h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Quite some years ago (2008), we brought the #OLPC AKA the 100$ laptop to Ethiopia as pilot. A surprising thing happened. The laptops were often without battery power in the morning. A thing that wasn’t anticipated. It had two reasons. One was the keyboard LED (it was removed in later series). It was used by the parents to have a light at home. The other was a bigger surprise. The parents used the mesh networking to discuss market prices for their produce. Fascinating. 1/3

In which I discuss new-ish cheap-and-almost-perfect audio amplifier tech: D-class, PWM, and a remarkable TI chip: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/09/09/Next-Step-Audiophile

So, audiophiles should invest all their their money and time in speakers and room prep, because everything else is now commoditized.

Newsletter: The recent Second Circuit decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is only the latest battle in the war on libraries and the freedom to read.

https://www.citationneeded.news/hachette-v-internet-archive/

#InternetArchive #HachettevInternetArchive #libraries #newsletter #CitationNeeded

Hey folks, next month there’s an angry & lighthearted book coming out with my name on the cover: “Standing on High Ground”. It’s an anthology of writing from people who were arrested protesting Canada’s awful “TMX” pipeline project. I’m an arrestee/ contributor & co-editor.
Here’s its official home: https://btlbooks.com/book/standing-on-high-ground
Here’s a blog piece full of background and pictures: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/09/08/Standing-On-High-Ground

This project means a lot to me and I’d appreciate anyone passing the word along.

#books #tmx

[BLOG] When sysctl took down my subnet

https://blog.yaakov.online/when-sysctl-took-down-my-subnet/

🆕 blog! “Yet another AI Racism example”

Here's a good pub-quiz trivia question - which Oscar-winning Actors have appeared in Doctor Who? It's the sort of thing that you can either wrack your brains for, or construct a SPARQL Query for WikiData0. I was bored and asked ChatGPT. The new Omni model claims to be faster and more accurate. But, in my […]

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/09/yet-another-ai-racism-example/
⸻
#DoctorWho #racism

New euphemism for being late: ‘BepiColombo’s journey to Mercury becomes even more epic’ http://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/BepiColombo/Fourth_Mercury_flyby_begins_BepiColombo_s_new_trajectory #astrodon

The Linux commands you should NEVER use
by @sjvn in 2017 https://web.archive.org/web/20180220202812/https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-linux-commands-you-should-never-use-1712.html

OMG - kids today on learning that the 'save' symbol 💾 is a physical storage disk ...

Also OMG - me on recently learning that 'upper case' and 'lower case' refers to the physical case printers used to use to store their letters. How did I miss this?

At the height of One Million Checkboxes's popularity I thought I'd been hacked. A few hours later I was tearing up, extraordinarily proud of some brilliant teens.

Here's my favorite story from running OMCB :)

https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/

Ukraine to abolish daylight saving time from 1 January 2025.
https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/tz@iana.org/message/64AC36LPSPQJTR7GDOHOFAJLCIPKTTFO/