Retired engineer, former sailor, living off grid in Puerto Rico. Volunteer for climate change mitigation efforts.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - it works perfectly all the time now. I have no idea at this point why anyone would continue to use Windows, tbh. A couple of years ago, audio management and networking were still a little bit fiddly, but I have not typed SUDO in almost two years now. I game with Steam, and Proton works with pretty many titles, but not all; I guess I am not that heavy a gamer - having a hard time getting past Kerbal Space Program 1.0 with its endless variety of fanbase mods and CKAN for mixing and matching them.




  • The guy living across the hall from me at Georgia Tech in about '80 had bought an Apple II with a 50hz power supply. He was an electrical engineer and rigged up a new power supply for US grid. All he had was the motherboard and a keyboard, the screen was an old TV. The memory was a regular audio cassette player. He had a game called “Orbital Mechanic” and we played with it quite a bit. It turns out that the paths of objects thrown from one orbit to another are not so intuitive - so it was a real challenge to toss a wrench from Astronaut A in orbit 1, to Astronaut B in orbit 2. That game used WASD for aiming the throw, and when I later began playing PC games, I wondered if that old game might have been the originator of the concept or if it goes even further back.


  • The demise of reddit marks my third foray into the fediverse - first after Google+ shut down and Mastodon was a squalling infant. I made accounts in numerous fediverse instances to try them out, and most withered from disuse. Then Musk began the death of Twitter and I moved solidly into fediverse and our distant cousin, Diaspora. I did not think of reddit as social, but as a news source - my bad. But now that it is effectively gone, I am all in with the fediverse. I again have multiple accounts, and they work remarkably differently for being so connected. Like if someone comments on Lemmy in direct reply, and I commented from Mastodon, I get the notification on Lemmy AND Mastodon (because the first @ is the same on both accounts I suppose). Anyway, hard to say how the platforms will evolve, but I love having a front row seat for these things and participating.

    I created magazines, not to stake out space, but to make a “bus stop” for fellow explorers. I have no long-term desire to own a piece of the fediverse. When a more robust space arises for a group’s topical interests, we’ll subscribe there too, and let the weeds take the old bus stop where we first gathered.



  • a thing with the nsfw filter in the fediverse generally: there is a school of thought that people should treat “content warning” somewhat like an email subject line - basically marking everything nsfw if there is any chance that anyone might find it offensive. Not subscribing to that point of view myself, I tend to block anyone I encounter who adopts that practice because it is so annoying - but I can also understand that some people of very delicate sensibilities might appreciate being able to protect themselves from things that are not well-behaved kittens. TLDR, this is why a lot of people don’t turn on their nsfw filter - because in many places 90% of the so-called nsfw content is actually sfw, but evokes food, alcohol, politics, violence (yet of the sfw sort), or controversy.



  • I am finding that is kind of broken. I mean, if I follow a Lemmy community “News” I can see all the posts in my Mastodon home feed, but I also see all the inane comments and boosts (out of context), so it is actually a terrible thing to add to my home feed. I can see all the magazines to which I am subscribed in kbin, but I cannot see a feed of the latest content in just those magazines - so that is also not a very attractive (to me) way to see the kbin content. I am not going back to reddit, so I feel much like a man without a country at this point.