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I recently completed the #DoctorWho novel "The Time Travelers" by Simon Guerrier. It's an original first Doctr novel with Ian, Barbara and Susan as the companions, likely taking place after the TV episode "Planet of Giants."
I absolutely loved this book for several reasons. First, it's a fact that many Doctor Who episodes of this era were simpler compared to many of the newer stories. I've always wanted to see a story with the first Doctor that was a bit more complex than what we got in the TV series and this book definitely does this, with time travel paradoxes being the central theme and how changes to history can create alternate timelines.
One of the things that has always annoyed me about Doctor Who, whether we're talking about the TV series, audio dramas or the books, is that no matter how interesting the plot is when the story starts out it more often than not winds up being about some alien being or race intent on taking over the planet/galaxy,universe, etc. You have such a broad canvas to work with, a series about an alien who can travel anywhere in time and space, and it often deals with yet another alien invasion. Don't get me wrong; I love a good Dalek or Cybermen story as much as any Whovian and I'm not saying this concept should be done away with. However, the stories which don't deal with an alien invasion are always memorable and refreshing to me and "the Time Travelers" is one such book, without a single menacing alien anywhere to be found. There are exceptions with references to a certain alien race taking up residence on a portion of Earth in an alternate timeline but this is hardly dealt with and I somehow missed it during my reading of the novel.
We also have a tasteful and reallistic exploration of Ian and Barbara's relationship, something which was not explored on the TV series but which was definitely acknowledged on a Big Finish audio. There's also a brief exploration of the fact that Susan is an alien and a certain aspect of her alien nature is briefly explored. This book, along with listening to some of the missing first Doctor TV stories, has given me a renewed appreciation of the original Doctor, along with the original companions.
Parts of the book did confuse me and, on occasion, I would pause and say, "OK, so what just happened?" However, that's OK; it was nice to have such weird and complex action dealing with alternate timelines in a first Doctor novel and I still highly recommend this book. I wish we had more first Doctor stories like this one.
This entry was edited (5 days ago)


The most recent Jerry Rig Everything video is deep, profound, poignant and worth a watch.
Americans, vote. Please, just vote.
youtu.be/nZftVjs-JdY?si=9mqKyU…


Perhaps it's a certain day, but I feel like capitulating as far as Meta glasses go. I mean, as a toy, they are fine., but I still can do so much more with my phone, and what's more important, get a higher quality feedback than what I get from Meta's AI. Oh yeah, the glasses are still cool for recording and listening to the music. Let's hope Apple will soon come up with their own... :)
in reply to Léonie Watson

@tink @JonathanMosen Leonie, I think it really dependss on the use case. How often do you travel on your own? I think the audio quality is quite nice for such a tiny form factor. You can take videos up to three minutes long with stereo audio as part of them. Meta AI is rather underwhelming, at least for my taste. I don't know why it is so. Perhaps Meta is saving resources given the wide use of glasses. (1/2)
in reply to victor tsaran

Of course, the integration with Insta, FB and Whatsapp may be important if you use these services. You cannot use Siri, etc. I'd say you should consider ordering them and trying out for yourself though. You can always return them. (2/2)
in reply to victor tsaran

You can use Siri if the glasses are paired to an iPhone. Both input and output for Siri are with the glasses when they are paired.
in reply to Jonathan Mosen

@JonathanMosen Thanks a lot. I stand corrected. I just don’t know why it did not occur to me to try Siri with the glasses on. I was just pulling out my phone every time I wanted to interact with Siri. O well, live and learn! Thanks a lot!
in reply to victor tsaran

@JonathanMosen That only works if your phone itself is listening and can hear you. In many cases, that won't be true; e.g. phone in pocket or bag. It is possible for Bluetooth headsets to invoke Siri themselves, but the Meta glasses don't seem to have a way to do that. I suspect that may be deliberate in order to drive traffic to the Meta assistant.
in reply to Jamie Teh

@jcsteh Interesting, I've not picked up on this because I have my iPhone in my pocket and it always just works when I use the invocation word.
in reply to Jonathan Mosen

