2023

I got the expensive thing and paid for it

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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.

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are…

/ from outside, tumblr

dailyadventureprompts:

lostsometime:

capricorn-0mnikorn:

capricorn-0mnikorn:

thesnadger:

thesnadger:

thesnadger:

Demons and monsters that torture people because they feed on human suffering are so dumb. People are suffering everywhere my guy go literally any place and take a deep whiff.

Monster that feeds on suffering becomes a professional caretaker for people with chronic pain and terminal illnesses. They can’t change the fact that these people are suffering, but they help a bit and in the meantime they’re fat and happy off that Sweet Sweet ambient pain in the air.

Two towns over there’s a demon lord trying to get their cult to abduct people for torture, but they keep getting stopped by heroes and the like, so they’re barely scraping by. Meanwhile Belogarth the Registered PCA is chowing down on back pain, medication side effects and looming mortality for eight hours a day and has become the most powerful demon on earth without realizing it.

“But don’t their clients feel weird knowing that they’re feeding off their suffering?” No they think it’s hilarious and they’re real shits about it.

It’s a form of spiritual husbandry. Like how you get more milk from a cow if you take good care of it than if you kill it.

If “Life is suffering,” a demon who feeds off suffering must love life.

Another thought: If someone is suffering, and a demon eats that suffering, that implies that the suffering is (temporarily, at least) alleviated.

“I’ve been depressed for months, but then a demon ate my sorrow and worry, and I feel so much better now.”

I was just thinking about this! Like with things that eat nightmares - the nightmare gets consumed, right? what a great way to get rid of persistent nightmares!

Something something capitalist realism where it’s impossible for certain people to imagine something not wanting to endlessly grow and expand, instead of merely being contented with enough.

D&D has an entity called “Dendar the night serpent” which is a Jörmungandr style snake titan that lives between worlds and is responsible for eating all the nightmares that ever existed….for some reason in the canon lore she’s evil….

WHY!?! big friendly space snake wants to make sure you sleep good! Every player I’ve told about her has been an instant fan with a dedicated minority making it a personal goal to boop the all-devouring snoot.

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

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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.

wait so technically vampires are vegetarians

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biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

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wait so technically vampires are vegetarians

op elaborate

blood is a non-meat animal product, like diary or eggs. that counts as vegetarian don’t it

if a vampire only feeds on villagers it finds wandering around in a haunted forest or whatever, that counts as both eating local and free-range

#well. it counts as eating locals

new alignment chart made out of the Most Common Replies to this post:

  • not vegetarian, blood counts as part of the meat
  • not vegetarian bc you have to harm/kill the animal (human) to get it (not sure how these people think blood drives work???)
  • maybe vegetarian but only if you don’t kill the animal (human) to harvest the blood
  • BLOOD IS VEGAN if the donor provides consent

an example, per se?

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

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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.

Anyway here’s wonderwall

/ local /

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.

Smartly helping you break the law

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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.

Enduro

/ rucksack /

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.

Some on twitter have bragged about having sex with their fitbits on

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For instance, Google kneecapped the Fitbit Versa 4 and Sense 2 by removing features like Google Assistant and third-party apps like Spotify and Starbucks. As a result, any longtime Fitbit user would be “upgrading” to products with fewer smart features than their predecessors — unless they chose to buy a Pixel Watch instead. And the decision to remove legacy Fitbit social features without offering an alternative threatens to chip away at one of Fitbit’s greatest strengths: its community.

Source: What is going on with Fitbit? – The Verge

A repeat of what Yahoo did to Flickr

And that was the problem. At the time, the Web was rapidly becoming more social, and Flickr was at the forefront of that movement. It was all about groups and comments and identifying people as contacts, friends or family. To Yahoo, it was just a fucking database.

All they’re trying to do is figure out how to make money off it. Fuck the people that came up with the devices, fuck the community built on those devices. To googke, fitbit is just a fucking database of lots of some of the most intimate and personal data they have: Their bodies themselves.

Abusers face the wall

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Sexual harassment as a rule is terrible. The #MeToo campaign on social media was heartbreaking, as I watched nearly all the women I knew bravely lay out their stories, or simply admit that it had happened to them. But when sexual harassment and assault happens in the military, it’s incredibly disturbing. See, in the military, we all joined up to serve in an organization where implicit trust in those around us is key for survival. Trust is built through continued training and operations as well as day-to-day interaction. In the Army, we have seven key values, and most support the growth of trust amongst fellow Soldiers; especially integrity.

Source: I Didn’t Know – The Angry Staff Officer

Makes you wonder how many female-presenting soldiers did the ethical and heroic thing and let an Abuser eat an enemy bullet.

Tiktok may be the first electronic drug

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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.

WordPress is **not** a documentation system though

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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.

These people aren’t ready for what’s coming

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When some proposed forming their own self-funded water provider, other residents revolted, saying the idea would foist an expensive, freedom-stealing new arm of government on them. The idea collapsed. Other solutions, like allowing a larger water utility to serve the area, could be years off.

Source: Skipped Showers, Paper Plates: An Arizona Suburb’s Water Is Cut Off – The New York Times

Well, those people are free to lose everything cos they decided to willingly entertain the notion they could live without running water. And in their pride everyone else loses.

If the drought in the Southwest continues for a couple more years we will enter water knife territory.

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