Biggles @Biggles@social.cleverlibre.org

Alright story time, Rubylith: How I Cured My Insomnia With Masking Material

I was an insomniac as long as I've remembered. Had it real bad, medicated and everything. Slept through fire alarms. Lost jobs to lateness. After hours of tossing and turning and fretting over how little sleep I was gonna get and how tired I'd be the next day I'd give up and grab a book in hopes that it'd help me sleep; it'd quiet my mind down, but turning on a light would make my body all excited, because I'm part moth I guess.

Round about when people started taking smartphones to bed with them, all the "I've spent years researching the effects of artificial light on circadian rhythms" people started shouting OH MY GOD DON'T TAKE YOUR PHONE TO BED WITH YOU, and we all shouted back LOL I'M TAKING MY PHONE TO BED WITH ME WHO ARE YOU THE BED COPS and took our phones to bed with us, and that's when the midden REALLY hit the windmill.

"Blue light keeps you awake!" they shouted.
"Lol" we replied.
"No we mean it, it's REALLY bad!" they wheedled.
"Lmao" we explained.
"Look, even a SINGLE blue photon hitting your retina can WRECK your night's sleep! One photon! Just one!" they cajoled.
"Sorry, what was that," we guffawed, "I was busy buying an alarm clock with big blue LED numbers on it. And an iPod dock, because that is the style at this time."

Anyway I was already an insomniac so no difference I guess, I'll read me ebooks on me phone, fine. Does seem a bit bright though even on min brightness, tell you what, I'll set the text to like a dark grey on a black background. Cor this is a good book, I'm gonna read this until 4am or whenever my eyes start hurting.

YEARS pass without incident or difference until my mate takes me to a star party. A very dark place, lots of quietly-excitable blokes with glasses and laptops and they're all very eager to let you look through their telescopes and tell you stuff, a Generally Mild Fun Chill Time - but a very dark time, the sort of darkness where everybody's eyes are used to it, the sort of dark where if someone lights up a smoke everyone blinks and scowls and goes "ah" just at that tiny lighter flame. I peek over the shoulder of one of these star dudes and see an entirely-red Windows XP and say "Oh cool, you've cut the green and blue all together huh?"

He's like well, red light doesn't destroy your night vision, you can look right at a red light and still see in the dark afterwards.

I say, huh. And I remember that big old metal torch my dad got from the army/navy shop, the one where you could swap out the lens for a red one. And I notice he's got electrical tape over his hard drive and power lights too.

And I say so what'd you do, cut into the video cable and short some stuff to ground, he says nah and he peels back the corner of his screen and blinds me with Horrible Blue Light and as I'm blinking it away he says this is just a sheet of Rubylith, and if this were a film I'd have that moment in slow motion, "Rrrooooooo

