Harena @Harena@toot.cat

There is an acute shortage of Tardigrades on the tl today.

if you are having a hard time today pls know that a smol pixel kitten is here for you and believes in you

So, I had an idea about object storage (like Amazon S3 / DigitalOcean Spaces)...

You could set up an API -- either compatible with the S3 API or not -- which would keep only the most frequently-used files on an expensive server, and offload less-frequently-accessed files to a home server, which could easily store many terabytes of data for no monthly cost.

That way, less-used stuff would still be available but maybe a little slower and less reliably (if your home server or ISP goes down temporarily).

It seems to me this would work especially well for social media like Mastodon, where you get a lot of new content every day but most of it is accessed very little after a certain amount of time.

Just a thought.

40 years ago this evening, I was listening to WQDR on my weird Panasonic bedside clock-radio with the little metal flip-plates for the numbers (like in Groundhog Day) when the DJ came on and said something like "wow, I have some special bummer news" and went on to say that John Lennon had been shot.

There was a span of time in there, a few minutes, when we didn't know he was going to die -- so it came as a further shock when they said he had been pronounced dead on arrival.

I think it's fair to say that this is the first time a death really hit me.

Three years later, my best friend/soulmate (@Harena 's beloved little sister) disappeared; one year later they found her skeleton in the woods, and then -- just to sort of add insult to injury -- the owners of WQDR, a very popular "album rock" station at the time and pretty much the only one I found reliably listenable, decided they could make more money changing it to a country music format (which it has been ever since, so I guess that worked out for them).

Sometimes things just suck.

I hope next year is better, y'all. 🕯️

So, this is an example of the way in which my brain functions.

When @Harena's mouse-holder broke, my first thought was that although trying to just glue the two pieces together directly would be basically useless, gluing something flat and hard along the underside to hold them like a splint could actually work pretty well.

I went down to the basement thinking I might find a small piece of wood or plastic to use -- but I also had vaguely in mind this small piece of metal I used to have, which I think I salvaged sometime around 1980 from a broken dictaphone I got at a flea market.

Not seeing any suitable wood or plastic bits around, I thought I might as well look for the metal thing.

I pulled back the dust-curtains to get to my plastic component drawers, found the one labeled "misc mechanical bits" or whatever, and... there it was, exactly as I remembered it.

I might not be able to remember where I set something important down half an hour ago, but a miscellaneous piece of metal I set aside 40 frickin' years ago? NO PROBLEM!

Reports clearly indicate that the temporary wave failure is due to primary technical measures, and it has been determined that the current health disassembly is due to reverse political failure.

So, I occasionally do network/internet consulting for a local (#DurhamNC) catering company, Sage & Swift, run by a lady I've known since kindergarten.

Their margins are kinda razor-thin, so they've often been a little slow to pay me -- but I let it go, partly because of the personal connection but also because they've been super-supportive of LGBTQ+ people, specifically including my own transition.

When COVID hit, they obviously took a big hit to their business -- but they adapted by offering weekly pick-up ordering... which meant that suddenly they were making something I'm interested in, i.e. family-sized meals.

We've now worked out that they can pay off my past invoices in food, which has been very useful in reducing the amount of food we have to buy (for 5 people).

TL;DR: I am now literally working for food :D

(...and also showing how computing can "put food on the table"... if we had a table to put it on, which we kinda don't; I just leave it all in the kitchen for people to self-serve, insert obligatory joke about being self-serving here.)

Basically a GoFundMe in two stages. The software starts out proprietary and hopefully becomes open-source.

Stage 1: Anyone who contributes over $X automatically gets a lifetime usage license.

The $X gradually goes up as development nears completion. (This process can be repeated for subsequent major versions, possibly.)

If funding is still at this stage by release time, then licenses for the software will be sold commercially at something over the latest $X (or possibly pay-what-you-can, with the site offering to recommend an amount based on your income).

Stage 2: If funding exceeds $Y, the project is released under a FOSS license.

While the software will be free, we can still sell support packages for some smaller amount (also PWYC/income-based).

I'm thinking specifically of desktop apps where there's an open-source program that works but was designed by people who don't understand GUI (like... most of Linux).

More specifically, I'm thinking of multitrack audio editing, video editing, image scanning, file management.

Thoughts?