BC TECH
Saved by @jay_millerjay

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

 but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...
it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.
and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"
there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
I could mostly fix it by hacking around it: write my own "search engine" which redirects to google if the text doesn't start with "foone "
but
1. this will break the "searched from the address bar" magic, which means google will make me do captchas if I search too fast
2. it will break search suggestions too
this workaround works. although from the comments on the bug that might also be a bug and they'll "fix" that workingness later.
https://t.co/KShHdCMzeT
related bugs:
https://t.co/RxcaI3qKK2
https://t.co/JzYlzwWUOk
I like the bullshittery of the developer question of "What appeals to you about space vs. tab?"
which I can't accurately reply to because twitter doesn't let me use 72pt font
here's why it appeals to me:

1. this is how it's been for years. I can type "foone blah" faster than you can blink, man. it's the #1 thing I DO in my browser. what appeals to me is THIS IS HOW IT FUCKING WORKS, DIPSHIT. CHANGING THINGS BECAUSE YOU FEEL LIKE IT IS NOT FUN
2. the space key is placed under one of my fingers while typing, because, and this may shock you, it's heavily used when typing english text.
it's a very common key to press. the tab key is not so centrally located, because it's rare.

AND I SAY THAT AS A PYTHON PROGRAMMER
why don't we change it to ctrl-alt-F12?
What appeals to you about space over ctrl-alt-f12, dipshit?
3. and probably most importantly:

SPACE IS HOW IT WORKS IN OTHER BROWSERS MOTHERFUCKER
I don't just use Chrome. I use Firefox almost as much. Hell, if I go into IE, which I haven't since like 2006, I bet it works using space over there too
Are you just trying to make it incompatible with firefox to punish people who dare use more than one browser?
Because having used multiple OSes/Browsers/Etc for years I can tell you one thing I've learned is that while muscle memory is 100% a thing and it can be retrained, what it's very much NOT good at is the idea of having muscle memory that's contextual.
it's way harder to remember "type foo blah on firefox, and type fooblah on chrome" than it would be to switch from "type foo blah" to "type fooblah" everywhere, for example.
this is why I have a set of hotkeys on my keyboard which do things like open a terminal and they were carefully set up to work exactly the same on my windows machine and my linux machine, so that I don't have to remember "ctrl-alt-t for a terminal on windows, and meta-T on linux"
so this "just use fooneblah!" solution would only work (and I say "work" very loosely. I wouldn't be happy with this solution) if I never used firefox ever again.
WHICH I'M SURE YOU'D LOVE
my favorite example of "no contextual muscle memory" is when I have to switch between a "classic layout" keyboard and one with a function key in the lower-left, like a thinkpad or that BTC-compact keyboard I use so much
every time that happens you WILL end up doing function-C and wondering why it doesn't copy and/or kill the program
That's why, for my Thinkpad, I've got the BIOS option to swap the keys turned on, and I even got stickers to relabel them.
Haven't yet figured out a solution for my BTC-5100.
Maybe I could swap the keycaps and mod the key matrix or reflash the controller?
think about that for a second.
I have a keyboard from the mid-90s and I'm thinking about dumping a 8051 firmware, reverse engineering it, modifying it, and reflashing it onto the keyboard just to eliminate a tiny source of friction in using it.
THAT'S HOW MUCH WORK I'M WILLING TO DO JUST TO AVOID THE PROBLEM OF OCCASIONALLY HITING FUNCTION-C ACCCIDENTALLY
EXACTLY HOW PISSED DO YOU THINK I AM THAT YOU BROKE ONE OF THE MAIN THINGS I DO IN YOUR BROWSER?
hmmm. It's definitely an 8051 but it's a custom-made one:
C32191AE or 1001000220 have no results.
maybe I should just stick it in my EEPROM reader and see if it can dump it as a generic 8051, then flash the modded code onto a replacement flash-enabled 8051?
Gah, this is going to be a pain to mod.
I'd want to desolder the 8051, but look, this controller PCB is basically sitting on top of the main keyboard PCB
And you can sorta see here that there's no connector between the two boards. They just soldered some pins onto the bottom board and then soldered them into the top board.
I assume they did this (rather than just making the bottom PCB double-sided and including all the components on it) is that either they needed more room to route the top components, or they use the bottom PCB for multiple "keyboards"
like this is the PS/2 version but I bet there was an AT version (which is just a different cable, really) and an XT/AT switchable version. and if they ever wanted to make like a Sun version of an ADB version, they could just swap the controller board.
still.
connectors, man. use connectors.
otherwise some punk yelling about web browsers is gonna get annoyed at you 28 years later.

