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Stuff posted in this site by me.

And that’s facts

Extreme closeup of an stage. There's half a human in there, and what looks to be the top end of a bass?

🎶 today was a good day. We think.

We’ve been at musicbarJerb for just over a month. It’s been pretty good other than the physical layer (aka “my body”) suffering under the stresses of long-thought-gone abuse, for we are a mere runner. We run to help the bar, help the servers, help the kitchen.

Our bosses didn’t think the job was so physical, but hey, here we are, the only hourly employee to actually get full time hours. We kinda know the food, we kinda know the drinks, we kinda know when to fuck off and let people make out uninhibited instead of refilling their water glasses.

Maybe, in time, we’ll move up. We don’t expect it. It’s not Minnesota culture to have people like me serve you, or make you drinks.

And that’s facts Read More »

Yes, this includes you

Google’s instructions will only work if everything goes smoothly, and as someone with hundreds of hours in ADB from testing various Android versions, I will guess that it will probably not go smoothly.

Source: Google’s Pixel storage issue fix requires developer tools and a terminal | Ars Technica

People forget google hates the fact they exist, which means you’re a sweaty, dirty, bloody meaty thing handling their perfect hardware and their perfect software.

Yes, this includes you Read More »

I got the expensive thing and paid for it

Some years ago we purchased one of these, which were recommended by the Wirecutter as the best monitor arms you could get

Fully Jarvis Monitor Arm - fits up to 32" Computer Display (Single, Silver)

All was good and we got plenty of use out of the thing. A few years later the monitor ended up at my workplace but to do so we took the plate off and put the monitor back on its own stand.

During this timeframe we lost the VESA plate that attaches to the back of a monitor, which then locks into the actual mount. This was a pain in the ass cos we like to have stuff on the desk while we find a space for said stuff, and not having the monitor on the actual desk surface makes everything that much easier to clean. Attempting to find a replacement plate directly through Jarvis was impossible as they sold themselves to Herman Miller— so replacement parts aren’t within easy reach, much less at decent prices.

Then a few weeks ago while looking for something else I actually hit on these:

Mount-It! Replacement Monitor VESA Plate, 75,100mm Silver

They are a perfect fit not only for the Fully Jarvis arms, but also for these cheaper Monoprice arms. These arms get you 90% of the functionality the more expensive arms have, but they’re half the price of the Jarvis arms. That’ll teach us to get the expensive thing to show off when you don’t even look at it except to rewire things.

Just putting this out here in case you’re also running into issues sourcing replacement parts, specially if you work in an office.

I got the expensive thing and paid for it Read More »

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care.

Schwalb’s DC lawsuit cites a former “high-ranking manager” at Greystar Management Services, one of the RealPage customers named in the suit, as confirming that landlords used rent management software to collude and raise prices. “He responded that of course they did—it’s the entire reason landlords used the software,” according to the complaint.

Source: 14 big landlords used software to collude on rent prices, DC lawsuit says | Ars Technica

Say, what are the chances there are other cartels in other cities that are also artificially inflating prices through the use of software? We get that landbastards want to make it easy for themselves to maximize profits as we all live in a capitalist society, but this is egregious. There is a difference between profiting and profiteering.

There is a high likelihood there’s a cartel here in Minneapolis given how city government feels safe in fucking life up for everyone within city limits.

We hope they all get fucked.

Of course they knew it was illegal. They just didn’t care. Read More »

At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back

Filling so much empty ground-floor space may require cities to rethink what brings people downtown. It may force officials to change how they regulate buildings, and property owners to shift how they profit from them.

Source: The Ground-Floor Window Into What’s Ailing Downtowns – The New York Times

“May”? The NYT are just hedging hard on this. Cities will have to rethink how downtowns function, officials will have to change how buildings are regulated, property owners will have to shift how they profit from them, businesses will have to adapt to a different customer base.

Case in point, this article in the Minneapolis St. Paul Journal(disable your javascript to read)

Fhima and other community members who make their living downtown see firsthand how the absence of thousands of Target (NYSE:TGT) workers at the retailer’s Nicollet Mall headquarters impacts the city’s overall vibrancy. From shops and restaurants to public transportation and property values, downtown Minneapolis is struggling without a strong, consistent daytime population there to support it.

