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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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Flossing Teeth Considered Harmful? — I am not 100% convinced yet, but I think flossing teeth can cause more damage than good. While every dental heath professional will tell you to floss, if you think about it, there are problems. Getting rid of remaining food and bacterial accumulations forming on sugary residues on your teeth is a good thing. However, driving it around with a piece of string can just as easily shove it deeper under the gum and make matters worse. If you have an infected...
💬 9 comments · Feb 02 · 3 days ago
Pissing into a jar, installing Linux — The two activities are surprisingly compatible. You can't leave the house. It takes the whole day. It is stinky and sometimes embarrassing. You feel inadequate. I succeeded in installing void on my 'main' machine. I collected not quite 2L of piss. Why am I collecting urine? I am long overdue for a 24-hour test to see what kind of stones my kidneys are making, and hopefully, return to a diet which contains spinach, beats, soy, and tea. I may be better at...
💬 24 comments · 1 like · Jan 23 · 13 days ago
A Terrible Restless Night... — I am way out of it today, after yet another disrupted sleep. I've been having trouble sleeping lately -- a new thing for me. My entire life I was a sound sleeper, and could usually wake up when needed before the alarm. Now I seem to wake up at 3AM almost every night, lie awake, listen to audiobooks to distract myself, fall asleep and feel like crap in the morning. Last night was ridiculous. I woke up at just around 3AM with a strong sense of something gone...
💬 6 comments · Jan 22 · 2 weeks ago
Escape from github — A few years back, when Microsoft took over github, i figured it was time to go. I copied all my repos to gitlab (is it any better? I don't know, it still seems i am the product...), but then I stopped short of deleting my github account. I still felt kind of attached... And then years went by, and I kind of forgot about it. I've even created some private repos for work-in-progress projects, out of habit. But now I am getting messages that I must enable 2FA...
💬 14 comments · 8 likes · Jan 21 · 2 weeks ago
Hello, Neighbors! — I don't know who had this brilliant idea, but having a door in front of the toilet sure provides adequate ventilation when needed! And sitting on the toilet can be a social activity. P.S. @gritty, I know you will really enjoy this!
💬 1 comment · Jan 13 · 3 weeks ago
LCD vs. Sledgehammer — The Accident I was climbing out of the bathtub, one hand holding my 10" tablet, the other swinging around vigorously to keep my balance. I placed the tablet onto a 5-gallon bucket of roofing compound that I keep next to the bathtub, but to my dismay, the tablet slipped off the bucket and fell onto a sledgehammer resting next to it. Glass side down, of course. The terrible sound of glass on sledgehammer! For a few seconds I thought the screen was broken: there were weird...
💬 5 comments · Jan 12 · 3 weeks ago
Yikes! Louis Rossman butchers a Mac on YouTube... — I like Rossman. He's done a lot of good work fighting for the Right to Repair, and his ongoing fight with New York City bureaucracy (even years after he moved to Texas or Florida) is truly amusing (and familiar). And no doubt he is technically very knowlegeable and, usually, good at diagnosing and fixing electronics. He has been very good at disseminating information about Mac repair, something that Apple clearly does not want. But he is...
💬 6 comments · 1 like · Jan 10 · 4 weeks ago
When you are a nail, everything feels like a hammer...
💬 4 comments · Jan 09 · 4 weeks ago
Cat adapter for Doggiebags — Last year I wound up with a surplus of dog bags and was looking for biodegradable bags for cat waste. Dog bags were too small to fit the scoop when held open with one hand. It sort of worked with two people - one to stretch the bag open, the other to scoop, but that was too inconvenient and filthy. I 3d-printed a bag holder for doggie bags - shaped such that a loaded scooper just fits the opening, solving this problem. The perimiter of the holder is just right for a...
💬 View post · Jan 07 · 4 weeks ago
CBDCs are coming, and I am not ready! — There are more rumblings of impending doom, Central Bank Digital Currencies. All assets will be tokenized and placed into a ledger, maintained by your favorite Central Bank. BIS had stated all assets, once tokenized, will carry with them conditional transaction limitations which banks will be able to programmatically impose. So long privacy and financial freedom. I just want cash, please. I've been, single-handedly, trying to bring it back, by paying...
💬 7 comments · 3 likes · Jan 07 · 4 weeks ago
Ouch! Tooth hurty! Extraction tomorrow! — Giant filling popped out at pandemic onset. Was stable since, with waterpick... Reckoning time is now, abscess and antibiotics..
💬 5 comments · 1 like · Jan 05 · 4 weeks ago
Electric cars: reprise — [gemini link] Thank you for this and other responses. No cars is better than any cars of any kind -- that is true; public transit, density and sensible city planning are much better. In the meantime, electric cars do offer a reasonable-seeming solution for short suburban commutes with lots of time to recharge, in places where infrastructure is available. But I still think we are fooling ourselves about pollution (unless we are in Norway or some place that does not use...
💬 12 comments · 4 likes · 2023-12-26 · 6 weeks ago
Toilets: Good, Bad, and Exploding — Americans are obsessed with bathrooms, and my house has four. To be fair, it has (conservatively) 10 bedrooms, so it's not really excessive. I think it was a whorehouse in the early 1900's. One of the toilets, my favorite, had a jet-engine flusher. Sequestered on the top floor and used mainly by me, it was incredibly powerful: nothing was ever unflushed as a blast of water blew through it with tremendous force. It was truly awesome, and I became a butt...
