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Thursday Earworm

[for those of a certain age...]

 

Perfect Strangers..

Sometimes I get jaded about the state of society on the internet..

Participating in Project Perfect Stranger / PlagueRound gives me renewed hope.

https://zu-uk.com/project/project-perfect-stranger-and-plagueround/

I now have a new friend in Sao Paulo who performs in a local theater group.

 

Through some intermediaries I'm trying to help a Saudi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loujain_al-Hathloul get access to her Google accounts. It's difficult since she was jailed and tortured for three years, doesn't have access to the recovery email address or phone numbers.

Sadly the Account Recovery process is proving to be its own form of pain.

If anyone wants to further escalate case 2-0838000031065 I'd really appreciate it.. I've gone back and forth for a few days already on this.

Apparently Twitter was very proactive about getting her back on. I'd love for us to outperform their customer service!!!!!





 

Power in Corpus Christi Texas

Only checking email a couple times per day.  Using Android extreme battery saver so use 4154251601 if you really need to contact me.

According to https://ercot.com/ the whole system has collapsed with cascading failures.  Auction rate for electricity is k/MWh instead of avg 8. Bonkers...  Water pumps offline or frozen.  Gasoline refineries offline so Gas supplies dipping.  Not enough power to even do the promised rolling blackouts.  At least the bridges to the island I'm on reopened..

Also another wrinkle in my situation.  Staying at friends place down south Texas, but the electronic lock jammed in the cold, so had to pack up to a temp place, which also has no power (and no food).  So no access to my laptop until power comes back so I can enter using the garage code (or a rock through a window)

It sounds worse in the place I was staying in Dallas which we fled from.  Power out there too and much much colder with lots of snow.

I wonder if fairness in power supply cuts is an area worth investigating.  Needs analysis could be interesting overlaid with circuit layout..

Will have a lot more to say when I'm online again....

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities"

Wrong answer.. This effort does not scale. You want to make it such that facts added by anyone can be easily imported with a simple opt-in.

GDPR data portability could be expanded to include defined formats for export so that import can be done in an automated fashion.

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenStreetMap proven to be a highly accurate map in top US cities"

One thing that someone might consider is working with Data Portability laws to allow for export of user contributed data to corporate map platforms.

I'd like to add my Google Maps contributions to OSM

I'm a Level 7 local guide there and was an active user of MapMaker back in the day..

 

What is this now? I just received a sketchy invite to my corp. address.. Hmm, the dark patterns are at play...


https://www.fishbowlapp.com/
https://www.fishbowlapp.com/






 

FiraCode + Ligatures -- so nice!

Better late than never I suppose :)

https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode





 

I'm in Dallas for a few weeks. If there are any Googlers that want to say hi in a socially distant way I'm up for it!





 

I have a chromebook with a noisy fan, so it sounds like a truck engine..

Actually kind of fun as the fan revs and slows. Launching gmail is like pressing down on the gas pedal hard :-D





 

New comment by lindner in "OpenSocial Specification"

hi5 (RIP) was originally a dating site and Pivoted to a Social Network.

Most profiles fake? I can say for sure that's not true. I maintained Postgres/Memcache/Graph DBs and the write load was real.

That said hi5 did engage in address book scraping and other dark patterns that you'd rather not see these days.

Fun fact: hi5 had a featured photos/profiles section based on popularity. Folks that ended up there deleted their account by 5x or more due to the unwanted attention their 'popular' photos garnered....

 

Regretted Attrition

Google's loss. dwb@ was a good one.

 

New comment by lindner in "OpenSocial Specification"

So many thoughts about OpenSocial and the reference implementation, Shindig. I have it thank for my time at hi5, LinkedIn and then Google.

Some little known facts about OpenSocial

- Hangouts Apps (remember those?) were based on OpenSocial containers.

- OpenSocial powered the LinkedIn Apps Platform and Labs for a number of years. The team built Rails and Node apps and deployed on Joyent.

- Eric Schmidt gave a pep talk to the working group pre-launch and mentioned about how open always wins in the end...

- MySpace was concerned about the attack surface of 3p apps running in iframes. They toyed with the idea of requiring a webkit browser plugin to run apps (!). It did lead to Caja* as a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

- The work on OpenSocial led in small part to the Activity Streams spec which led to ActivityPub and thus the latest Fediverse protocols. I like to think of OpenSocial as dead, but a good organ donor.

Fun times...

 

 

 

Me building stuff with parts I find in google3...

https://youtu.be/18cW_yHo3PY





 

A must watch documentary on voting rights now on Prime Video. Was lucky enough to see this at the Drive in a couple weeks back.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08FRQQKD5

cc @westwinddrivein @primevideo

 

Please help a good friend give their little fella a life saving surgery. I'll match any contributions. https://t.co/QjZlI3f8QJ

 

Used my WFH budget to buy a 500W/520Wh battery pack.... (I already have solar panels with bypass circuit to recharge..)

https://twitter.com/sashaperigo/status/1303388835808595970





 

 

@lipsandskin Can someone tell me if this is the right way to summon the correct lindner? Bonus points if it sounds like you're summoning a demon =)

Heraufbeschwören den @c_lindner

 

Product Idea: Terraform for Teams using Google Calendar/GSuite.

