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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.



  • I’m not making excuses for anyone, but I’ve accidentally done this. On my phone and messaging app, if I read a text and leave the conversation open (not exiting the thread and the app) I won’t get any further notifications from that person no matter how much they text. I’m sure it’s a setting somewhere, but the setting is dumb. Like, surely I don’t want a bunch of pings when I’m actively conversing with someone and looking at the app, but leaving the thread open and the screen off “should” still get a notification, even if the app is open under my lock screen.


  • “Boring straight lines” as you put it are also a way for the poorest land owners to describe, subdivide, buy, and sell property using simple easy to understand language, often without even the need for a surveyor or a lawyer to get involved. Curved boundary lines are a clear indicator of commercial development at the higher end of that spectrum. Ordinary folks are not going to have the necessary training to do anything to directly subdivide property described in that way without involving lawyers and surveyors.

    Moreover, you often can’t sell a property without ingress and egress access to some public right of way. The same rules for simplicity of geometry apply to those right of ways too. Curves are vague and require complex legalese to describe in words. It also wasn’t too long ago that the precision of survey tools just did not exist to accurately describe parcels as anything but straight line distances with sometimes VERY vague information about orientation. Only more recent subdivisions (often much less than about 100 years old) include curves described with any decent level of precision. When they do describe curves on older documents it’s almost always in reference to large curves along existing structures (like railroads) and the actual geometry of that curve is not fully defined.

    What we see here is only tangentially related to tourism in that it is directly related to the entire business of land development, which includes everything else.


  • Ask a surveyor with experience in Mexico.

    It looks like most of the minor streets are mostly parallel with or perpendicular to the major road to the north and the rest are aligned along the cardinal directions: north & south, east & west. Lots of the properties and their respective drainage and road right of ways were probably apportioned to align with whatever the most significant roadway or canal was in place at the time. I can see the being portioned off using simple legal language like you can buy the north 50 meters of the south 300 meters relative to “this road” and the east 50 meters of the west 200 meters relative to “this canal”. You can accurately divide an area this way without any need to define a grid north, a proper grid coordinate system, and very basic survey tools.

    I’d guess that the other streets oriented to the cardinal directions came later as survey tools and practices advanced or some other change in the way municipalities regulate. For example, in the U.S. you see most gridded streets and lots in older areas, relative to sections townships and ranges, but in new platted developments constantly curving streets are all the rage.

    Whatever the cause, you are seeing the history of land development as the area develops it’s customs around land development.





  • Selfhosting is not piracy because you’re only streaming the albums you already bought and paid for. If you’re not down for buying CD’s or other physical media, or maybe you no longer have a disc drive, then you should be buying the lossless audio direct from the artists or via a service like Bandcamp. I just bought a few vinyls from Bandcamp and I had them to listen as to on all my devices (as lossless CD quality FLAC files) inside of a few minutes after purchase. Plex paired with plexamp on devices for ease of use. Replace with Jellyfish in a pinch. MPD might work, but you’d need to be better at networking than I am, also you’d need a steady internet connection at both ends.

    Self-hosting is not piracy, it’s fair use. Piracy is when a fool that only bought a license to listen instead of buying the actual media decides they want to listen on another device.









  • You don’t even need the ship to have active acoustics, just that the other ships whizzing by using “insert sci-fi techno babble force here” affect space and matter around them in such a way that energy waves from that sci-fi force moving silently through the vacuum and turn into sound when they interact with the technology/structure of your own ship or spacesuit. Like a microwave generating sparks and a crackling noise across metal foil.


  • The et cetera: Shouldn’t be allowed to work overtime either. And they should get taxed more if they work a second job, so only 40 hours per week. Attach ridiculous fees to any attempt at saving money in a bank, can’t have their money earning interest for them. They should also be in a high cost of living part of hell with no public transportation. And they should be forced to buy their own safety equipment. They should have to pay for healthcare out of pocket, no good health insurance. And they should be penalized for aging the same way too, with new billionaires coming in cheaper and forcing them out of their position and making their experience a liability in finding new work. Let’s throw in some inflation to keeps things spicy. An HOA that is constantly fighting them and won’t let them grow food. How about random detentions and beatings for being the wrong shade in the wrong part of hell town, the part they work in. And they should never be allowed to forget for one moment what they had in life and how they squandered it on petty selfish things.