💬 7 comments · 1 like · 2023-12-26 · 6 weeks ago
A Shopping-Free Christmas — One thing to be grateful for - I've reached an age where I no longer have to worry about Christmas presents. I don't want anything. I have everything I need. My partner feels the same. My kids are old. My house is full of boxes of stocking stuffers of years gone by - unwrapped, hugs exchanged, stuff thrown into a box for me to sort and try to get rid of years later. Happy holidays to all of you.
💬 4 comments · 5 likes · 2023-12-24 · 6 weeks ago
Running With and Without A Big Dog Today I ran 5K straight. It took me about a half hour -- no records broken. I usually run a bit less in a single run as I don't really want to wear out my knees, but it felt good today, so I kept going. I worked up a sweat by the end of it, but wasn't at all out of breath. I have to crank up the speed again to get more of a workout. I mostly run on a treadmill. For some reason it is much, much harder for me to run IRL -- I don't know if it's dealing...
💬 2 comments · 1 like · 2023-12-22 · 6 weeks ago
Abandoning FreeBSD; back to Linux — I give up. I gave it a good try, and kind of liked it. But it's just too painful, and I was beginning to feel like may hands were tied behind my back. I especiallly liked the minimalism. Only a handful of processes running (as opposed to hundreds on my xubuntu machine). Fast and clean. But I did not like the constant struggle for simple things. Mounting drives. Editing wpa_supplicant file to connect to wifis, like it's 1999. Everything is like pulling...
💬 7 comments · 2023-12-15 · 8 weeks ago
Wiring a dimmer turns weird — I finally got around to replacing a dimmer for the classic three pendant lights over the open-plan kitchen/lr counter. These had been dark for months now as I was elsewhere, then procrastinating too much. It ws time. The old Feit dimmer failed in an unforeseen way: the large rocker on/off switch got internally detached and was now just flapping in the breeze, not clicking or doing anything. The unit is sealed with triangular-slot screws. E-waste. I had an...
💬 2 comments · 2023-12-11 · 8 weeks ago
Brainfogged... — The last week or or two had been hard... I feel like someone had hit me in the head with a shovel, sans the pain. But I never get headaches, and no exception here. No pain, but a kind of dizziness, and weird visuals - feels like slightly out of focus but not really... Most importantly, my brain is not functioning at capacity. It took me a while to remember the word 'brainfog' when I sat down, and I had to get up and dick around for a while... I've been using my brain daily...
💬 7 comments · 1 like · 2023-12-10 · 8 weeks ago
I wrote a Lisp... — There are many 'make a lisp' projects resulting in a crippled scheme, using your favorite language. I wanted something that would be super-simple and reasonably performant, bootstrapped in pure assembly, like JonesForth. But there was nothing like that. So I wrote one. Let's call it SmithLisp. It seems as performant as Picolisp, which is pretty good. Unlike Picolisp it has real lexical scope, and real McCarthian Lisp semantics, currying and all. Right now it assembles to...
💬 View post · 4 likes · 2023-11-10 · 3 months ago
Getting Sick of Linux — My pretty minimal installation of Xubuntu, running with dwm (no desktop or related crap) is beginning to feel like a lead weight. It is plenty fast on the old i5 ThinkPad (I've been scaling down - a couple of years I only used i7's), and I have few complaints, really. But I feel like I am drowning. It is running like 200 processes, without me doing anything taxing right now. I have no clue what 95% of these are. Some are downright scary sounding: idle_inject,...
💬 15 comments · 1 like · 2023-10-02 · 4 months ago
I drove across the US, and Google Auto was a disaster — Decades ago I had a GPS navigator, and I thought it was pretty bad. But it was a paradise compared to Google Auto running on my Moto G Play in conjunction to the Sony XAV-AX5000 (which came with my used car). This combination results in a truly dangerous road experience. I was also trying to listen to podcasts, which added yet another layer of horribleness to the experience. Let me try to summarize what happened: First, my tablet had a...
💬 1 comment · 2023-09-30 · 4 months ago
Do Dogs Face North When Pooping? — I saw a stupid Youtube segment that claimed that dogs prefer facing towards the magnetic North when crapping. This sounds like nonsense, but it seems that many other places of questionable reputation concur. I've been watching my dog, and indeed for 3 days she faced North, but today she faced East.
💬 3 comments · 2023-09-11 · 5 months ago
When your Forth is smaller than 4K... — I had a funny realization today. Normally you work with a sizable toolchain, and are working on some code that is tiny in comparison. But when your tool is 4K, it is kind of disposable - you can attach it to every piece of source without making a dent... I started out with trying to figure out how to boot nForth - it starts up, then loads a forth file to expand itself. But it turns out that it is easier to append the forth file to the binary - it saves...
💬 View post · 5 likes · 2023-09-07 · 5 months ago
nForth update pushed — Just pushed an overhauled nForth source (and binary) to: [https link] In the last couple of days I got back up to speed in 386 assembly, learned an awful lot about the (lack of adequate) Linux support for i386 executables, and got nForth to work in the treacherous Address Space Randomization environment. It now works with as little as 8K of heap, and runs as a CGI with minimal resources. Now I can get back to whumpage.
💬 View post · 2 likes · 2023-09-04 · 5 months ago
nForth - trouble in paradise — Just as I was beginning to enjoy low-level assembly coding after a long break, and looking forward to whumpin' on some home-made forth, the bastards got me! My mom tried to tell me to be normal, and do things the way other people do them, but no! I had to be this weirdo who just gets more and more restless doing things the 'normal' way. And so, 32-bit code is apparently over, just when I was really embracing the i386, with its limited registers. But I love being...
💬 3 comments · 1 like · 2023-09-03 · 5 months ago
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