This is a device category I have very little knowledge about, but I have a growing collection of PDFs and ebooks and I'd love to have a light weight device to read them on.

Any recommendations? Are they all walled gardens?

I love alternative programming languages, the only other one I know about in this style is Piet (mentioned in the article). They're not usually very "practical", but its interesting to explore different ways to talk to computers.

I have no words.

spoiler

The return of Intel's Coffee Lake.

Rust lobbyists winning

Doing my first ITX build after two uATX. Pulled the trigger on the following and I am SO excited!

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tbCYcx

From what I gather it might be the best way for me going forward to have a new PC. I see them as low as $150 on amazon that come with windows so I'd have to nuke the SSD and install something like Mint on it instead.

Maybe we can get a fundraiser going for me so I can finally get a new laptop and put this 12 year old piece of junk to bed.

Found in the wild while shopping.

I've been thinking about this for a while, that there's kind of not a great solution, that I know of or can think of, for long-form internal political discussions within an organisation. There are of course existing platforms that are not private (like you could have a Facebook group for instance).

There's obviously a lot of encrypted chat apps out there but they're all more "texting" form and are not great for like forum-style discussion.

The best I can think of might be Matrix, but it's more of a chatroom style format and I've not tried using it for this forum-style of discussion which I'm not sure if it works smoothly for.

Tbh a mailing list would kind of be my ideal (I assume there's mailing list software out there that integrates with PGP so we can protect our emails) but so many people in organising spaces are pretty tech-resistant boomers (no offence to the older generation, I'm aware it's a generalisation that doesn't apply to everyone) and it'd be hard to get everyone to use PGP I think. Also email is just not very secure in the first place and would expose a lot of metadata, making it not suitable for organisations that are heavily criminalised or otherwise have a higher threat model. Not to mention that the mail server in question would be able to read the emails sent to the mailing list, as it has to decrypt emails sent to the mailing list in order to encrypt it with all recipients' personal PGP keys. And there's just so many points of failure in terms of all messages to the mailing list getting accessed if just one member gets compromised.

Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution, in which case please tell me of course. But this is just an issue that's crossed my mind over the years as I've watched organisations use insecure platforms for long-form discussion, and I cringe, but I don't think I know the ideal solution either.

I was at this school event where my laptop was plugged in near a lot of foot traffic. Admittedly I was too lazy to get a new battery and it's partly my fault. So my plug got kicked a bunch of times. My laptop restarted and updated, then restarted a bunch more fucking times because people kept kicking the cable. Now Windows is broken, and even using a repair USB won't fix it.

Like seriously, why does Windows, and sometimes Android, decide now's the time to do an update after a hard restart?!?!?

Feck.

(illustration by Joe Biden)

Sunshine Protection Act. When the worst person you know etc... (marco rubio)

I just spent all day thinking it was an hour later than it is. I was planning on going for a bike ride in the last hour of light so I waited till 5pm and went outside and it was dark already. Went back inside looked at the clock on the wall - 5pm - then checked my phone - 4pm - and remembered daylight savings time. It feels like mild jet lag twice a year and I think I would prefer no DLT. Orange man says he will sign it so if he wins the election it might be the only useful thing he does in 4 years.

https://archive.is/QyTwy

(None of this is getting into cookie popups, banner ads, etc., which is a separate discussion.)

Bitch, this screen is like 2 inches wide, you better not waste a single fucking pixel. Reading a paragraph that only fits 30 characters per line* is fucking exhausting. “Just reduce the font size!” Then it gets hard to read because it’s too small. But the main thing is: I shouldn’t have to! The pixels are already there for you to use! Fucking use them! Are you stupid!?

“But what about people with fat fingers?” First of all, if you’re gripping it that tight, you will accidentally press things and make it impossible to use your phone. Just grip it lighter, or grip it at the top or bottom, get one of those grip rings for the back, or put in on a table, dummy! You’re not reading a long text while fucking running out and about, you don’t need stability.

Bonus points if your device is black and you use a dark theme, which could use the bezels as free margins but no, I read on some shitty design blog 13 years ago about “negative space” or “air” or “flow” or “visual clarity” or some other bullshit some fresh tech bro pulled out of his ass after an ayahuasca pilgrimage.

Very awesome creator who is in-depth and does great videos on anything space related.

Thought this video on him talking about Mars was interesting. Haven't heard of the "iron rod" tactic of creating a magnetic field.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/46364772