ijk64✅ @ijk64@m.futex.au

37 years ago today, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch. Most of us of a certain age can remember where we were. I was in the common area of a dorm at the University of New Hampshire, watching the 1 TV with another student.

What I did NOT remember, until reading Scott Monty's newsletter today, was that President Reagan was supposed to give the State of the Union address that night, but instead said these power words:

https://history.nasa.gov/reagan12886.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynuDA8A42Ic

1/2

Not only do you need leap seconds to keep solar time and atomic time in sync, you'll need a different kind of leap second to keep Lunar atomic time and Earth atomic time in sync, because mass distorts spacetime. So good luck with that... Defining lunar...
https://jwz.org/b/yj9T

Some #Twitter things that the company didn’t build or invent itself:

• Twitterrific was the first mobile Twitter app
• The word tweet made its first official appearance on Twitterrific
• The hashtag was from Chris Messina
• Advanced Twitter Search was originally Summize
• Twitter bought TweetDeck
• Live stream was from Periscope acquisition
• The official Twitter app was originally Tweetie which they purchased from Loren Brichter
• Mentioning people with an @ was user driven and wasn’t linked to accounts because they didn’t consider conversations to take place on Twitter initially
• Quote tweet was adopted from people copy+pasting tweets and adding RT in front of the copied tweet
• Threads were built to accomodate existing user behavior

Did I miss anything major?

[update 29/1] lots of additions in the replies that I thought should get added here

• Image attachments added after third party services like imageshack/yfrog, and twitpic became super popular.
• Twitterrific was first to officially associate Twitter with a bird
• Retweet was adopted from user behavior (you couldn’t comment or add context using the official retweet so many people kept using RT until Twitter introduced native QT)
• Scheduling, posting across accounts, and team/shared accounts were from Hootsuite
• Popularity of short link services like isgd and bitly lead to tco url masking

Something that people may not have been aware, in my corner of Twitter in those early years, people interpreted RT not as retweet but as reply to. So they weren’t replying by hitting the reply button but by manually quote tweeting and adding RT after their response.

There’s enough confusion over RT so I’m gonna add this example

https://octodon.social/@aulia/109770564472648044

#Gumtrees are my favourite large growing mass within the flora world.

They’re known as #eucalypts and csiro.com.au reports that there are 934 species of #eucalypt trees native to #Australia.

Gums typically grow to a height of 45 m (148 ft) but may sometimes only be a stunted shrub. Alternatively under ideal conditions, they can grow as tall as 90–100 m (300–330 ft).

IMO, they’re an emphatic statement of strength and resilience.

Gums can withstand prolonged drought conditions and still stand tall and present happy and healthy. Their trunks and branches are normally covered in a thin layer of white bark that sheds annually around this time of year (summer time).

Their leaves vary in size and shape, depending on the species.

My favourite are the shape as seen in these photos taken a couple of days ago near #Melbournes #Botanicgardens. They’re long (elongated), 10+cm (4+ inch) long and 1.5-2.0cm (3/4 inch) in width at their widest point.

Their leaves often possess a slight curved appearance, are usually deep dark green and clumped together, facing downward toward the ground, hanging from their branches.

This specific tree caught my eye. Its trunk is mottled with varying shades of whites, browns and greys. It is also pitted and indented along its entire length.

It really is a beauty

#urbanflora #flora #gardening #garden #melbourne #butterfly #aesthetichedonist #januaryjoy #gardeningAU #gardening #narrm #victoria #Australia #godmustbeabotanist #makesmehappy

Looking back, I should never have connected to the Internet

Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko tells Engadget: “Third party applications are incredibly valuable for a platform because that's where the power users go … it benefits everybody because the power users are the people who create the content that everybody reads.”

THANK YOU 👏👏👏

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-client-developers-fleeing-twitter-mastodon-130031551.html

The German word "Moin", mostly used in the northen parts of the country, can mean

- Good morning
- Hello
- Good day
- Good afternoon
- Good evening
- Welcome!
- How are you?
- Long time no see
- Oops!
- Bye

So, if you only speak little German, visit the North.

You only need one word to get through the day.

Enjoy our language!

#TheGermanWord

Here is an updated light curve from http://astro.vanbuitenen.nl/comet/2022E3 with magnitude (brightness) values of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). This graph predicts a magnitude value of around 5 on Feb 1, at closest approach to earth.

Objects with lower magnitude values are brighter. The human eye can detect objects with magnitude < 6. With a good pair of 10x50 binoculars, one can observe objects at magnitude 11 and lower .