@JonathanMosen Fascinating. Normally the wake word doesn't work if the iPhone's proximity sensor senses something. I guess it doesn't when it's in your pocket? It does here, heh.
in reply to Jamie Teh

@JonathanMosen Ah. Do you have Settings -> Accessibility -> Siri -> Always listen for Siri turned on by any chance? I don't. Turning that on might help this.
in reply to Jamie Teh

@jcsteh No I can honestly say it has always worked in my pocket. Glad to have such a cool, cooperative pocket! 📱No, the always listen setting is off.
in reply to Jonathan Mosen

@JonathanMosen Well, at least turning that setting on might help those of us with less cooperative pockets. I'll have to try it out.
in reply to Jamie Teh

@jcsteh @JonathanMosen Does the iPhone in pocket working with Siri have anything to do with hearing aids? They might act as headphones or something similar to having AirPods in.
in reply to Jonathan Mosen

@JonathanMosen @chinakow @jcsteh I tried summoning Siri from my phone in the pocket (without glasses on my face) and was not successful. However, when I put the glasses on, Siri seems to respond when the phone is in the proximity. Hmmm, interesting.
in reply to victor tsaran

@JonathanMosen @chinakow Heh, and earlier today I couldn't even get Siri to work with the glasses on even while physically holding the button on my phone, yet that has worked previously. 😕
in reply to Jamie Teh

@JonathanMosen @chinakow I just love how all of this tech works so reliably together. It's like these mega companies all get along swimmingly and the most important thing to them is that things work delightfully for users, regardless of walled gardens. Oh wait... sorry, must have been in an alternate universe there for a sec.
in reply to Jonathan Mosen

@JonathanMosen @jcsteh Still, Jonathan helped me in understanding that I can actually rely on Siri hearing me while in the pocket. As long as it works… :)
in reply to victor tsaran

@JonathanMosen Right, unless you're like me and your phone thinks it's covered when it's in your pocket, in which case you'll need to flip that option I mentioned.
in reply to Jamie Teh

@jcsteh @JonathanMosen Yep, Jamie, I guess I need to stand back and correct myself again. LOL I just took my iPhone father away from where I could not hear me and, sure enough, the Siri wake up words no longer worked. Meta stuff still worked as before. This sort of makes sense since the glasses were not tuned to understand Siri commands.
in reply to victor tsaran

@JonathanMosen Right, though it'd be nice if you could at least say "Hey Meta, phone assistant" or something.
in reply to victor tsaran

I travel a lot on my own, so the ability to use AIRA/WhatsApp for video calls using the glasses is the main appeal. You're right though, experimenting with a pair would be the best way to answer the question 😊
in reply to Charlotte Joanne

@Lottie @tink @JonathanMosen Ah, that’s a good point, but also a matter of taste. I wish there were not as big but a bit more stylish, like, say, some high-end Italian brands! lOL Having said that, Ray-ban is definitely a good compromise, especially considering the amazing tech built-in.


The Five Faces of Doctor Who, the multi-Doctor repeat season was broadcast 40 years ago today, on 2 November 1981. This fondly remembered run of repeats gave many fans the chance to enjoy stories from past Doctor’s that they’d never seen before for the first time! #DoctorWho
in reply to Paul Bowler

Considering its popularity, it's remarkable to me that the BBC rarely aired repeat episodes of #DoctorWho.
in reply to David Goldfield

@DavidGoldfield IKWYM, it still baffles me why they've never repeated the show on a regular basis, they seem to with just about everything else these days.


I have just downloaded the Reader from ElevenLabs. If you want a way to listen to audiobooks, get this app! Unlike Voice Dream Reader, I can't actually read what's on the screen with my Braille Display, but I love the voices and the way it reads. It is extremely accessible also.
in reply to Kelly Wickham

I've wanted to try the ElevenLabs Reader app for a while but after reading your post I decided to finally download it. I am very, very impressed. Thanks for reminding me about it. It's not perfect but for reading text and Epub files it's an improvement over Voice Dream Reader.
in reply to David Goldfield

@DavidGoldfield @technocounselor Have they improved VoiceOver accessibility? I was quite disappointed with that aspect when it was first released. On being free, based on a survey they sent me the other day, it looks like they are preparing to introduce a paid tier.