what's a web browser? OH, YOU'LL SEE!
(although to be accurate, Mosaic was released in 1993 so there's every possibility they could have known what a web browser was)
the first major web browser is older than Doom. That's not something that feels like it should be true.
and the first FIRST web browser is older than The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It's older than the US release of the Super Nintendo.
That was WorldWideWeb (aka Nexus), launched in December 1990.
it was released to the general public in August 1991.
Zelda: A Link To The Past, The US release of the Super Nintendo, and the dissolution of the USSR hadn't happened yet, but would later that year.
WHEN THE FIRST BROWSER WAS MADE, THE TWO MAIN FOUNDERS OF GOOGLE WEREN'T OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE YET
Oh hey, its's a Foam-and-Foil keyboard.
This use a capacitive method to detect key presses. These seem to have been liked by some companies as a better feeling keyboard than a membrane, but the foam sometimes completely disintegrates so they don't last forever.
Here's the other side. This one seems to be still doing fine after 28 years, though.
Pads closeup.
You can see there's a little foam pad under the foil.
This is apparently for "overtravel". The key actually is detected shortly after you start pushing it down, but to make it feel like you can push it down farther, the foam is there and gets compressed.
Several companies made these, like Cherry and Key Tronic and, of course, BTC.
https://t.co/syXLRu6Rly
TexElec makes replacements in case you need to fix one of these. THANKFULLY I don't, at least not yet.
https://t.co/8xEis5WHID
Anyway I was looking at the key matrix to see if I could easily just adjust these to make ctrl and function switch. Not really, no.
The two pins in the middle go off to other keys (since it's a matrix) so I can't really swap them without affecting other ones
What I could do is chop the traces here, scrape off the solder max, and cross-connect them.
This would be hard because they'd have to cross, so I'd either have to use insulating layers or drill through to the other side.
plus, this is capacitive, and who knows what the tolerances are on that? it's entirely possible that doing all this modding will change the capacitance and now the keys don't work.
so I don't think that's a very good solution. Changing the controller is probably a much better one.
I'm also not sure what those two solder blobs are about.
The ones on top are for a reverse-side jumper connection.
But if you look at the opposite side (I mirrored it so they'll match) you can see that those aren't vias, there's no hole here. It's solely on the top, not the bottom.
https://t.co/GvdQ2dmzzL
by the way, BTC is still around! They just don't make keyboards anymore:
https://t.co/vh3qJTKdSs

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
love to see a youtube video that references a script that's linked in the comments and it's an obfuscated link to a one-click hoster.

THAT'S DEFINITELY STILL GONNA WORK IN FOUR YEARS

it does still work, but that's because it's only been 2 years.

also, wow, this is horrible.

the script is to generate random kanji/han characters and insert them into minecraft books.
but the video references there being two hotkeys to generate two distinct books, which seemed odd. so I thought I'd check.

it turns out by "random" they mean "pre-randomized and is hardcoded into the 45 kilobyte autohotkey scripot"


I mean, I get it. I don't want to write AutoHotKey scripts either. it's a horrible, horrible language.

BUT STILL
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
Check out what I got today. You can tell it's something weird as fuck just from the box...


So this is a FISK ... thing.
It's a floppy disk fax machine! You can fax floppies to other people who have these things.


Apparently you can connect it to external drives, computers, or printers?


So I'm gonna do more research into this thing and how it works, but while I'm here, some of the other stuff I got today. Some 3.5" floppy disks. Single sided, double density ones! These were some of the very first 3.5" disks and basically nothing used them.


I also got this book: AutoSim, the Marketing Laboratory.
It's some software to help you sell cars, apparently! it was weird and cheap, so I got it. I'll of course image it.
ALL
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foone
foone
@Foone
I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
Something that I didn't realize but hurt my brain to learn:
John Norman (aka John Frederick Lange Jr.), of the Gor series of sci-fi/BDSM novels, is still alive.
He released two books (one of them a Gor book, #35), in 2019.


I guess with the fact that the series started in 1966 and feels like it's always a historical thing... I assumed he had to have quit writing and/or died back in like 1986.

Nope. Still alive, he's 89, and was apparently still writing as of 2 years ago.

also, my brain being what it is, I totally just googled for the book's cover image by entering "trans man of gor" which is NOT the title.

in my defense, how many book serieses look like this WITH THE SAMEAUTHOR FROM BOOK #1 to BOOK #35?


