● 09.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 13/09/2023: Walmart Locks Wipes, Oracle Cloud Burns Users

Posted in News Roundup at 7:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Back in the early ‘90s my friends and I were on constant lookout for quiet places to have a toke, talk shite, and listen to music. Often times this meant a secluded parking spot, preferably with a view, that wasn’t going to be interrupted by dog walkers or the f’ing police.

• We found a perfect place, for a while, sometime in early ’94. A quiet side-road with two empty bungalows at the end, surrounded by trees, between the motorway and a spur road leading back into town. We parked there regularly, and when the sun was out, occasionally wandered through the trees to see what we could find.

• On the topic of factory farmed versus free range chicken eggs, Herodotus is reputed to have talked about “wool from trees”, where the people in a strange and faraway land obtained their wool from a plant. Tree wool usually goes by the name of cotton. So we have the same thing described in two different ways, as opposed to two different chicken products that perhaps incorrectly share the same name, that maybe should be different. Some egg producers would doubtless bristle at having to label their product “orbs from savagely brutalized chickens”. Think of what that would do to the sales!

• You keep *alcohol wipes* under lock and key?

• Are they *that* valuable?

• You do realize that we repealed the 18^th Amendment [1], right?

• Here’s how to select a boardgame using scoring, then instant runoff.

• Give everyone a paper list of the games on offer.

• Everyone anonymously scores each game from zero to five stars, zero means don’t wanna play today and five means really wanna play today.

• It’s OK to mark a bunch of zeroes and just one five, it’s OK to give all kinds of scores, it’s OK to have several fives or several threes or whatever. It works anyway.

• Hey there, pub-goers! Six months ago I gave up recorded music as part of what may be the dumbest personal experiment ever (reclusib brilliantly called it being a ‘musical anchorite’), and I figure I should give an update.

• It’s been…weird. Not living without recorded sound–that was honestly pretty easy–but letting it back into my life has been a bit strange.

• A great deal of music now sounds frantic and overly complex to my ear. Busy. Crowded. “Too many notes,” as Joseph II supposedly told Mozart. When I feel compelled to listen to music, I seem to gravitate toward very simple percussion and human voices.

Technology and Free Software

• Back in March, I wrote about Oracle Cloud’s stupid definition of “idle” compute resources and the potential impact on capsules hosted using the “Always Free” service. This is a quick update/warning to say that the thresholds for what is considered idle have changed from 10% to 20%. I don’t recall seeing any notification of this until yesterday when I received an email saying that my server (where this capsule is hosted) had failed to meet the threshold over the last 7 days (and so would be shut down after a further 7 days).

• Recently, with help from colleagues, I ran an online workshop for the SEOSAW network[1] on estimating tree growth rates, rates of recruitment and mortality, and rates of biomass productivity and loss from repeat measurements of tree stem diameter in fixed area plots.

• This is the story of the hackiest, coolest, most absurd, and most pointless feature I’ve ever been part of developing. It’s probably the one I’m most proud of, despite it being entirely unused.

• The year was 2014, or maybe 2015. Grooveshark was a small but popular music streaming service where I had been working for several years. At the time I was working closely with my friend Mike Cugini on Grooveshark’s backend systems, and together we were given the task of developing Mobile Broadcasts.

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