Trusting a specific vendor's money back guarantees I ordered an expensive cervical pillow. Apparently it is made to order and will arrive in a couple weeks. We'll see how that goes.
Dogs can be pillows too. These two were instant friends!
Did someone say Basil? This grows in my window, was bought when about hand sized and re-potted with last year's soil. The rest is "add water daily", and take it inside before the day temps exceed 35C. One plant, Basil all year it seems (until I do pesto).
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Statistics prove me wrong though. Subjectively guessing is a bad guide for this.
Almost no region is wetter/had more precipitation overall. Berlin regional/north east had the driest ever spring (-44%), so we're at half the amount of previous years over long time values (~260mm v 560mm). D:
This is weather data from 1881 to present, and while some regions have received more rain, the distribution is all over the place, regionalized, and most places are drier than ever.
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Speaking of socks, specimen with tighter fit are excellent for value-add for doggo dummies.
We have a couple of those. Slip a sock on it takes a different meaning here, and makes for a fine source of different smell thus increased difficulty in search tasks when identifying the thing for doggo.
Holes don't matter here. Repurposing socks rocks for training! :))
Wtf, I had no idea it was giving you an activity stream protocol documentation. Tags appear to work differently in places, now I'm assuming you are using diaspora as the client and that is where it breaks.
It could look llke that. Substitute mastodon.social with whatever federates:
Basically, all pound words I use work as last URL parameter of any other place that participates in fedi. :)
Rubber chicken? There's an RFC for the R. I. T. A. device!
It's something you whack into the customers' face, or back of their head to improve clearness of direction (yours, which they didn't understand or follow), clarity of communication (their readiness to follow it) and generally for opinion amplification, strictly scientific and unidirectionally by kinetic method.
Almost percussive maintenance, but for softer tissue.
Many times I've been phantasizing about it. I'd have the excuse "it's a dog toy" now. :p
The competitive aspect though kicked in, so I beat idiots by patience nowadays.
If that fails I know a cat5'o'nine tails could do the trick.
Rubber chicken? There's an RFC for the R. I. T. A. device!
It's something you whack into the customers' face, or back of their head to improve clearness of direction (yours, which they didn't understand or follow), clarity of communication (their readiness to follow it) and generally for opinion amplification, strictly scientific and unidirectionally by kinetic method.
Almost percussive maintenance, but for softer tissue.
Many times I've been phantasizing about it. I'd have the excuse "it's a dog toy" now. :p
The competitive aspect though kicked in, so I beat idiots by patience nowadays.
If that fails I know a cat5'o'nine tails could do the trick.
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Sure should be! :D Just bring me to the right spot in Venus's orbit where occlusional effects shall be maximized, it then shall be mind blowing! Seems hard to do from this rock in he solar system.
I'm afraid this involves both measuring in feet and its feasibility remains speculative at this point, so may not happen.
Fortunately someone else, local to earth, witnessed this before and left a legacy document:
Re typing, I tend to not look at the keyboard much when I am typing - or so I thought. After a coworker bought a blank keycaps Das Keyboard I had to try this. To no one's surprise blank keycaps are an excellent tool to expose the shortcomings of anyone's typing skills.
Letters may work well, numbers do too, but as soon as you leave bog standard punctuation and type pipe, semicolon, German Umlauts or diacritical marks and these ^~<>\'`# for e.g. Markdown or LaTex and whatnot, I dearly need a keyboard with visible letters I can orient myself on.
Maybe the game you saw @Karl Auerbach was Lingua? Any case, it is curious when these types of anticipation happen. Im Mahjang, I tend to get caught and slowed down by calculation scores and moves while its my turn, leading to inevitable complaints by routine players on the table. *shrug
Drive-in cinema was a thing with the Americans residing in West Berlin Allied forces. The site the cinema was still exists and is a museum now. Outside of that relatively small circle as a kid I thought what an odd concept. I was taken there once, and found the experience entirely non-captivating. I don't remember the movie at all and may have fallen asleep too. Hazy memory.
@Muse Happy birthday! May I present you your own little train station signage, ta-dah!
The Riot Goose sticker shall go onto my laptop, maybe. For the moment it graces the fridge.
Not part of my collection, or only via photos, is this set from a university town:
Adbusting has been and continues to be an excellent source of amusement for me. The Nett Hier motive and claim has been bent in many hilarous and also bitter ways, raising awareness for unpopular but convincing political positions.
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Ooohh, a Japanese Film Festival. Enjoy! I've been to many, and enjoyed every minute of it. Ahhh student days. Don't know about now, back then every. single. film. with or by Beat Takeshi was shown every time. And many others were.
I'll never forget the daftest bank robbery on film ever, a scene in Hana-Bi which is completely silent and presents an excellent twist in a dramatic plot. The guy hilmself was prominent on the last poster I saw:
By the way, I went to see Band Maid live yesterday. It was super fun, noisy, loud, and dam they pack a punch of energy. By my guesstimation about half the people in the venue were older than me. Who would have thought! Check my pixelfed. I hope the concert you get to see will be equally good @Christoph S !