beeeeeeeeeee

lllliitthhhhhhh"

~~~RUBYLITH~~~

A clingfilm-thin plastic sheet originally used in lithography and screen printing because it cuts so clean and nice, Rubylith is called Rubylith because it's Really Really Incredibly Red. Its Incredible Redness means that you can put a layer on top of a monitor and it'd turn your whites to an arterial pink and your brightest blue to the deepest inky indigo; another layer and the blue is black, it's gone, your whites are now deep blood reds. Your #ffffff is a #ff0000, there's Nothing But Red.

I must clarify, I'm not talking about sunset mode here, I'm not talking about tinting your screen amber - I'm talking MUCH further than that. Imagine a red heart shape made to look shiny with a white highlight; you wouldn't be able to see the highlight, it'd render the same colour as the rest of the heart. Hell, if the heart were against a white background you might not see the heart at all, because it takes red, green and blue to make white, and there's no green or blue. There's no pink in Rubylith land, there's no amber, there's no orange, red is red and white is red and pink is slightly dimmer red. Clouds are blood red against a black sky. This isn't your phone's eye-relief night mode, this is the complete eradication of two thirds of colour data and damn being able to determine what you're looking at.

Anyway, there was a bloke selling big sheets of Rubylith on eBay for a tenner.

(it's gone way up, he's asking $20 now)

Anyway I saw this astronomer and his Rubylith and I set my phone's ebook reader app (moon+ Reader if you're interested, I've tried literally dozens and it's still the best) to red text on a black background, and aye it looks like a goth's MySpace but it works, I'm getting sleepy as I read - until I get a notification or there's a picture mid-text and I get the DANGEROUS BLUE PHOTONS and I'm awake again.

Cut out a wee bit of this lovely red wonder material and slip it into my phone case at night, though, and we're sorted. I'm not worrying about how late I'm gonna be up, I'm just reading my Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson or Michael Marshall Smith or whoever, and half an hour later I'm getting sleepy, I'm having problems focusing, my mind's off in that pre-dream playground and I put my phone down and I'm off, I'm in the land of nod, I'm sleeping like a Functional Normal Person and it's absolute magic.

I'm constantly amazed at how well this works, and how I spent most of my life being perpetually late for things because No Sleep, before I put two and two together.

Now these days I use rooted phones where you can cut the green and blue with a one-tap widget on the home screen, but if you can't root your phone or you need to red-only an iPhone or a laptop or smth then RUBYLITH IS WELL WORTH YOUR CONSIDERATION MY FRIEND

If you're a Homebrew user this might now be one of the quickest and easiest ways to start running a LLM locally on your own machine - it's just three steps:

brew install llm
llm install llm-gpt4all llm -m 'ggml-vicuna-7b-1' \
'ten fun names for a pet pelican'

CATHOLIC CHURCH: No meat on Fridays
PEOPLE: Ok so no eggs for breakfast
CC: No, eggs are ok
P: But eggs are chicken
CC: Not until they hatch
P: So the thing isn't the thing until it's born?
CC: Correct—um, no, wait.

@gamingonlinux SEGA bass fishing? Way to reel me in there, Liam.

Elon Musk spent $44b on Twitter just so he could not own Twitter.

Hey lovely Mastodon folk. I've just released an HP-35, HP-45, HP-80 simulator called HP-1973 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the HP-45 calculator. (Free) standalone versions for Mac and WIndows (no need for any Python installation or knowledge) & Python source for Linux. It's been a coding marathon, so it'd mean a lot to me if you could boost this post, so it gets in front of the right people. Download here: https://sarahkmarr.com/retrohp1973.html Enjoy. #retrocomputing #calculators #python #coding #rpn

On Slack, Steve said "Only OGs remember the original Apple Vision", so I had to make this dumb GIF

Now I think maybe @Cdespinosa will be the only one on the planet who might get this

@stavvers hahaha I love when they do that to themselves, always tempted to just reply with this whenever anything like that happens

@codinghorror

In June I used Google Chrome to do a Google search just to see the how the Google DeepMind AI engine worked. I was not disappointed.

If I may generalize for a moment, of all social media instances, Mastodon, I think, would be the one most excited about this new toy which arrived today

I owe you all the deepest and sincerest apology. It has been brought to my attention that my facts are enabling fascism and destroying democracy. I am especially sorry for the harmful facts stating that:

-Every month is National Potato Month.
-George W. Bush has a Foo Fighters tattoo on his back.
-Optimus Prime is the only heterosexual Transformer.
-The Lord of the Rings was filmed in New York City.
-Cher’s full name is Chernobyl.

I pray that you can all find it in your hearts to forgive me.

@jgg @Biggles @hkrn I would bet that all phones will be waterproof just so we don't have choice

Have you ever wanted to make a "you wouldn't steal a car" meme, but been disappointed with how lame the existing meme editors are?

I made a better one: https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

Dangerzone lets you take potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and convert them to safe PDFs.

Say you're a journalist receiving a tip in the form of an electronic document. It could be your next big story, or it could be a file containing malware intended to spy on you.

Dangerzone is intended to help anyone manage these risks when dealing with electronic documents. See our "About" page for more information:

https://dangerzone.rocks/about.html

The best advice I got about Mastodon is that it’s for things you love, not hate

A new study shows a whopping 87% of games released prior to 2010 are no longer available for sale or download by any means other than the second-hand market and archival/"piracy": http://gamehistory.org/87percent/

Proof if you ever needed it that the community is doing the work that corporate interests won't do to preserve gaming history and the slice of culture it represents.

We are living in an age when it is so astonishingly cheap to keep copies of things around and yet the perverse incentives exist for companies to memory-hole anything that doesn't perform well or that might compete with newer offerings.

IMO, in the big picture this is what legislation is for, correcting a horrible tendency that the market will have if left to its own devices, and there should absolutely be legislation protecting archivists of content that's no longer available for sale, or even requiring that content creation companies keep content available in SOME form. Until then, we depend on each other to do this.