Peter Oliver @mavit@bergamot.social

@ryantownsend Back when email was new and unfamiliar, you didn't choose. You just got given a mailbox by your university (which you would use as you're personal address, even if technically it wasn't), or your ISP.

By the time that independent email providers were really taking off, you had clear, concrete reasons for your choice, such as price (Hotmail), brand recognition (Yahoo!), or features (GMail). But Mastodon servers all look kind-of the same, so how do you select one?

The care instructions for this scarf are topologically problematic.

@pid_eins I'm sure there's a good (or at least, complicated) reason for this, but why not use the already-familiar ctrl-alt-del combination?

@sil There's definitely something weird and interesting going on here. You routinely damage the rings but not the keys themselves? Are you sure you're not just buying really bad rings?

I've been using the same ring for as long as I can remember (maybe as long as I've been using keys?) and it's as good as new.

I find myself today wearing double corduroy. Is this a fashion faux pas similar to double denim, or merely an appropriate response to the changing of the seasons (and the passing of the years).

@alex @sldrant They can all do it, according to https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/#:~:text=List%20searchable%20files%20that%20match%20a%20pattern

Flying ant day in October?!

@april They're secretly Thunderbird users?

@sil Does the former imply more strongly that this is Tarquin's problem to solve, rather than a by-product of the inscrutable nature of the technology (or the deliberate action of the host)?

@unspeaker I think it doesn’t really have a name as such, but is referred to by its X11 font specifier “misc-fixed”. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

If your OS doesn’t supply this font in OpenType format, you could convert the bitmaps yourself; see, e.g., https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/ucs-miscfixed-fonts/blob/d1e980c8998d6f62c794bb2d2bad6b09aa8bedec/f/ucs-miscfixed-fonts.spec#_39 for the recipe. Because of a spacing bug (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/fonttosfnt/-/issues/7), you want fonttosfnt version 1.2.4 (which hasn’t been released yet), so perhaps extract the font files from say https://download.copr.fedorainfracloud.org/results/mavit/ucs-miscfixed-fonts/fedora-rawhide-x86_64/07764419-ucs-miscfixed-fonts/ucs-miscfixed-opentype-fonts-0.3-34.fc41.noarch.rpm instead.

@sil See also: Bad dad bad dim bye Cotton-eye Joe.

@brucelawson With the Android app, the option to enter the meeting ID exists, but is hidden behind a misnamed menu (I forget exactly what; something like "Create a new account", maybe?).

I know we've all been distracted recently by old new Snobs moving to new new Snobs, but did anyone realise that old old Snobs is now a corner shop?!

@bigcalm There's an argument for the default flavour, because it gets the most focus from Canonical, but I'd suggest you'll have the easiest time with whatever you know best. I moved my parents from Ubuntu to Fedora Workstation for this reason and it's been way smoother sailing.

@dracos Good stuff. When the prices are a few pence out, I worry the ticket machine/booking system is trying to sell me the wrong tickets again.

If I want to get back into reading RSS, what software should I be using these days? I've tried a few things since Google Reader shut down, but nothing's stuck.

@sil Remember how in the old days WiFi was an unreliable hassle, and now it mostly just works? Well, consider how in the old days printers were also an unreliable hassle, and now... they are still an unreliable hassle. You don't want printers stinking up your WiFi.

@rythie Browsers could block the domain. Maybe if you needed to see where a particular link pointed, you could find it at archive.org, if you were lucky.

But yeah, don't use third-party link-shorteners. I guess a combination of Twitter improvements and QR codes have replaced the main use-cases for them anyway, which is good and bad; if they're largely abandoned then they're more at risk from malicious takeover.

@alex I jest, of course. I assume what actually happens is it loses acceleration, and chargers slower?