pixelscript

Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.

The two apps are identical and built from the same codebase anyway. K-9 is just a branding asset swap.

I've seen conflicting info from Thunderbird devs on how long they actually intend to keep both branding packages active. I've heard no longer than a year. I've heard only as long as it takes to get Thunderbird out of beta. I've heard they have some sort of agreement with FDroid that obligates them to keep it listed for some minimum duration of time (???). I've most recently heard indefinitely, because their build script is just a toggle now and it costs them nothing. Which one do I believe? I have no idea. I doubt K-9 will be kept around in perpetuity, though.

I'd be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don't care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft's market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.

Rule of thumb: if it sits between you and the ground for an extended period, don't cheap out on it or settle if you have the choice.

Shoes, desk chair, mattress, pillow, car seat.

Life is too short to be uncomfortable.

There's actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It's all analog.

A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.

An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they're hooked up to. If it's coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).

The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you'll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there's no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It's a direct pass-through.

The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it's holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.

I'm sure you already know all of this. I just think it's really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.

Aww... That Marnie cover is one-of-a-kind.

Pity. It's far and away the nicest one I've seen.

Votes on Lemmy are public, fyi.

You have to host your own Lemmy instance to see them for yourself, but you can check if you were so inclined.

I love cats. Other peoples' cats.

I will never own my own cat because I don't want to accept the burden of responsibility that responsible pet ownership demands.

I guess, in a very liberal definition of the term, "cloud gaming". Specifically the old LodgeNet systems in hotels where you could rent Nintendo games by the hour to be streamed to your room from a physical console somewhere behind the front desk. Every room had a special controller with oodles of extra buttons on it hardwired to the television that also functioned as television remotes.

The service was objectively awful, of course, when factoring in how much the hotel charged compared to what little you got for it. But I've always found it fascinating.

My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there's no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.

The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren't preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, "users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward"? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the "crawlers" (the users) aren't leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?

The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.

That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there's only some high-profile defed exceptions.

A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn't remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.