Has anyone here done any work on CSS parsers?

I am thinking of using github.com/keithamus/csslex as a base and going from there to learn more about CSS internals, but I admit I am Afraid of Doing Code Crimes and would like encouragment ha ha

in reply to Olu

not with that library in particular, but in librsvg I use a rust-based css lexer and parse properties with that. Writing the parsers is fun, a bit tricky sometimes. I do steal code from Servo from time to time. Happy to talk about it.


Oh the non believers among you re my toot about Woollybutt St!! I had to walk 5km there and back this . morning to bring you this .... It even has its own dedicated bus stop (@welshpixie)
This entry was edited (6 days ago)



#SabadoDeMochilas72h

Veo que algunes os estáis planteando hacer las mochilas 72h.

Así que si os parece vamos hablando de ello.

Yo no soy experta, pero hacerlas me ayuda a saber qué es lo importante en un emergencia y no quedarme corriendo como pollo sin cabeza por la casa.

Ayuda a manejar la ansiedad, y pasar de preocuparse a ocuparse.

Así que...

Vamos a hablar de lo que llevamos en las mochilas de emergencia.



He may be starting with lanes in Toronto, but all communities are at risk, including Ottawa. We need to stand up for everyone who uses these lanes, benefits from the cyclists shopping along the routes, and all those who will be too afraid to ride because of the increased danger. See you there! #ottbike #biketooter


Shall the historic anglophones ALSO sue the province of Québec AND the city of Montréal, etc. to translate ALL its websites and provincial and municipal documents into English?

Supreme Court sued over its refusal to translate decisions before 1970 into French: montreal.citynews.ca/2024/11/0…

#cdnpoli #polcan #polQC #QCpoli #assnat #polMTL #MTLpoli



To pull a Bezos: to sell oneself out to someone only to be kicked in the teeth by them.

Couldn’t have happened to a smarter person. Like literally, almost anyone paying attention with a modicum of intelligence would have known acquiescence would earn them nothing but scorn.

h/t @amberwavesofflame

#fec #WashingtonPost #trump #bezos #USpol



Montreal metro shut down for nearly 20 hours

montreal.citynews.ca/2024/11/0…

But Valérie Plante want to spend MILLIONS on Franco Fascism.



Stone-built Snake Bridge on the Macclesfield Canal in England.

The ‘Snake Bridge’ or 'Roving Bridge' is a bridge over a canal constructed to allow a horse towing a boat to cross the canal when the towpath changes sides, without having to be unhitched from the boat.

#archaeohistories



by ma zaujímalo aké porekadlá a príslovia pozná dnešná mládež
This entry was edited (6 days ago)


If you think a cast iron skillet is the same as any other, science has proven you wrong.

In a blind taste-test, diners were able to instantly identify which meal was prepared in cast iron cookware, due to the distinctive way the cooks wouldn’t shut up about how big a difference cast iron makes.



Sixteen years since I was on the FLOSS Weekly podcast last, I will join them again on Tuesday for a new recording. I know, a little annoying that I shall keep showing up there all the time.

daniel:// stenberg:// reshared this.



Trump Media Outsourced Jobs to #Mexico Even as #Trump Pushes “America First”
==

On the campaign trail, #DonaldTrump threatened businesses that send jobs south of the border, while his own company that runs the Truth Social platform outsourced coding jobs to workers in Mexico, outraging some staff members.

#News #TrumpMedia #Trump #Government #Business #Tariffs #Politics #Election #ELection2024 #TruthSocial

propublica.org/article/donald-…




Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were hauled away in handcuffs by the police for performances far less obscene than the ones Donald Trump is now enacting nightly before live audiences.