At the end of the article they actually have a section titled “What Target can do about”. Newsflash: they en’t doing shit. They just held their third auction to clear own office equipment. Even if they wanted to bring everyone back they don’t even have the furniture to put those people in.

Cities at large could make an effort to populate downtowns with small businesses, small/medium size landbastards, and change zoning to allow for living in skyscrapers. But that takes political capital no one wants to spend.

A lot of people would love to live downtown. Hell, a lot of people already do, but if they want basic necessities they need to get them delivered, or worse, drive out to the suburbs to get them.

At least the highway will have no traffic out to the big box store and back Read More »

Anyway here’s wonderwall

In the past three months:

  • Moved to a new apartment. It sucks easily the worst dwelling I’ve had of the past ten years.
  • Changed jobs. I am now at helpdeskJerb
  • Almost got completely fucked over by someone. In their story I’m the villain. I’ll let it be.
  • Got into a fight when someone tried to steal my bike. My nose still hurts three weeks later.
  • Fell in with bluesky. It’s nice, but gods the fucken developers are being fucken idiots.

I’ll try to blog more often.

Anyway here’s wonderwall Read More »

Smartly helping you break the law

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Insert smart chips & building blocks in your Google Doc
Insert smart chips in your Google Doc to include information about:

Other users with Gmail or Workspace email addresses
Other Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides files
Dates or Google Calendar events
Places and map directions

Where there’s a smart chip in your document, you and other users can hover or click on a chip to get more information.

If you are dealing with confidential information you should stop using Google Sheets immediately.

  • There is no way to disable them.
  • Google will insist on forwarding or sharing the resource with people within the organization even if do not need access to it.
  • The changes are not reversible via Undo functionality. You have to revert to a previous version of the file (File -> Version History -> See Version History). Good luck to you if you’ve been working on the file for hours/days and google shits all over your file.
  • What happens when google kills the feature because no one is using it? The original data that was kept in those cells is gone.

This is particularly important if you’re dealing with FERPA or HIPAA data. Switch to excel, which is what you should’ve done from the beginning.

Smartly helping you break the law Read More »

Enduro

In the space of a month:

  • Found a new full-time job at helpdeskJerb.
  • Adjusted my schedule at bartendJerb.
  • Moved addresses.
  • Potentially finished my time working at sysadminJerb.

I’m fucken tired.

Enduro Read More »

Tiktok may be the first electronic drug

Rather than see specificity and device limitations as an inconvenient hurdle to omnipresence, TikTok embeds itself within them—taking advantage of the fact that mobile technology limits how people engage with content and leaning into these constraints (e.g. the user only sees one video at a time and can only proceed linearly to the next video by swiping). This narrow focus enables a “flow state” to open up between the platform and spectator, as attention is entirely channeled to the content at hand.

Source: TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone | WIRED

We’ve experienced this. Tiktok is extremely good at showing you things that will make your mind reach this “flow state” and then you’re just adrift in the current of swipes from one video to another, punctuated with brief stops to write a comment.

This can last for hours upon hours. We currently make it a point to check tiktok once or twice a day for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. Catch up with the people we follow, check what drama is going on, what went viral, and then quit out of it.

Disabling notifications helps tremendously with this, as tiktok is a very pushy application when it comes to demanding your attention.

Tiktok may be the first electronic drug Read More »

WordPress is **not** a documentation system though

Writing documentation is different from writing code.

Source: Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText – a tale of docs-as-code – Dewan’s Blog

I’m currently using commonmark in vim to write my own personal documentation for things and keep running into that small issue of having to embed HTML if I want to do anything “complicated”. I’m also trying out keeping it in git… although this might be a bit of overkill.

All in all a great article on what things you need to consider if you need to implement documentation for an entire organization and you want that documentation versioned and actionable.

Yeah, git sucks, but there are other version control systems out there. Gotta mix and match.

WordPress is **not** a documentation system though Read More »