today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 16, 2023

• mastodon move (again)

  I know I just moved mastodon servers three months ago, but unfortunately tenforward.social just wasn't working out for me. I do like Star Trek, but my initial impression had been that the community would be a little more general interest, and unfortunately the Local Timeline ended up looking a bit more like a 90's era single-subject forum than I'd like. So, anyhow, I've moved to hachyderm.io (specifically, to @roguelazer@hachyderm.io), which is a tech-focused instance and where a lot of folks from mastodon.technology ended up going.

  Beyond that, the fact that it was a small instance with a single moderator meant that there were some things I disagreed with (like the total defederation with mastodon.cloud, journa.host, and fosstodon.org)1 and sometimes it just felt like a little more friction than I want in my life right now.

• 2022: The Year in Review

  Another year is behind us and it’s time for the obligatory “year in review” blog post. I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, that’s why I’m getting to writing it a bit of a delay, but you’ll forgive me.

  [...]

  My favorite social network has been in free fall after getting acquired by Elon Musk. A lot of people jumped ship already, but I’m still hoping that the situation there will improve with time. I’m on Mastodon these days as well, but I still enjoy using Twitter much more.

• Spoiler Messages in IRC - Björn Wärmedal

  Discord, Mastodon, and a bunch of other modern messaging platforms have some sort of "spoiler" feature or content warning. Something where you can hide your message and the reader has to click to reveal it.

  [...]

  I'm not suggesting that IRC clients implement some way of handling this. But if you as a user want to send a message that may potentially spoil the fun for someone, then why not make it difficult for everyone to read?

• Rubenerd: The great Commodore/Atari engineer swap

  Spend any time reading about the history of 1980s home computers, and you’ll learn about Jack Trameil’s famous departure from Commodore to Atari, two of the biggest names in the industry at the time. What I didn’t realise was just how much engineering talent and design ended up being swapped between the two companies.

  [...]

  I’ve always loved Ira Velinsky’s industrial design of the Atari ST. It seems weird to think it has ex-Commodore fingerprints on it; but then the whole history of these companies and product lines are bizarre.

• The 10 Best Commodore 64 Games... Ever. - by Bryan Lunduke

  What follows is the most important list of Commodore 64 games ever assembled.

  This is not your traditional, run-of-the-mill “top 10 C64” list. No sir-ee-bob. You won’t find “top 10” list staples like IK+, The Sentinel, or Wizball here.

  What you will find are games that Lunduke deems “totally awesome.” Games so good — so absolutely amazing — that their mere existence immediately makes the Commodore 64 a “must own” computer for gaming.

  And, just to make it hard on myself, I’m going to rank them. Starting with number 10…

• The War on Physical Media

  Let’s discuss the ongoing war against physical computer storage media. It’s impact, reasons, and possible solutions.

• Smart Watches Without the Spyware - Invidious

  In this video I discuss the world of smart watches from the perspective of someone who doesn't want a device to spy on them and wants to be able to mod it as they wish. Pine time is probably the best option with sane defaults, let me know about other projects you're interested in