Just let me put agendas and crontab lines in a text file and have it drive the whole thing. Right now it's all pointy-clicky and there's no way to rollback in a coordinated way.

Also would make it soooo easy to split a team into two or clone a team...





 

 

For those that haven't spent their 000 WFH budget.

https://www.winsted.com/





 

Guessing that lithold will be with me a while longer...

https://www.googleplusdatalitigation.com/





 

The known site I'm posting this from is finally back up after a few hours of fighting with podman networking, nftables and mysql unicode collation.

 

Income targeting seems.. problematic on a number of levels given the distribution of income by ethnicity and gender.. I probably don't want to know how we calculate rich vs poor traffic.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2580383?hl=en





 

Can't seem to find a way to get Desktop PWAs to work on a new laptop..

Currents/G+ isn't offering an install option and the PWA Anywhere app isn't really doing it's thing.

I seemed to have gotten some entries created but clicking on them opens a tab. Then I can go to the triple dot menu and click 'Open in Gmail' and the application window opens.





 

Sorry Chromebook, your screen lock timeout is way too short...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4mHPeMGTJM





 

"Police Reform" is the new "Cage Free Eggs"

We don't need more humane oppression. Replace the system with one that is focused solving on human needs, not in reinforcing broken organizations.


 

Google could refuse to work with Law Enforcement Agencies until they clean up their act. Minimum legal effort and that's it.

Not doing so puts people at risk.

Our time and assistance is valuable and a privilege so we should prioritize good actors over bad.





 

"The Purpose of a System is What it Does"

Change, or replace, the system to get better outcomes.

https://www.mpd150.com/resources/

 

Oz Turns 10

I didn't see any posts about it in my stream, so I'll mention that Oz turns 10 years old today.

Thank you Oz for inspiring Apps Framework and Boq.

 

Finally solved a really weird network issue on my home network.

Multiple interfaces with different firewall rules on the same wire cause great confusion, but a few sysctl entries fix it.

https://netbeez.net/blog/avoiding-arp-flux-in-multi-interface-linux-hosts/

 

@slightlylate @KevinJHill Better put it in the freezer if you want your GPU to survive.

https://t.co/BWhQN7Rtbo

 

HTML EMAIL

Found in some email archives..

 ===============================================
 |                       /"\                   |
 | ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN \ / AGAINST HTML MAIL |
 |                        X                    |
 |                       / \                   |
 `============================================='

 

 

Adding some new background music to the WFH mix. Come play! You can chat and make requests!

https://www.dnalounge.com/webcast/video.html

 

MessagingApps++

Installed Instagram just for chat.

It's... Really good. This is for 1:1 but the video and voice message sharing is simple, and you can respond by just lifting the phone to your ear. Kinda magical and beats the crap out of voice typing.

YMMV etc etc

 

Lady Gaga is a Robot?

Just in case you wanted to know how AI is getting sucked into the conspiracy world..

https://www.thechembow.com/covid-19-flu-bug-or-computer-virus

 

Flip Fone Follies..

Managed to teach an elderly aunt how to
- get text messages on her flip phone,
- so she could sign up for Skype
- so she could share her screen
- so I could help her diagnose her email problem
- using Windows Live Messenger
- by doing a Skype + Conference call with her ISP to change her password and settings.

So Skype requires a gmail/yahoo account (won't let you use a "business" account like kmtel) so sign up with phone was the only option.

Had to explain 'soft keys' plus there were 100 texts that had never been read.

Skype created account password wasn't confirmed, so had to change password

Windows Live Messenger is a hot mess. SO. MANY. BUTTONS.

pop3 + smtp with differing passwords (pop3 was fine, smtp not)

phew......

 

Any covid-19 WebPass-for-business specials in SF? I have a potential customer...





 

"You die Edison Carter or you live long enough to see yourself become Network 23"





 

that xscreensaver is on Android and usable as live wallpapers.

"Hacking the Gibson" adds some nice cyberpunk aesthetic to my home screen...

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/download.html

 

Oh wow, I haven't read the issue cover-to-cover but I didn't see @waynecoyne mentioned there.

I'll make sure that I do this justice and will see if I can find an ANSI C (or A2) sized scanner for the cover art.

 

Ears

Spotty ambient song recognition on this mashup set.

Impressed that it got the Eminem song with the Imperial March overlay though

Humans still do it better.:)

 

@technolust@hackers.town yeah, good times. Bad reception though! And Radio K only had a daytime AM license at the time. That's why they were 'open to 9pm'!!!

 

You had to work harder to listen to good music back then. @radiok remembers. I'm sure @djkevincole of remembers.

 

Just amazing work by @chankfonts including design, content (and fonts!) and photography by @midwestartbuyer and tons of other people...

Will upload to @internetarchive when I'm happy with the results..

 

WFH

French Press + Vacuum Themos = Less time doing pour-overs

Also I don't think I'll be able to tolerate the MK coffee machine when all this is done....