Credit: Gideon van Buitenen at http://astro.vanbuitenen.nl/home
#comet #C2022E3 #Astronomy
5/n

Like other comets, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has a dust tail trailing behind the comet and a glowing ion tail, pointing away from the Sun, formed from gases ionized by UV radiation from the Sun.

The dust tail is also affected by solar radiation and hence is oriented a bit away from the sun.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image source: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/comets/en/
#comet #C2022E3 #Astronomy
6/n

Someone's ported the Level 9 text adventure engine + game data for the BBC Micro to Python. While I was mince at these, I know many people were fond of them.

Repo: https://github.com/ajgbarnes/level9

Announcement/discussion: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=26239

#Python #RetroComputing #BBCMicro #InteractiveFiction #Level9

Wow, there's innovation in propeller shapes (which i thought we're close to optimal for a century): toroidal propellers https://newatlas.com/aircraft/toroidal-quiet-propellers/ >50% performance improvement at midrange rpms in liquids!

#Libraries #Librarians #Books #Music #Movies #Internet #MoreThanYouThink

Pick your poison

"Cistercian Numbers" are incredibly cool

It's a rare numeric system designed by 13th century monks

Each number is a based on a single vertical stick, with patterns you draw in all four quadrants off it -- top right, top left, bottom right, bottom left

A single glyph can represent a number from 1 to 9,999

It's in my recent weekly "Linkfest" newsletter, here: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-3-cisterian-numbers-robots-that-hug-and/

Want to subscribe? Pay-what-you-want here: https://buttondown.email/clivethompson

I call it "The opposite of doomscrolling"

In the face of planetary ecocide, how do we deal with a sense of loss, grief, powerlessness, and hopelessness? Where can we find the strength and courage to carry on?

Luísa Souza has some thoughts on the subject.
________________________

Capitalism is a world-eater, and it must be stopped at all costs.

Its expansion — slow at first — has been the proliferation of increasingly larger cities, factories, open-pit mines, oil fields, subterranean cables, power lines, monocultures, security cameras, detention centers, prisons, concentration camps, and the buses, trains, and subways where workers huddle together as they move to their places of work from where they will move the machine with their labor.

This process has also been the end of peoples, cultures, and communities, of forests, rivers, and tundras. The monster devours worlds, people, trees, and mountains, and vomits residues: plastic, twisted metal, glass, pesticides, and chemicals of all types that accumulate in the soil and travel through rivers and clouds. And thus it grows.

The expansion of industrial capitalism through the Earth has generated a crisis of global scale which is manifested in a multitude of local crises.

The scale of the global crisis makes us feel powerless because we have no influence at this level, but there is a lot that we can do to change things around us. And if our power is limited, it is ours, and it can always be increased as we develop our capabilities and form alliances.

If the monster has spread its tentacles throughout the world, we can fight it where we are. This involves stopping to look around us and reflect on our desires and capabilities and on what struggles we can join where we are. It also means accepting that no matter how heroic our efforts, there is no guarantee that we will be able to avoid catastrophe or even extinction. But defeat is certain if we do nothing, and the more we fight the further we go and the better our chances.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://luisa29.medium.com/dealing-with-grief-and-facing-the-ecocide-e2f8dcd1c252

#AntiCapitalism #Ecocide #ClimateCrisis

Here is how to search ~/projects/ dir under #Linux and #Unix for any open files which may have been deleted recursively:

lsof -nP +L1 +D ~/projects/

sudo lsof -nP +L1 +D # the whole system

See https://www.nixcraft.com/t/linux-reports-on-any-open-files-which-have-been-unlinked/4482 for more info.

Fahrenheit 450.5
---
RT @JagsFanBrian
Since y'all wanna play the "this isn't really happening" game https://twitter.com/JagsFanBrian/status/1618765896511819777
https://twitter.com/JagsFanBrian/status/1618977880696041474

Alright folks, for those that would like to follow @haveibeenpwned on Mastodon, I've now set up an *official* account.

There are a bunch of fake ones around the place on other Mastodon instances, the legit one only follows my account and has a *verified* link through to the website.

Also, shoutout to me for temporarily breaking the website by linking through to the full Mastodon URL without properly escaping the @ symbol in the Razor syntax. It's been a big day 😅

Nice write up from @troyhunt on the implementation of k-anonymity to verify breached passwords on Have I Been Pawned.

https://www.troyhunt.com/ive-just-launched-pwned-passwords-version-2/#cloudflareprivacyandkanonymity