Obinice

I actually saw those once! Was so confused what they were at first, I was visiting the USA at the time and they had them in some of their public toilets.

But then they also have a huge - intentional - gap in the doors on those cubicles, so that people outside the cubicle waiting to use it were just watching me poop.

It was really fucked up, and not just a one off design mistake, this was EVERY public bathroom. Mental.

What would someone do if they didn’t cook their own meals? Hire a butler? Just get takeaway for their entire lives?

That would be mental. Everyone, except the truly weird - or in special situations, home cooks the majority of the time, right? O.o

He refuses to update the identification info for contributers? Why? It’s the least they can do for people who offer their time and expertise for the project.

Presumably he’d be happy to do so if they got married and changed their name, so it sounds like he’s probably a transphobe, right?

I also had an idea for a wifi network where a router talks to other routers in range to setup networks independent of the internet. The idea being that, if widely enough adopted, you could potentially cut out ISPs except in situations where the signal needs to travel long distances (like rural areas). The router would have an antenna for long-range communication, and then a second antenna to actually talk to devices in a smaller range. Kinda like meshtastic, but significantly faster (with the trade-off being distance and penetration).

There are open source projects in the works for just such a thing, I forget the details at the moment but I heard about them from the Meshtastic Discord funny enough.

Look up the IEEE 802.11ah standard (or Wi-Fi HaLow) for example, it’s a standard that can achieve pretty good WiFi data rates for quite a distance (enough that a neighborhood mesh would work well), whilst running on low power, sub-GHz hardware (like the Meshtastic hardware).

https://www.quectel.com/blog/what-is-wi-fi-halow-iot/

There are mesh internet projects using this, I just don’t remember their names right now haha.

Sadly while it uses more or less the same frequency band as LoRa in the USA (around 900MHz), I’m not sure how useable it is here in Europe given the band licensing restrictions. I’d like to think they’ve thought of that! But I dunno? I’ve seen HaLow hardware that only used the US band, but maybe other companies price EU equivalent hardware.

Sending multimedia via traditional text messaging uses the MMS service, which is ideal for very low resolution images, like sub megabyte, I didn’t even know it could support videos! Wild.

I suggest you add her on something like Discord, or WhatsApp, LINE, whatever works for you, and send each other multimedia that way :-)

Also depending on your provider you may incur lower costs and faster load times, too.

Let’s not be angry at the Devs, it’s the publishers and other execs we should be pissed at :-(

The really annoying thing is that these coatings used to be optional paid extras, and when I got some new lenses for the first time in almost a decade they quickly became blotchy and awful so I went back to get some more but this time with zero coatings.

Specsavers told me that’s wasn’t possible, that ALL lenses have these coatings now, it’s not even optional.

Glasses lenses used to last years and years, now they’re blotchy crap after only 3 or 4 years. Bloody ghets know what they’re doing. And ripping us off while they’re at it with their high prices £££

Why would you think it can only be pronounced with an “uh” at the end? Where did that come from?

I could be wrong about how she uses her name of course, but I would pronounce it Cam-ahl-a, nothing the hard a at the end, as in apple.

We don’t say uhpple, we say apple.

But if labour can afford to live, how will we minimise their ability to focus what little energy we leave them with at the end of their shift on improving their situation?

Paying a living wage is a slippery slope that ends in things like healthcare, education and opportunities being available to all, and that’d make them more than just our bought and paid for production labour, that’d make them our rivals.

I don’t think people are “refusing”, it’s not like it’s mandatory or anything. Nobody’s trying to force you to drive a car.

I know I’ll never be able to afford a car, they’re incredibly expensive to buy and operate, and most of my travel is already covered by our excellent Trams, Buses and Trains, which can get me basically anywhere comfortably and quickly.

For the times I need something special I can ask someone for a lift, but that happens only a handful of times a year. A car would be a big, expensive, risky piece of equipment to just leave sat around for someone to steal…

Being sacked isn’t ruining someone’s life. There are other companies, other jobs. It’s hardly the end of the world.

What you’re saying is “I want him to know it’s okay to keep doing this to other people with no consequences”.

No no like, that classic golden oldies singer, Britney Spears!

NIt’s election season on the internet

Is it? Or is it just election season in a couple of specific countries, and not elsewhere…

Just sayin :P

Yeah, it does a fab job of giving me playlists in each of the moods/genres/decades I tend to listen to most, giving me a mix of tracks I know and stuff I can discover. I’ve found sooo much new music I love that way!

The AI voiced DJ is fun too, it’s surprising how psychologically satisfying it is to have a personal lil DJ, even when it’s basically just generating those same playlists under the hood, with a few tweaks.

I’m glad there are offline/open source solutions people are posting of course, I don’t want Spotify to ever be the only choice or some kinda monopoly. But yeah, if you’re happy using a service like that and spending a reasonable amount on a subscription, it’s fantastic :-)

DokuWiki is fantastic!

Sadly I believe you’re right.

The other side of the coin is desperation, too. Let’s say there’s a truly serious pandemic. Huge numbers of people getting sick, not enough resources to treat them all, even if there is a treatment.

In that scenario, even in a world with no antivaxers or antimaskers, where everyone trusts the science and the doctors, do we think everyone is going to just stay in their homes following the quarantine rules, when there’s not enough to go around, and doing so could be a death sentence?

Or do we think they’d go out, and try to get their hands on what they need to survive? Be it food, medicines etc…

Even in a world of people who trust the science like you or I, we’re probably screwed if things really get that bad, and the only reason COVID didn’t get that bad is for all its awfulness, it’s actually a relatively mild illness overall (not to disrespect the many deaths it caused, just to say that as things go, it could have easily been more infectious, more deadly, harder to treat, etc).

When things get that bad, good people will be so desperate to save themselves, their families, their children, that they’ll break the rules, spread the disease, and doom us all :-(

The Last Of Us.

Because it could happen. It’s unlikely yes, but all it takes is one lucky mutation and we’re done. They were correct in that game, our understanding of fungal infections in humans and our ability to treat it is almost non existent.

We were able to product a vaccine for COVID, a far, far less disruptive illness, within two years (via huge global effort) because we’d been focusing on that area of research for decades very closely and producing similar treatments for a long time already.

But something fungal, and highly contagious? There’s nothing we could do except try to quarantine, bomb and napalm every infected area, and hope we got it all.

And we’ve already seen how an easy to contain illness like COVID simply can’t be contained even when we’ve had a heads up and some time to prepare. It will suddenly explode into the population, and once it’s out there it’s out there.

Long ago, we used to be protected from extinction due to disease as a species due to our inability to travel long distances to spread it. Now? All it takes is one infected person to spend a few hours at a large airport, and within 48 hours it’s reached the doorstep of vast majority of the populated world, and is already behind our best pandemic defences.

If a fungal infection that serious ever does make the leap to humans (which again while unlikely, is also entirely possible, it’s like winning the lottery - it could happen tomorrow or maybe never), we have an extremely tiny, almost non existent window in which we must identify how dangerous it is, quarantine the entire region it was located in, bomb it off the face of the earth and hope to the gods we got it all.

But, our morals, humanity and our indecision will stop us from committing what would normally amount to serious war crimes to save the human race, and that tiny window will slip by.

And then we’re done.

I watch Carol & The End of The World.

Do you think they everybody’s flatulence smells bad or even noticeable all the time? This is not the case.

If yours is particularly bad and common enough that you’re finding it to be an issue, you may need to address your diet, and perhaps check to see if you’re lactose intolerant too, just to be on the safe side.

A Singer sewing machine from before the Great War.