[Correction: I’m told that, although Carlin was arrested, no handcuffs were involved.]

This entry was edited (6 days ago)


If you buy a Mac with Sequoia on their closed arm SOC you're contributing to the enshittification of general purpose computing and will get the feudalized computing experience webserfs crave.
hackaday.com/2024/11/01/apple-…
This entry was edited (6 days ago)


Fun thing about the loudest critics of the #OpenSourceAIDefinition: during the fully transparent and open process leading to its result they were nowhere to be seen. Only *after* it was published they suddenly had something to say. Clickbait, much? :(


Twitch are updating their rules & decided that LGBTQ+ is a "Sensitive social issue" & needs to be hidden behind a content warning.

Obviously this is bad for LGBTQ+ streamers & a slippery slope, so please if you're a twitch user, vote on this feedback petition:

twitch.uservoice.com/forums/93…

There's a lot more I could have written about this but... look we've all seen this a million times before, we know how it works, how bad actors abuse it to mass report and bully and where it all goes.

This entry was edited (6 days ago)


Hey folks, thanks to @bagder and @kees , I managed to compute the "Source code age" from the GLPI project, which I'm working on, and it's really fun because we can see a lot of nice information on it!

To sum it up: the code is very dynamic, and compared to Curl (which you can see here: mastodon.social/@bagder/113399… ) , we can definitely see that it doesn't endorse backwards compatibility: there are a lot of refactorings of big parts of the codebase! 🎉

(I'm running this on Symfony too, stay tuned)

This entry was edited (6 days ago)
in reply to Alex Rock

yeah, I think you just have to decide what it is you want shown in the graph and make sure you pick the tags that represent that view
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

Yep, in that case, tags must be totally reordered by number instead of by date. That's a whole different way of analyzing 😅

For instance, version 2.x had tags published the same day for several versions of both 2.7.x and 2.8.x branches.

I will have to rewrite this more than just tweaking it, I guess.



Welcome Jonas 'Sortie' Termansen as #curl commit author 1313: github.com/curl/curl/pull/1547…
#curl



@bagder I think you already have this one but I just got this Vita and I had to look 👀


Táta půjde na operaci s kolenem a na dobu, co bude marodit, mi půjčil pracovní nebeskou Felicii, abych jí udržovala v provozu 💙 Jízda tichá, nic nebouchá, světla svítí, stěrače stírají, bez posilovače řízení, vepředu i vzadu švihadla, přidaný denní svícení a dálkový centrální zamykání... prostě stará dobrá klasika bez zbytečný elektroniky 😀👌🏻


Thirty six years almost to the day after the release of the Morris Worm, OKTA announces they've just patched a bug where you can just log in with no password if your username is too long.

Could we please, before the Morris Worm turns forty years old, make a habit of, god help us all maybe even a standard practice of, sanitizing our inputs.

trust.okta.com/security-adviso…

This entry was edited (6 days ago)


Anyone know of a good way to clean and maintain a braille display? I want to ensure my pins don't start not to work as I'm already seeing some of that happening on my display and I want to avoid even more of that if at all possible. Any thoughts would be most welcome. #Blind
in reply to LeonianUniverse

Also I heard that individual pins can be cleaned of dirt by using cans of compressed air, but I've never tried it myself.


Encryption backdoors must never be allowed. To prove that Tuta Mail and Tuta Calendar are free from any backdoor, the entire client code is published as open source. Let's fight against mass surveillance! ✊

tuta.com/blog/why-a-backdoor-i…

#privacy #encryption #surveillance #backdoors

in reply to Tuta

A very good way to have instant access to all program knowledge, workings, creations, and language. The easy access blueprints to robbing your entirety and wiping you clean.

Then proceed with, "This is our version, new, updated from the ground up, a re-creation of a familiar past creation."

Modern day successes made easy off your backs.

in reply to Tuta

Some clothes dyes are colorless in the infrared so that using a near infrared camera one can see through clothes dyed with them. This was infamous back in the 80s when some cameras had poor IR cut filters and people noticed this.


