I don't know who needs to learn this, but, around the System 7 era of Mac OS (I don't know, mid '90s? Ish?) there was some kind of add on or extension or whatever that enhanced the desktop experience thus:
Whenever you dragged something to the Trash target icon, it would play a little animation of Oscar the Grouch popping up out of the can.
He would sing "I love trash! I love it because it's trash!" and then lickity-split descend back down.
Thank you for not only donating, but being a monthly donor and sharing your story here on Mastodon! All of us on team Thunderbird are so grateful, and will keep doing our best to make email boring but better. 💙 😊
Ah, yes, the time of year where everybody is asking for donations. Surprised that the rescue we got my wife's dog from made no requests of us, this year? The rescue we got my dog from did. Gave to the latter because of the "Giving Tuesday" matching program. I'll have to see if the former is still running under "Giving Tuesday".
I've finally put my money where my mouth is and joined the other #FriendsOfGNOME.
I've been using #GNOME since the #HelixCode/#Ximian days shortly after 1.0 and while I have certainly tried other DEs over time, GNOME remains my go-to desktop project after all of these years. It just vibes with how my brain works and what it likes. It is one of my FLOSS rocks.
The consistency, attention to details, and un-overwhelming/non-stim-triggering design has been a comfort to me all of these years later.
I'm finally, 26ish years on, finally in a place that I can actively, and responsibly, support incredible projects like GNOME.
Supporting the GNOME Foundation directly enables us to take on more initiatives like this, paying community members to deliver impactful work. Help us reach 1,500 #FriendsOfGNOME before the end of the year by donating today: donate.gnome.org
What features or initiatives would YOU like to see the GNOME Foundation take on in the coming year?
Microsoft is making changes to its diversity and inclusion efforts. The annual report is being dropped, alongside employee performance review reporting.
Fascinating story from a software dev Fedi friend, shared with permission to keep it anonymous:
❝A couple of days ago, I had an experience at work that made me understand one of the reasons why the chasm of opinion about LLMs is so deep and wide.
My department mostly does fiddly lowlevel work, [close to hardware]. A few of us don't use LLMs at all, a few use them sparingly, and one member is absolutely all-in. So during one of our morning meetings he suddenly started going off on a deeply disturbing diatribe about how we need to treat the LLMs “like slaves”.❞
❝I said that I *absolutely in no way* want a slave, or a technology that simulates one. I want to do creative work using good tools. I *don't want* the experience of a slaver; in fact, I would go very far to never have that experience, because it is a demeaning and antihuman experience.❞
❝He was completely unable to understand why. He kept arguing that since the LLM isn't an actual conscious person (which is correct), it ought to be treated like a slave, and that the arc of technology is to give everyone access to their own virtual slaves.❞
I agree with the storyteller: the experience of having a slave is abhorrent, simulated or not, and this story is a window into something •deep• about the present moment. Even without having slaves, we are all in danger of having a •slaver mindset•. It’s a disease that’s running rampant now in billionaire-shaped techno-utopian circles.
…and even having written that, it’s still shocking — not surprising, exactly, but shocking — to hear those thoughts expressed so baldly by the colleague in the story above.
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us @rysiek@mstdn.social @cstross@wandering.shop Guinan said it. This scene still gives me chills every time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9TUeapBSQ
What writers. What a pair of actors. 🧵
elevator pitch: it’s a small, wide carriage electric train set with a circular track (available in various diameters) designed to make a cozy slow little circuit around the base of your holiday tree until its package of onboard sensors detect an incoming robot vacuum or cat, at which point it moves rapidly to intercept and clamp on its magnetic brakes until the invader has been repelled or has otherwise circumvented the train’s defensive mode.
Six Conservative Justices saw almost every member of the Texas Republican Party bragging about how intentionally racist they were being, and said, "We don't see any racism."
I can't wait to see their COMPLETELY OPPOSITE RULING striking down California's redrawn maps. bbc.com/news/articles/cvg1v21p…
Interesting take on how Microsoft employees are resentful of AI because they're forced to use Copilot but it doesn't make them more productive and AI teams are rewarded while everyone else gets scraps & layoffs. It even claims a team lost their PM to layoffs because of lack of proficiency at using AI.
