“Linux is probably insecure. Also GPL sounds like communism.” …did I just get mysteriously whisked back to 1998? Because that was the last time I heard this shit.

Well, the ball is in the court of the public transport agencies, then! While OpenStreetMap cannot be expected to accept any and all kind of geographic data imaginable, OSM is meant to serve map data that can supplement other data sources and services.

I’m in Finland, and there’s at least a couple of Web services that do long distance bus/rail/plane route planning, all using OSM. Our municipal bus schedule service, mobile app and the bus stop displays have been using OSM for over a decade.

To me Teams pretty much represents one of Microsoft’s aggravating mortal sins.

Teams got popular. More due to the circumstances than the inherent quality of the app. And once entrenched, Microsoft did what they always do in situations like this. Jack squat.

This could have been a start of a beautiful new era! Strike the iron while it’s hot! Show what the money, resources and the technical know-how at Microsoft’s disposal could do! Fix all of the failings of Skype tech, and really polish up the app! Did Microsoft do that? Naaah. It’s a mediocre app with brand new jank! That’s its destiny now.

I’m mostly using my PC for photo work, drawing, writing, and programming.

Most of my game time is on consoles (Xbox Series X and Switch).

I rarely play PC games, and they’re usually PC-friendly by design (e.g. heavy use of keyboard/mice, ready availability of neat mods) or distribution (weird indie shit®).

Oh and emulators. Recently started dumping all of my GameCube and Wii games, and I have to say Dolphin is just bloody incredible.

[Some person is getting devastating flak from industry peers for association with Trump]
[…while also getting screwed by Trump]

Begun, the second Trump administration has.

Yup. One of the most artsy American comics deeply appreciated by the 🖤goth community🖤. …With this inexplicable page. Most people who read this thing probably went, like, wtf. …And continued reading.

Funny thing, Pixelfed isn’t even a competitor to Instagram in the very very strictest sense.

Pixelfed is a federated service for posting photos.

Instagram started out as a service for posting photos, but it has become this… thing. I don’t even know anymore.

Probably the silliest thing I have run into was some game. It asked you to set two passwords. You needed both to login. The second password couldn’t be changed. This is why it was secure, see. (…What.)

When I created my account and set the second password, I couldn’t log on the second time. Because I had entered a 20 character second password. It was accepted and verified during the account creation just fine. On the second login, it only accepted 16 characters. (It let you enter 20 characters but said it was too long.) Trying to enter first 16 characters of the second password didn’t work, of course.

I then contacted the support, and they did manage to reset the second password anyway. (What is this even)

Huh.

You know, when I think of supercomputer applications, I think of deeply analytical problems based on solid math and well understood algorithms that can be highly parallelised to take the maximum theoretical advantage of the hardware at hand.

You know, the opposite of what the “AI” crowd is doing. Throwing vast amounts of crunching power at a barely understood hypothetical black-box problem in hopes that it potentially yields some interesting results. Maybe.

…We control the treble, and all your bass belongs to us too.

/incredibly ancient joke

Which is why I’m a Drupal fan. It’s wayyyy too overpowered for every purpose equally. …If I need a personal blog, there’s always Jekyll.

If I were building a larger site, I’d probably use Drupal.

It’s a bit of a departure from the “blogware” mindset though. You’re not managing “posts” and “static pages”. You’re managing stuff. …Which can manifest itself as pages or posts. Different kinds of content, different kinds of fields. Blogware gets hacky if you are posting anything but pages and posts, but in Drupal, every type of content is equally tweakable.

I’ve lately started using more paper notebooks for various projects. Recently bought a new sketchbook. Will go buy a paper almanac for the next year today.

I’m a huge tech nerd, but I don’t think going 100% digital works for me. Also noticed that one of the ways I can deal with ADHD is to stop messing around with computers and do things by hand.

Will there be an official Office of Dildo Inspections? With Dildo Inspectors making rounds, carefully checking every household for staying within their allotted number of items? Will the billboards aside the vast highways advertise the government hotline for anonymous reporting of infractions?

And if not, well, they’re clearly cowards. If you’re going to pass a law like that, you have to go all the way!

Seriously though, I sometimes wonder how this period of time will be described in history books 50 years from now.

I assume they’re trying to out-do the old Soviet joke.

Preface to a new sex education schoolbook:
“Dear children. There are three kinds of love. First, there is the love between parents and children. We’re sure all of you are already familiar with that, so there is no need to discuss it here. Second, there is the love between two adults. Some suggest it might be too early to tell you anything about that yet. And third, there’s the love the People feel toward the Party, and that is what we shall discuss for the rest of this book…”

There’s a movie plot hook buried there. About a kid on spectrum whose robot buddy gets killed by the uncaring business. They go “oh no, I’ll have to fix my robot buddy” and go on to become a tech genius. One day, they become a tech millionaire, and the story’s antagonist, the shady businesses partner, goes “look, we’re bankrupt, we have no choice, we have to shut down all of the robot buddies”. And the protagonist remembers the saddest moment of their childhood and are like “no, we can’t do that”.

I’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.

Things that do trip me up:

• Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
• Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
• so freaking many irregular verbs etc
• seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)

Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.

For those who don’t need cloud access, I just put all of my photos on a NAS and use a digital asset manager software. digiKam is great if you want an open source solution. I use ACDSee because it’s faster and has better usability in my humble opinion. But since both of the software packages store the metadata in image files and XMP sidecars and basically only use local app-specific database for caching, if digiKam ever gets a couple of quantum leaps ahead, switching back to it isn’t that big of a deal. (As usual, don’t use Adobe Lightroom or you’re screwed in that regard. Or so I’ve been told.)

When Twitter (and Reddit) pulled this off, I was just mildly pissed. Can’t do interesting things with my data, oh no.

…Image that, except it’s an expensive luxury car you’re no longer allowed to do interesting things with.

Elon Musk before: “Oh, these old Twitter executives were so dumb. When number go up, you’ve gotta show it everywhere!”

Elon Musk now: “Number not go up? For cripes sake, don’t show it!”