Therapist: Mercator sphere isn't real, it can't hurt you
Mercator sphere:


~25M lines of code in the Linux kernel drivers/ directory. O_O

~15M LoC for everything else.


in reply to MikeDunnAuthor

to be fair they'd make better decision and still remain as unaccountable as before.

"I'm sorry Dave, I had to let you go. It's my fault".



Fake videos from Russian propagandists aim to raise tensions ahead of Election Day - NPR apple.news/Ab1jgHqgtQ8Gni_R994…


El capitalismo te dice:

Mira todas las series y pelis que hemos hecho para ti: en cuanto llegue el futuro solo sobreviviremos en bunkers defendidos con armas, sera el todo contra todos cuando falte lo básico.

Lo que esta sucediendo realmente en Valencia ahora mismo:

Miles, literalmente miles de personas están ayudando, incluso caminando decenas de kilómetros, llevando agua y comida, despejando las calles, cuidando animales de compañía, acogiendo en su casa.... en su mayor parte de manera autorganizada.

Así es como respondemos realmente la inmensa mayoría de personas cuando nos quedamos sin agua, luz, teléfono, internet, casa ni comida durante días y días.



The pain about clouds
Everyone knows it, nobody has a sulotion.
- Dropbox: Is being hated for some reason by people because it's, apparently, to expensive, but I don't get the issue. It's really accessible, easy, works, and needs no real care. You can run and use it out of the box, one could say. But just 2 gb for free? Come on dude.
- Google Drive: We don't need to start about this. Super slow, synces ages and buggy, annoying because you have to share every file you want to generate a file of manually and the sharing is bugged as hell. 15 gb as start off are fine yes, but still.
- Self hosted sulotions:
Nextcloud? Nah. Honestly the idea of it is cool and I like that it has a such big community, but it still has it's inaccessible parts and is not really running out of the box.
- Some weird ftp shit with simple URL: Yes, is pretty cool although this also needs a bit more setup than it looks as first, and would possibely need experience because you never know how secure it would be at the end.
And other stuff like seadrive? No idea. This is even more complicated unless you find a way to host it, say in snap, as example.
So at the end I'm just saying, it's annoying if you don't want to pay. I really would like dropbox at most but I can't pay $10 per month for two thousand gigabytes right now.
If anyone has something really cool, please please recommend it. I am searching for something with a simple and cool UI, which can be hosted on Linux and be installed either easely or even with a service snap or a script, or is maybe also commertial.
in reply to garo

Maybe HFS could be a solution if you just need file and folder sharing? I haven't had time to test it thoroughly yet, but a first look at the web interface wasn't too bad. github.com/rejetto/hfs
in reply to Steffen

@radiorobbe This looks really cool. I need to mess around with my proxy stuff a little before i actually will be able to use it but when it runs it probably will be amazing. Thanks for that. I'll share my experience soon.


Question for the dads out there: if we - with preparation, of course, steeling ourselves and approaching the task with resolve - if we throw away that container of random old nuts, bolts and screws. Do we ever recover from that, emotionally, or do we just live with its loss?
in reply to mhoye

I think it's like knowing when to take microwave popcorn out of the oven. If more than N time passes between useful picks from the container, you can throw it out.

(I seem to have exhausted all the useful bolt/nut pairs from such container, and all that remains is things that don't fit anywhere. I should really throw it out.)



Eh, I wanted to do some work today as I rested after #pragma24. But I still feel floppy and tired.


I love test-driven development. It's fun to convert a list of requirements into a set of tests, develop APIs that conform to those tests, and then try to write the simplest code possible to conform to your requirements.
in reply to Chris 🌱

100% agree! 💯

IMO, it is one of the single most important coding practices that can be adopted by software engineers.

One advantage that is often not talked about (and applies to unit tests in general) is, what I like to call "Press Play And Debug":
Imagine you have a very complicated workflow/process you have to go through manually until you reach your desired state of debugging.

With unit tests you can just Press Play And Debug.¯\_(ツ)_/¯