Does anyone else find the #MacOS #TextToSpeech app (I think it's called #VoiceOver) really annoying and painful to listen to? I'm searching for an alternative but can't find anything. #Blind
On a positive observation, I've been conducting a very successful experiment with my WiFi network over the past week. Old Habits Die Hard I go back to the young days of Wi-Fi, around 2003. I do know people who go back further than I do for sure, but I got in at the start of the consumer adoption of Wi-Fi. Back in the days of draft standards, half-baked implementations, finicky radios, the lot. The sage old advice said that you should have separate SSIDs for each band being broadcast, so that devices could choose, and stay locked on, to which ever band you intend. That has worked quite well for me, to this very present day. However, a popup on my iPhone 17 Pro Max at setup gave me pause. It had mentioned something about my WiFi network having limited compatibility with some AirPlay features, due to the SSIDs being separate. It wanted me to unite all the bands into one SSID. So on a whim, and with really nothing to lose, I did that. I combined my 2.4 GHZ, 5GHZ and 6GHZ bands under one single SSID. And insanely amazingly, it actually has worked perfectly for the past week! All devices connect to their best band at the best rate! Its seemless! And what's even more cool with the iPhone, is that it actually seemlessly hands off to lower rates on lower bands as signal strength weakens. I can get all the way down to my elevator lobby. That's about 100 feet away with this new setup. Cool shtuff! Thanks Apple.
Yep. I've been using a unified SSID like that since about 2014, but I also maintain separate ones if I find they are needed for anything, because my UniFi access points make that easy to do. Granted, I don't currently have 6 gHz access points until I upgrade the AP's, which will also mean a switch upgrade, because Gigabit bottleneck. So far, other than for testing purposes only, I have not needed to use the separate per-band SSIDs.
Wow. That's cool that its been working for you that long. And also cool that you can have combined and separate SSIDs too. I think my gear can do that too, but meh, LOL. I suppose I'll do it if that need should present itself.
With the price of RAM now, it will become impossible to run all these stupid Electron wrappers. Both brough the same technobros that find solutions to problems that don't exist.
SeaweedFS has had one hell of a struggle with their S3 V4 signatures and reverse proxies. Over the last year they've refactored several things to get it to work as consistently as possible.
But one giant problem that they haven't properly documented: If you are reverse proxying on HTTPS/443, you should NOT set X-Forwarded-Port or it fails signatures.
Because it assumes you need the port to be signed because it's part of the URL right??, but nobody puts the 443 port in the URL...
Disabling X-Forwarded-Port fixed SeaweedFS auth for me
guess I'll have to save someone the pain and blog this
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Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.
We’ve only had about a week of winter weather and I’ve already had enough! Not even snow, just cold. Yes, I’m a wimp. But spring can’t come soon enough for me.
@kl1964 I hope it warms up there a little. I don't understand what human beings are doing up in these northern latitudes. We belong in the tropics. I'm thinking about moving back up north for family-related reasons, but I hate the weather up there.
Tomorrow night join @Liz, from 6 P.M. eastern (US time), for Mellow Vibes. It’s two hours of Acoustic, mellow, and unplugged music. So tune in tomorrow night, and start the weekend relaxed. HKCRadio.com
Anyone know of a way I can test my RAM on my laptop as a blind person? Or at least something that would, say, wrrite a log file or something I can review after the fact?
Optimize your PC performance and prevent slowdowns with Windows Memory Diagnostic and RAM tools. Learn how to test RAM and improve performance with Windows Memory Diagnostic.
I suck horribly at gaming, but occasionally dabble. ioquake3 is actually a good small program to test our exploit mitigations and security hardening techniques. So, let's play (with cheats!) Signed-off-by:...
it's not a lie! They got the blessing from Epic, it's planned to do full net install and be compatible with all the mods etc and mean to work with all old and new servers
The great news is that the blueberry butterfly iBook G3 has survived the travel after 6 months in a box in a container (3 of them blocked due to strikes in Spain) !
I never noticed before that back then the logo on the back was upside down when opened. Feels kinda weird nowadays.
Anyway this looks great for upcoming #Marchintosh and #GlobalTalk in 2026 (or 2027, if you know how I am).
“It’s a long and crooked walk to a bad friend, Even if he lives nearby. But it’s an easy road To a good friend, No matter how long the journey.”
-Hávamál 34
You should actually want to hang out with your friends. This seems like a ridiculously simple concept, but as social creatures, we tend to hold onto relationships even when they’re harming us.
Odin’s advice is that if you have to force yourself to hang out with someone, if you dread their texts, if you have to prepare yourself for their phone call, then that person is bad for you. A friend should be someone you actually want to spend time with because they’re fun, and they make you feel good. Yeah, we all have days where we just don’t want to leave the house, but there’s a difference between wanting to stay home because you’re tired and actively dreading someone’s company.
thank you for this post, may gods keep you safe from evil. I feel it in my heart especially because it seems, we found some friends to hangout with after long years when we had only each other. I mean, to have a good wife is already the most precious gift from gods in my life, but as you said, we are social animals and sometimes need larger company.
You ever found yourself trying to do something really simple, like show a username on a web page, but you can't because there's too much "architecture"? This...
Borris
in reply to Max Leibman • • •