I find as I get older and my vision is not what it once was, I need bigger screens with good contrast but don’t care so much about resolution. I think it was on the show Corner Gas where they were talking about how big a screen you should get and concluded the size in inches should match your age. That made me laugh but I have to confess now there may be some truth in that…

Thought for a moment there the dude on the right was Emperor Palpatine?

I posted this because it gave me a hint as to why conservative propaganda has shifted in recent years. It’s mostly personal attacks on the man at the top now. “F#ck Trudeau” and all that.

While this might make some sense in the US where the presidency is an institution unto itself, it makes a lot less sense in Canada where we have a parliamentary system in which running the country is a group effort by the dominant political party.

And Trudeau is not even a power-trippy type of leader. He’s always been more of a delegator. So while I believe there is plenty of reason to be critical of the current federal government, pinning it all on the prime minister just seems weird and off. Like something a foreign influence campaign would be trying to do, in other words.

Their developer supporters must be salivating at the thought of building more single family houses though, which solves the housing/affordability crisis about as well as building bigger roads solves traffic congestion.

Storm surges can be insane. I’ve never been in a hurricane, but have witnessed the aftermath. My parents had some property in coastal Mexico that got hit. When we got there to assess damages, the town’s main street was essentially a giant sand dune over 2 storeys tall. The surge had basically lifted the entire beach and dumped it 2 blocks in. The town square was likewise covered in sand with all sorts of debris sticking out of it. And by debris, I mean stuff as large as a fridge.

(Regarding the property, we kind of lucked out. About a year before it hit, a hotel went up between the house and the beach, which blocked the view but had a major silver lining in terms of protecting all the houses behind it from the worst of the storm. And then speaking to the hotel owner, he said he’d spent a small fortune to build a giant concrete foundation that stretched almost a city block’s length under the beach. People thought he was insane to do that, but it was literally the only waterfront building still standing, so he clearly knew what he was doing.)

My understanding is that Russian athletes have been competing as independents, which is a different category from refugees. But apparently, they have been barred from competing in events that also include Ukrainians.

If I’m not mistaken, they have actually medalled, which is better than some countries.

You mean like the comment fields we’re using right here on lemmy?

As others have pointed out, it’s usually some markdown that’s embedded within the text. Lemmy is using a format that’s actually called “markdown” if I’m not mistaken, or a slight variation/subset thereof.

I’ve gotten used to the double-star for bold and what not to the point that it annoys me when some message client or whatever doesn’t support it. I share code snippets with people fairly often, and the code markdown is particularly useful to maintain its legibility.

I guess the MAC address guy is up next. 48 bits may not go so far if every light bulb is going to want its own.

Imagine if you were the guy who made the call on IPv4 addresses…

Falsehoods About Time

Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

Falsehoods About Text

I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!

Aw man that’s a good list!

In terms of consoles, I got the most enjoyment out of Super Nintendo. I think that’s in part because my kids were still young at the time and we played a lot of coop mode games on it before they got older and their tastes started diverging from mine.

It was the golden age of platformers I guess, and the focus was still solidly on game mechanics over production. I especially liked Bomberman. The gameplay was just perfect the way the challenge scaled naturally even as you got upgrades or added a 2nd player. Literally a blast!

I’ve come to collect the ren…ah shit!

So far so good… For me, Shoppers is harder to avoid than Loblaws or No Frills, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’d be curious to know whether urban air quality in general is improving also?

Well, Shortcuts comes from the iOS world and is a relatively recent addition to macOS. Automator originated in macOS and I don’t think it has made it over to iOS at this point?

That’s not even the full extent of it though. Before Automator, there was Script Editor, which could also create script applications, but that doesn’t seem to work so well anymore. Automator has become the preferred approach for that. But Script Editor is still around and is useful for looking up AppleScript dictionaries. These tell you if a given application offers special scripting support, and there are also a few general dictionaries like StandardAdditions that are worth a gander. I wish AppleScript existed for iOS.

And then there’s the command line approach of using crontab to open your files with the open command. And osascript lets you run any AppleScript from the command line.

1st reaction: lmao

2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!

There is also the ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure aspect to all this. The anti-carbon tax camp loves to blame rising costs on essentials like groceries on the tax (conveniently forgetting to mention that aside from it being a minor contributor, the rebates are specifically put in to address this).

But you know what else will raise the price of food? Climate change. I think it’s fair to say that it has already contributed to shortages of certain items and you can bet it’s only going to get worse to the point that we will be looking back on the prices today nostalgically before long.

Well that’s not really what I’m referring to. I’m talking about EUI-64, which was supposed to make life easier by giving everyone an IP addressed based on their MAC address. You wouldn’t need to worry about address collisions with such an address, as it would be globally unique.

But following up on it a little just now, it seems the idea is falling out of favour precisely due to the privacy issues I was fretting about. I assume that means DHCP or some similar scheme will come to dominate just as with IPv4? I’m not an IT guy so I don’t know what the current thinking is on this.