Anyway if you look at any this and think it's a suggestion that you should try reading any of these novels or learning anything about them, you are quite mistaken.

Gor is bad sci-fi and bad BDSM, and you should skip it for either reason.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
time to get back to "repairing" old computers


The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

so it's inherently hard to satirize the repairing-computers-with-dremels guy, since they're also the guns-guy.

you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

"this hard drive from 1986 won't spin up. We tried freezing it, tapping it with a rubber hammer, and opening the case to lower the friction... there's only one option left: GET OUT THE C4 EXPLOSIVES!"
INTERNET

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@z3nblack
1/ Thread: "A Silicon Valley Ponzi Scheme"

Thanks to @chamath for laying this out in Social Capital's 2018 annual letter.

I've always appreciated his outspokenness.

2/ The hardest thing for most startups today is the path to market: first finding product-market fit & a way to reach customers, then building a ruthless machine to acquire, monetize & retain them.

3/ Because of this, when the VC industry invests capital into fast growing startups today, the plurality (if not majority) of invested capital will go into user acquisition and ad spending, for better or worse— usually worse.

4/ Todays massive venture-backed advertising, sales, and user acquisition playbook has morphed into one that champions growth at any cost.

This is creating a big bill that will soon come due...

5/ Ad impressions and click-throughs are bid up to outrageous prices by startups flush with venture money, and prospective users demand more and more subsidized products to gain their initial attention.
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Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
Novid Houellebecq (Tha...
@GarouGothic
I want to explain what happened to tumblr overnight. And why Twitter as reached it's dream (or have come ever so close to it)

Yahoo, who bought Tumblr years ago, used to have a huge adult presence on the early net. They allowed adult groups and what not.

However, people and bots (just like now) misused the service, and Yahoo were forced to make a choice. They made private the groups (and later closed them down and sold some of it to other companies) and then ended their chatrooms on yahoo messenger...

after a incident with one of the chatrooms vid cams. The damage was done, Yahoo Messenger lost a lot of people - and with the closing of the groups - backpage and Craigslist came more important.

Now backpage is no more and Craigslist is slowly passing away. Tumblr had a semi strong community, but once 2014 came around and both porn, and political bots exploded the quality started to go down,
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foone
foone
@Foone
I went looking for a remote-controlled power switch (the wireless christmas kind, not the modern IoT kind) and didn't find it, but I did find this thing I bought just to figure out why it exists.
It's a timer outlet, but you program it from your phone... but it's not wireless.


Yeah instead it plugs into your phone's HEADPHONE PORT


I got it on sale.
probably because iphone dropped the headphone port and they had to get with the 21st century and make it bluetooth


So inside the box is the device. it's got a little 2-prong polarized outlet with no ground.


on top is the only controls: on/off/timer.
TECH
Austin Energy
Austin Energy
@austinenergy
LIVE: ❄️ City of Austin leadership including @AustinEnergyGM will address the unprecedented severe weather.
💻 Due to tech limitations, it will only be available via Facebook Live here: https://t.co/PchiwUgP0M
We will be live-tweeting in this thread.

Mayor Steve Adler: This will require us all to come together and help one another.
City Manager Spencer Cronk: As a City, we are doing our best to help those in need.

Cronk: Stay off the roads and conserve energy. Every little bit helps.

COA Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Director Juan Ortiz: Currently we have a warming center at the Palmer Events Center. You can show up at any time. As of this morning, cold weather shelters remain active. 282 were sheltered overnight.

Ortiz: Urge residents to conserve much power as possible to help with the emergency issues. We are working with critical facilities to ensure that access to those facilities remain open, so ambulances can get in.
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R for the Rest of Us
R for the Rest of Us
@rfortherest
Setting up Git/GitHub to work with R/RStudio can be challenging.

Here's a thread to walk you through the process step by step.

This thread also lives in blog post form. #rstats

Preamble: the best overall resource, and one I rely on extensively, is Happy Git with R by @JennyBryan and @jimhester_.

If you have additional questions about Git/GitHub + R/RStudio, this should be your first

The first step to set things up is to install Git.

Chapter 6 of Happy Git with R lays out the process for Mac, Windows, and Linux users.

I’m on a Mac so Git came pre-installed on my computer. I was able to verify that I had Git installed using the terminal in RStudio.


The next step is to configure Git.

This is covered in Chapter 7 of Happy Git with R , though I show what I believe to be a slightly easier process using the edit_git_config() function from the {usethis} package.
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