Dr. Guillermo Power @gpowerf@social.cleverlibre.org

I've been here since April, making me one of the proper old timers here and god am I fed up with the waves of indignant bird site users that come here, realise they're starting again from scratch with no-one clicking that like button, and they just sort of wander off.

Like... just accept that metric driven social media is awful and you don't need it? Start now before the bird site inevitably gets shut down?

There's a new Mastodon instance for jazz people! Please migrate, or sign up for an additional account, and help spread the word to those who need to abandon the bird site for the better Bird site.
https://jazztodon.com/invite/wjyp2zP6

#jazz @jazz@a.gup.pe @jazz@mastodon.art

"Free speech absolutist" Elon Musk has now banned Mastodon from Twitter and is declaring any link to here as "unsafe"

Who are some other video game journalists for us to follow on here? The less I have to use Twitter for it, the more likely I'm able to just stop using it.

Post suggestions in replies and boost please.

I also love that things went from "I should probably figure out a Twitter alternative" on Saturday to "My Twitter account will probably be nuked for no reason" on Thursday. What a week

This is such an obvious point but it is so hilarious to me that Elon's free-speech crusade on Twitter lasted all of six weeks before he started indiscriminately banning reporters. Like what an all-time hilarious business story

Public Service Warning

Mastodon has a very big surge of new users right now. There's no way to tell if it will be sustained, but at this early point it looks similar to Nov 18 when when Musk pulled the employee purge.

It is very challenging for system administration to accommodate so many new users. If your server starts to struggle, it is not broken and will get sorted out.

We're all in this together. It's our social network. Be patient. What we are building is amazing.

#twittermigration

Edinburgh this morning

I asked ChatGPT to explain "machine learning" as a grumpy old man.

I ran @rheolism's program and got this.
Source: https://bbcmic.ro/?t=6SV7R #bbcbasic

So over on birbsite Scott Miller (of Apogee and 3D Realms) posted a legal letter sent to him from Core/Eidos for a Lara Croft easter egg in a 1997 first person shooter of questionable taste, Shadow Warrior. He said "the dev studio--sent us a legal letter we claimed parody protection and they backed off." (1/2)

45 years ago today Bill Gates got arrested for running a stop sign, and driving without a license.

#SlideRule tip:
These plastic erasers are great for gently removing surface dirt, but you cannot mix brands. Careful!
😄

(Just kidding, of course)

I set up a second mini PC with Linux Mint XFCE edition which I found for only $70 used (it's a bit old but still has an SSD) and which uses only 15W of electricity. The XFCE edition is ideal for older hardware.

One piece of software that makes this setup extra useful is barrier, which is a free virtual (software) KVM switch, i.e. lets you use the same keyboard and mouse on 2 computers that are both turn on, and switch between them without unplugging things:

https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Setting up barrier took a bit more effort that their page indicates - you also have to ensure that one computer always has the same IP address by configuring your router (in my case, go to http://192.168.2.1, login, Advanced setup -> DHCP reservation). And I had to disable SSL in the barrier options to get it to work.

Since I play PC games, my other computer pretty much has to have Windows and be powerful and consume a lot of electricity, and I think a lot of people are in my situation. The advantages of having a second Linux mini-PC beside it is to save electricity when I'm not gaming and be able to use Linux for all other tasks besides gaming, without needing to reboot whenever I want to switch between a game and another application. A virtual machine is another thing people do but I think my setup is better because VMs are slow, it saves electricity, it prevents me from having to deal with the annoyances of using Windows all the time, and it means I have a spare computer for when one dies.

A reminder for anyone new to mastodon who might not be happy with some of the racist and bad actors out there on other servers... Just import the fediblock list to your personal blocks and you will be safe from the vast majority of bad actors.

The Birdsite feels thinner and thinner. But it also still has no promoted content for me. I wonder how follower numbers are going for the bigger accounts.

Stolen from @excds.