@vorap will this run on my iphone?

Also a disappointment: I think I've finally worked out that I'm allergic - or at least have some unpleasant skin reaction - to the neato dark purple sparkly nail polish I've worn off & on for the past year or two. :sadness:

@vorap It's a Linksys iPhone! They actually had the trademark first and sued Apple over it back in 2007 or so. I've never gotten mine to work, but supposedly it's a wifi-enabled IP phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone

Seems like over the dozen or so times I've applied it, there's a 50/50 chance one of my fingers gets extremely irritated and puffs up. Like, time for a soak in epsom salts redness & swelling. Went to urgent care for it once.

For some reason it took me til this latest application over the weekend and the next-day reaction to realize - oh hey maybe there's a connection?

All of which is to say, a) sadness and b) I guess maybe it could happen to you too so watch out? (but you might already know about this and be smarter than me :blob_grinning_sweat: )

@gryllus @historyofpunkrock dance this mess around is a euphemism for assaulting old ladies with hallibut

@tfb it’s a fair comment 😅

LRT: I'm curious about Bluesky and how it'll shake out. Still wondering what would motivate someone to run a PDS for their "own data" - since a PDS seems useless on its own without all the upstream pipeline infrastructure to funnel the data into a more central indexer & feed generator & app view provider

As I understand Bluesky: if you host your own PDS, that is not like a web site as they describe. You can view a web site with a browser without a middleman. But, a PDS is just a data repository. This would be like not being able to view a web site at all without going through (e.g.) Google's servers first.

Maybe another way to describe it: What if you hosted just an RSS feed on your site? No HTML pages. Some other infrastructure piece - not hosted by you - comes along and blends your feed with others into a firehose. That eventually ends up in a view elsewhere - also not hosted by you. That's different from a web site in very meaningful ways.

@ArtifexUmbra Yeah, that's the bit which sounds not at all decentralized to me. Like you can federate all day right into their data warehouse - or I guess someone else with the resources could stand up a parallel silo, but it seems rather prohibitive to "ingest the entire network"

@deadsuperhero Well, a headless fediverse server at least has a local API for apps. In Bluesky, that API lives elsewhere, at the other end of aggregation, ingest, & indexing machinery. You could probably set up a parallel pipeline for just select PDSes? Sounds like that's not expected to be a hobby-level activity though

@deadsuperhero Yeah, this whitepaper and this diagram has really helped me wrap my head around it.

Mastodon & friends are kind of all-in-one social network servers. The Bluesky infrastructure decomposes analogous machinery into a handful of separate pipeline services that form kind of a centralizing funnel toward end-user output

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239.pdf

To be fair to Bluesky, maybe we could see communities form around running shared service clusters as parallel alternatives to the mainline Bluesky? One of those could kinda look like a constellation of ActivityPub instances if you squint, but with far less local autonomy at the per-host level and more pushed to end-users.

@stefan I haven't dug into it yet, but I'm wondering if there might be like a Docker Compose stack to set a whole miniature Bluesky pipeline up on my own hardware. That could be interesting & encouraging.

But, yeah, it sounds like a centralization machine to me. (Which has advantages, but also is very tempting to enshittify)

@nomad That is really what I'm curious about. What would motivate folks to participate in this thing?

@nomad At various points over the years, I've run different P2P file hosting servers on my own stuff. Like IPFS, Freenet, whatever. I saw lots of pretty flashing network lights and I held onto opaque blobs of data. Felt like I was "helping" I guess?

But, after awhile, it didn't feel worthwhile to support random strangers' crap - some of which I actively disagreed with, like preserving images for NFTs

@stefan I'm trying to stay open-minded, but also yeah I think I like the Mastodon / ActivityPub model better.

Back on my #3dprinting bullshit of attempting to print bolts & screws again. More out of curiosity than anything, I've got real metal versions coming in the mail.

@benbrown THE MONKS! :sadness:

@benbrown We have one (1) bottle of Chartreuse left in the house, and we've been severely rationing it

Hmm, the ESP-Link firmware on the ESP8266 in my #rc2014 wifi card disconnects my terminal after 5 minutes of inactivity. That's inconvenient. Seems like maybe there's a constant somewhere in the code that affects this? But I'll have to compile the firmware myself, which is a whole thing. Adventure!

@benbrown lemme know if you wanna do like a group buy or something

@emma My hypothesis is that the horizontal ones will be stronger as fasteners, but the vertical ones will have better threads. Could also be that M3 is too fine a pitch for the comfy resolution of my printer in either case?

Alright, well that’s kinda gnarly. I think a lesson learned is that I can’t really go finer than M5 screws, and even that’s dicey. Maybe different filament and fiddling with settings could help? But really I just need to use real metal screws

My brain is switching between earworms of "Baby Come Back" by Player and a hurdy-gurdy rendition of the opening guitar riff to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck"

Kinda wish I could change the station

Here's the hurdy gurdy Thunderstruck, FWIW. It's pretty rad

https://www.tiktok.com/@anniehurdygurdy/video/7138048559265402118?q=hurdy%20gurdy&t=1708640854131

@mavica_again I did manage to print some M5 nuts & bolts last weekend, which are mostly passable. But, it's feeling like more trouble than it's worth / get real metal screws / use alternative fasteners if printed

A recent shower thought: The shittier Amazon makes itself, the more attractive alternative shitty stores look.

Like, apparently, I can skip Amazon and use AliExpress as my source for random all-caps six-letter brand name hobby supplies? And it comes direct from the factory in China for half the price in under two weeks?

Even if a package evaporates occasionally or arrives filled with gravel instead of what I ordered, it's converging on an overall comparable experience.

The funny thing is that I can remember like 15 years ago when I was super dubious about Amazon and then frog-boiled myself into using them as my omni-store. Feels very similar now

I know this is only really new-to-me, but I'm finding it fascinating how stuff on AliExpress basically doesn't bother with brand names.

That's at least more honest than the last few decades of excavation and enshittification of all brands here in the US. I almost can't think of an once-favored brand that wasn't at some point stripped by investors down to the letters in the name in the hopes folks remain convinced it's anything like what it used to be

Anyway, this is an "old man shouts at clouds" rant.

Also, be careful if you shop for "PYREX" that you don't end up with "pyrex" - one of them doesn't explode nearly as much as the other

@hotdogsladies Yeah, like I bought $20 worth of CNC mill bits and M3 screws from AliExpress that would have been $40 on Amazon. Seems like they're all the same exact stuff with equal likelihood of actually being made of cake or chocolate? :blobshrug:

There is sun and I hear crows, I should go for a walk!