Badabinski

It very definitely was 😅 The way that company used the satellite network was cool, don’t get me wrong. They would use it to push content out to all their stores with multicast which was really efficient with bandwidth. I loved it for that, but I hated interacting with it over unicast in any way, shape, or form. Horses for courses, as they say.

My pain tolerance for shitty input methods has been permanently warped after experiencing psychic damage from using Teamviewer to connect to a system over a very flaky HughesNet satellite link. I was working for a vendor that supplied a hardware networking box to a stupid retail company that sells food and shit. I just wanted to ssh to our boxen on a specific network so I could troubleshoot something, but the only way I could get to it was via putty installed on an ancient Windows XP desktop on the same network as our box that could only be accessed with Teamviewer. My favorite part of that was that the locale or something was fucked up, so my qwerty keyboard inputs were, like, fucking transformed into azerty somehow?? The Windows desktop was locked down and monitored to a tremendous degree, so I couldn’t change anything. The resolution was terrible, the latency was over a second, and half of my keyboard inputs turned into gibberish on the other side.

Oh, and I was onsite at that same company’s HQ doing a sales engineering call while I was trying to figure out what was wrong. I spent 5 days sitting in spare offices with shitty chairs, away from my family, living that fucking nightmare before I finally figured out what was wrong. God damn, what a fucking mess that was. For anyone reading this, NEVER WORK FOR GROCERY/DRUG STORE IT. They are worse than fucking banks in some ways. Fuck.

EDIT: also, I asked ‘why Teamviewer’ and the answer was always shrugs. This was before the big TeamViewer security incidents, so maybe they thought it was more secure? Like, at least they didn’t expose RDP on the internet…

Having been in this situation (the only binary I could use was bash, although cd was a bash builtin for me), echo * is your friend. Even better is something like this:

get_path_type() {
    local item
    item="$1"
    [[ -z "$item" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to get_path_type'; return 1; }
    if [[ -d "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'dir'
    elif [[ -f "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'file'
    elif [[ -h "$item" ]]; then
        echo 'link'  # not accurate, but symlink is too long
    else
        echo '????'
    fi
}

print_path_listing() {
    local path path_type
    path="$1"
    [[ -z "$path" ]] && { echo 'wrong arg count passed to print_path_listing'; return 1; }
    path_type="$(get_path_type "$path")"
    printf '%s\t%s\n' "$path_type" "$path"
}

ls() {
    local path paths item symlink_regex
    paths=("$@")
    if ((${#paths[@]} == 0)); then
        paths=("$(pwd)")
    fi
    shopt -s dotglob
    for path in "${paths[@]}"; do
        if [[ -d "$path" ]]; then
            printf '%s\n' "$path"
            for item in "$path"/*; do
                print_path_listing "$item"
            done
        elif [[ -e "$path" ]]; then
            print_path_listing "$path"
        printf '\n'
        fi
    done
}

This is recreated from memory and will likely have several nasty bugs. I also wrote it and quickly tested it entirely on my phone which was a bit painful. It should be pure bash, so it’ll work in this type of situation.

EDIT: I’m bored and sleep deprived and wanted to do something, hence this nonsense. I’ve taken the joke entirely too seriously.

oh my God it’s like you’re in my head get out of my head. I’m reading this because I’m trying to catch up on sleep and need to distract myself from the dread, so this hits way too close to home lol

I think the concern is that it doesn’t necessarily do that thing where the collar will come off if it gets caught on something. Like, most commercial collars have a breakaway that will prevent a cat from getting strangled. It might be worth getting breakaway latches and using them in any future designs.

I played so many games on my Palm Pilot back in middle school. My Palm Tungsten T3 was great, and there were a shitload of freeware or shareware games released over the years.

Don’t forget fully automated!

I had two cats as a kid, and the day one of them hid somewhere to die from undiagnosed cancer was the day I learned that they’ll just secretly go somewhere else :( She went under the basement stairs near the litterbox, and when I ripped the stairs out to get to her, I learned what a bunch of old cat pee and poop smelled like. I got much more serious about cleaning the litter box after that incident, and it’s the reason why I’m waiting until I’m good and ready before getting another cat.

The advice I’ve always heard is that if you can do it yourself, it’s always better. Animals can’t tell you that they’re sick, so every bit of info you can get on how they’re doing is important. Having the machine automatically clean the litter box deprives you of that option.

