Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

@bruces I feel seen

@Beeks @AnnemarieBridy

I imagine the prompt was "Suspicious and much put-upon people in very clean but ugly clothes, backed up against a hedge, warily eyeing the weeds for the approach of vermin."

@randahl The commonest kind of troll. Some people have no source of joy in life and need to provoke strangers simply to feel alive.

Block and forget.

Just got the latest generation of Bill Gates' #covid microchips injected yesterday, and am feeling a little rough.

It must be all the 5G reception. Hopefully I'll get acclimated to it and tomorrow I'll feel up for going out and wantonly shedding #vaccine all over everybody.

@edwiebe @redfrog It doesn't have to be anything real, it's AI generated to be broadly industrial-technical while looking like a face.

@jern No it's a good question. The forecast is text in a not very predictable format, which could be succinct or not so much depending on how interesting the weather is going to be. And the icons I'm using are perforce very simple and represent just one thing. Automatically picking the one most likely to represent what you really want to know about the day based on what you hope is the most significant word or phrase in the forecast took a little doing. It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote that bit and it's choosing pretty well so far.

@jern There's a ton of permutations to the forecast text, even the terse form. The code has to decide which words are important, and also where they land in the sentence, to decide which of the very simple icons will actually tell you the important thing to know about the day or night. Will there be a storm? Early or late? Is it clearing or becoming cloudy? It might be mostly sunny with rain later... it could say anything. Freezing rain, chance of hail... I can show essentially one thing. What's the right thing to show?

@PlumpCat Yeah, it's soft enough, just needs gentle pressure and a sharp Stanley knife. Don't cut yourself.

Since the card slot is on the top of the board, you need to raise the hole up kind of high, just under the lip, or you won't be able to get it out without tweezers. But popping the lid off works too.

@recantha (Belatedly I see you're British, so I can mention I first stumbled on the font when trying to evoke the style of certain 1930s London Transport posters, which might be more meaningful to you than WPA.)

@recantha It's ITC Kabel bold or demi, I've used it a lot over the years, very fond of it; carries a certain 1930s WPA poster art quality.

(Actually the Pico can do all of that just fine, but doing dynamic text generation in arbitrary fonts on the device itself is a rather painful chore for memory and storage reasons. As I've got spare capacity on one or two always-on servers thought I'd delegate it to a web application that's running anyway.)

While I'm talking about #RaspberryPi projects, here's my just-completed weather widget, based on a Pi Pico W and a 3.7" e-ink display. It reads the temperature and humidity from another Pico with a sensor attached that's out on the back porch, and the forecast from the National Weather Service, uses a bit of fuzzy logic to select icons, and displays as many as can comfortably fit into the allocated area of the display.

This is rather more than the Pico can do well by itself, so this is all done by a script on another machine; this device just requests it at suitable intervals and displays it.

It all started because I got tired of going and looking at the mercury thermometer out back to find the temperature, toyed with the idea of pointing a camera at it, and ultimately decided to make this instead.

Ha. Ten minutes with a utility knife and I no longer have to remove this #RaspberryPi Zero 2 W from the case to access the SD card.

#PiZero #Casemod #BeAmazed at my #MadSkillz

"My child, where you see only one set of footprints, that was where I said, 'hey, let's both hop on one leg for a while!'"

@lobsterofrevenge @carlysagan Yep. These are the two main reasons I don't fly anymore. A distant third is the prospect spending the whole flight sitting next to a belligerent idiot enraged by my mask. This has happened to someone I know.

@jrychter The only times I've had a positive experience with Windows machines is when they're issued and maintained by a tech employer or client with a top-notch IT department. The good ones curate windows images for the machines they support, and push only vetted updates in the background. In the best cases it's been seamless and microsoft the company and its practices are undetectable; and the overal experience not unlike linux or Mac; it just works.

But almost no ordinary person has that luxury.

@randahl It's definitely worth that to certain buyers, but only when it comes with a US President who'll reveal state secrets just to show off.

@randahl Yet another indicator that it's actually the opposite: everyone still bends over backward not to hold him to the same standards as anyone else. Any other defendant would already be in jail for contempt for that alone.

@fulelo Oh yes, the famously "woke" GB News. It was always only a matter of time before this lot started devouring each other.

@arstechnica @sundogplanets Time to fire up the ground-based lasers to push it away with light pressure. Hang on, no, focused mirror arrays. Much greener.