package authors to test new changes against all public clients of their APIs.
check, as long as those clients are also available from the same source
Languages should also provide easy ways to isolate a suspect package.
this one isn't done, but the idea is that suspect packages don't get there in the first place. YMMV on what counts as suspect, however.
Dear fediverse,
does anybody know of instructions on how to light an oil lamp (the kind with vegetable oil) with flint and steel, and no matches (not even the old, non self-igniting, type with sulfur)?
I've found how to light fires (lots of resources), a couple of instructions on how to light candles that aren't going to work with a lamp, articles and videos about oil lamps in general, but nothing on the combination.
I can't believe that before the invention of sulfur matches people had to light a full fire (or ask some fire to the neighbors) in order to be able to light a simple lamp…
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Fire is the shared blood of community. You generally would ask some lit coals of a neighbor and carry them home in a jar ("to heap coals on their head") and light your fire from that. Lanterns etc were lit from a spill, straw, or noodle (spills preferred) because bootstrapping fire suucks. But if you must:
Charcloth or char moss on top of flint, striking w/ sparks that catch and glow, place lit cloth into tinder and blow into a flame, light the lantern from that.
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These days I'm re-reading a book on the history of math I had read ages ago.
The aim of the book is to present an overview of current (at the time it was written, in the 1970s, plus an appendix from the 1990s) modern math and it's pretty good at it (that's the reason why it was recommended to me when I was in high school and my math teacher found out I had plans to study math at the university).
Because of this, it is reasonable that it's skipping all math development from cultures that didn't have a direct influence on modern math: it claims so in the introduction, apparently recognizing that those developments were significant, just outside the scope.
But then, every. single. time. the author gives a judgement on something, it's cringeworthy. When the europeans in 1600 and 1700 developed calculus with no formal basis and without even recognizing the need for one it was liberating; when arabs did the same with algebra it was a lack of formal capabilities. No. just no. did you even *read* what you're writing???
Luckily, most of the book is maths and that part is enjoyable, I should just skip the end of most chapters…
@Charles Stanhope it's “Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times” by Morris Kline
(in an italian translation, and I've just realized that the original book only reaches the 1930s and the appendix written in the 90s that brings it a bit more up-to-date is from the italian editor. It was ages since I read it, and right now I'm still at the 1700s :) )
Bad picture is bad, but...
I didn't exactly lit a #fire, but at least I got some embers from #FlintAndSteel (I was indoors, so I couldn't light kindling)
I watched the following two videos to get from "one spark every 100 strikes" to "one spark every 5-10 strikes, and sometimes they even get on the char cloth" (sorry for the youtube links)
youtube.com/watch?v=CRR8fQbVYT…
youtube.com/watch?v=3pzGMQkdeF…
The big hints from those videos were:
* keep the flint at 45° to the striker
* if you're missing the flint often, you are using the right movement :)
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I don't see any technical reason why there couldn't be a trustworthy source of curated flatpacks, but wouldn't that be basically a distribution repository?
Yes, programs wouldn't have to be patched to work with different versions of their dependencies, but flatpacks would have to be regenerated every time a dependency has a security issue, so I'm not convinced it would be easier for the maintainers.
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Opening raw images with feh
Up to debian buster, feh was able to open the thumbnails inside my .cr2 files using Imlib2 directly; this has stopped working in debian bullseye, but I've found that there is a way to open them properly using dcraw: it only requires adding --conversion-timeout 5
(or any other suitable positive number) to the command line to enable the use of external programs.
so
feh 141140-img_5195.cr2
results into various errors including feh WARNING: 141140-img_5195.cr2 - No Imlib2 loader for that file format
while
feh9 --conversion-timeout 5 141140-img_5195.cr2
prints 141140-img_5195.cr2 is a Canon EOS 1100D image.
and shows you the preview you wanted :)
And this shaves the neck of the yak, now I can proceed with the original task...
In the last few years I've been adding little boy blue and similar shades to my clothing (beside black, which remains the main me-colour).
Last week I suddenly realized that I “needed” a #fountainPen ink in a similar shade., asked for recommendations on a forum and ended up buying two (online, looking at pictures, because I don't have a shop that keeps a variety of inks nearby :( ): Noodler's Polar Blue and Herbin Bleu Myostosis.
The Herbin is more periwinkle, which is not really me, but I love it and it's very me-playing-old-lady (only missing some lavender scent…), and the bottle with a pen holder is very nice.
The Noodler's is a problematic ink, but the shade is just as I wanted (and I've managed to make it behave with #dipPens by adding some gum arabic: that's the sample in the middle of the picture).
Also, I've managed to open a Noodler's bottle without spilling ink everywhere, and I consider this a personal achievement :) (there is a reason why other producers leave some air in their bottles…)
And I would never give ink samples to friends with the subtle aim of starting an ink sample exchange and end up with even MOAR inks to try.
NEVER!
(sometime I just give ink samples with no other reasons :D )
Of course, part of the reason for that is that people are terrible.
Holding cash on site opens you up to the possibility of being robbed, sometimes violently.
If people weren't terrible, that wouldn't be a concern.
It isn't all that though, there is, at least in Australia, laws stating you MUST be paid into a bank account (not cash) for your labour. That is the Tax Dept making sure they keep their fingers in your pie.
I live in a place where luckily armed robberies are rare (although extortion isn't, but that doesn't depend on the amount of cash kept on-site).
OTOH, places with a lot of cash flow do have ways not to keep too much inside the premises, at least not in a way where it can be accessed on demand (time-based deposit safes, people regularly moving cash away to a bank, etc.). Maybe it's helped by the fact that those who have that need really have a lot of money around (and thus can afford paying to keep it safe).
OTOH, since recently we also have laws that state that payments above a certain amount can't use cash, but at least that's quite above a typical restaurant bill, even for large groups.
> Bits were stored as sound pulses sent into a nickel wire, about 50 feet long. The pulses traveled through the wire and came out the other end exactly 5.5545 milliseconds later. By sending a pulse (or not sending a pulse for a 0) every 500 nanoseconds, the wire held 11,008 bits. A pair of wires created a buffer that held the pixels for 480 characters
That is so punk.
Watts also suggested that the police should wear baby blue uniforms because, he asserted, this would make them less likely to commit acts of police brutality than if they were wearing the usual dark blue uniforms. This proposal was never implemented.
from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_blu…
I guess it can't hurt?
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Your friendly 'net denizen
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • •Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Your friendly 'net denizen • •it did.
except for the fact that we aren't going to buy a new one to replace it (but I suspect my father did).