With that being said, a clean litterbox is also really important. I plan on getting a couple of cats in the next 5 years after I’ve gotten my shit together (cats and incredibly messy houses don’t mix), and I will probably get an automatic litter box because I don’t want my depressive episodes to result in my cats being miserable. As this post shows, you should do your research. Find a litter box that has been endorsed by multiple unrelated reviewers if possible. Some of these boxes are dangerous, and many of them are kinda worthless.

The video in the OP was recommended to me a few days ago and was my introduction to this whole fiasco. This person has done a ton of reviews and has a couple of boxes he’d recommend.

EDIT: I literally linked to the video in the OP… I thought it was the video from one of the people who had a cat die.

As a child, I greatly preferred the original. A lot of the emotional subtext from the sequels went over my head (since I was raised in a very emotionally repressed environment), but I could totally grok the cold, somewhat impersonal nature of the first book. It was easier to imagine myself in this huge alien structure when I could understand the characters. Nowadays I think I’d probably prefer the sequels since I derive a lot of enjoyment from interpersonal drama and conflict. I’ll admit that it’s been ages since I’ve read them, so I can’t say for sure.

It makes me happy to see Rama mentioned here! I read the first book in the series when I was 8 or 9, and it’s what really hooked me on science fiction. Like, I had to read it with a dictionary open because some of the language was way too technical for me, but I was absolutely enthralled.

Game: Noita
Book: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (RIP, you deserved more time)
TV show: Cowboy Bebop, I think
Movie: Honestly, I can’t think of one.

In order of priority, I’d put The Player of Games at the top by a wide margin (seriously, it’s an amazing book by a brilliant author), followed by Noita, with Cowboy Bebop at the end.

Time to see if this comes across properly:

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

I do, but certain Android browsers don’t support plugins. I have to use a specific browser for compatibility reasons with some work shit (I do on-call stuff). I need that to just work, so I can’t use, say, Firefox for Android. I use multiple browsers on computers, but I just can’t be bothered on my phone. That leaves me with DNS-based ad blockers. Those work almost as well, but only when I’m home or VPNed home. I don’t want to use a hosted service for privacy reasons, and I don’t want to expose a DNS server on the internet. This means that when I can’t VPN or I forget to, I get fandom rage. I’m sure I could do something to address this, but I have bigger fish to fry right now. The nice ad-free fandom frontend sounds like a great compromise to me.

You’re an absolute hero. I’m easily irritated by ads, and fandom has driven me to genuine rage a couple of times when I’m on mobile and only have DNS-based adblocking some of the time. It’s a wiki, for Christ’s sake, so why does it need so, so many ads‽ It’s just static content most of the time!

edit: to provide more context, this is a frontend for fandom wikis that strips out the bullshit.

To the tune of “Pop Goes The Weasel”:

x equals negative b /
plus or minus the square root /
of b squared minus 4 ac /
all over 2a!

I cannot believe that stupid fucking song is still in my head, but good God damn it worked. It’s there for all 0 times I’ll need the quadratic equation in my daily life.

This aligns with what I’ve always been told. The mechanical action of thoroughly washing your hands for 20 seconds + the surfactant in the soap is enough to allow the subsequent rinse and dry to physically remove shit from your hands.

Honestly, I kinda love the whole “lawyering with God” thing that Jewish folks have going on. For any religion with restrictive beliefs, there will be adherents who will try to find loopholes. I’ve been lucky enough to have an upbringing almost completely free from religion (except for a year drinking hot chocolate at a Unitarian Universalist church, which is almost not religion), but I also grew up in a super Mormon part of Utah. I’ve spent my whole life as a bit of an outsider, seeing people pick and choose which rules to follow and try to discretely find and exploit every little loophole there is. I’ve always found the hypocrisy a bit unsettling.

I think I’d really prefer it if the Mormons took the same argumentative stance with their god. It would make the picking and choosing a bit less hypocritical (which might lead to more Mormons ditching some of their religion’s shittiest and most regressive teachings), and there’d be a lot less shitty sneaking around.

He’s got 3000 subscribers, but I really love Brother Jauffre. This video lives rent free in my head: https://youtu.be/ERfhHK8zBdE

He just makes absurd little videos about whatever. If you like silly nonsensical things (which I do), he’ll be great for you.

I’ve always heard that seismic activity makes hyperloop-style transit effectively impossible.*

† Impossible given the constraints of current materials science. From what I’ve read (which may be garbage, but it seemed well researched), making a vacuum chamber that’s hundreds of thousands of miles long on top of a big wiggly molten goo ball isn’t something we can even see a way to realistically achieve right now.