Just a couple weeks ago this city had the Culture Carnival, which over 30 years went from 0 to 100, from an undaunted team of under 30 organizers overstretching their abilities to attracting almost a million visitors over festivities that last three days within a very small number of years.
So I went to see #Band-Maid #bandmaid at the Columbia Theater in #Berlin. Great concert! If you haven't heard them, my take: they are loud! Cross over heavy metal, guitar solos and all, blues rock, punk-ish and grunge-ian themes, allude to pop and pack crazy rhythm changes all the time too. Perfect!
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@Kenny Chaffin If you are in conflict with my neighbors over loud music and partying on their driveway, maybe you should dance and party on your own driveway!!1lol
I'll see myself out.
In other news, after a long and exhausting day yesterday I meet this brass band under the elevated subway tracks, and they were packing a punch. Recognized only a few tunes, one of them was Billie Eilish's first single, well adapted to these instruments and performed without the signature yellow hoodie.
So after a long and exhausting day yesterday I meet this brass band under the elevated subway tracks, and they were packing a punch, as if to brighten my #wednesdaywalk in the city - and others's day too.
Speaking of, when this thing was in preview the live navigation overlay was very helpful. GPS on its own is not useful, and I don't care if you're a reCALCulating loop or not, just tell me which way is which and where to turn.
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Old photos, I have found a box full of old photos from my parents, and their parents. Contains many film negatives in pockets, and a good amount of 6x6 among them. I do remember grandpa had and used one of those when I was little, but the device itself is not to be found. Anyway I wonder when I'll get to take proper time for reproducing some of these, in the meantime they may show up on my Pixelfed.
I know enthusiasts cherish middle format still today, but I've never handled a 6x6 camera myself. For me, when photography started at age 11 or so it was all 36x24mm film in 3:2 ratio, no 1:1. Different rules apply.
Here's Grandma in her own store, selling things as you did mid-1950s era.
#throwbackthursday with Grandma in her store, the year is ca. 1952. She was not in her thirties yet and ran the grocery store with Grandpa in #Flensburg.
You remind me a Vonnegut book is in the lower section of the unread books pile here. Wonder when I will ever get to..
Back to tuna, and this does not parse well in any English translation, but I'll describe, because canned tuna.
Back when environmental consciousness grew here, late 1990s, trawler fishing and such brute force methods gave bad publicity (maybe from Greenpeace, or another org. It went big at the time). So the canned tuna industry thought up a label in order to mark their own product as environmentally conscious and ethically clean. That included reacting to bad press that dolphins were caught and had died from tuna fishing. The PR depts could not have that report stick.
So what they did was redesign and label the stuff inside as "dolphin, caught in a friendly way". Kinda like what the LLM of choice generated for the visuals here. The layout determined the meaning by having a blank space between the first two words. Without it the text would have been clear in its message of not hurting Flipper. Well, not here:
Maximum embarassement ensued. Industry ended up with another, hastily knit follow-up campaign to clean up their mess and make clear no way had they ever sold canned dolphin, well ofcourse they had not.
Losing a thing this way reminds me of a The Prestige dialogue, when a shock (found all of them) and a simple question elicits a reply "They're all yours!"
Just weeks ago my first real Casio resurfaced, fx-100v. Coolest feature is it can hold 6 custom constants to be used in calculations. When we were allowed calculator use in physics and maths class this helped a ton.
This specimen is from early 1992 or so, and I remember I did renew the AAA battery once since.
Re black holes, this eso photo of the week is super cool. The precision we measure orbital trajectories with is staggering.
AI is very much in all domains of IT and adjacent work, at least those areas I touch. However, I proudly wear this to mock uncritical use and self-inflicted dependence.
(some fedi account had this first)
Also, none of planning rounds to use AI in the future makes this any more efficient: working groups taking weeks over weeks to draft a plan how beneficial use could look like is more akin to Death By Meeting than solving a problem by avoiding it.
Bestest example: while using an LLM for code generation is a smart idea and gives people like me the ability to program, the f*ck will I do and e.g. rely on it with no code review, or debug output or a log file. Easiest way out: have the thing generate code, and for repeated use re-run the code, not the LLM prompt.
But yeah, most of this is hype-driven and has proven detrimental to the environment. Resistance to land and resource grab is growing.
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The new Mercedes Sylvia got is fully electric, and it invites you strongly to install the app on your phone for emphasizing their branding (can do without, but whatever) and ease of use (oh well, I succumbed to this call too).
Terrible behaviour surfaces, quality testing wise. They should have caught this early on.
This is long, feel free to skip.
One feature, slightly more useful (I think) than a washing machine app that alerts you when the thing finishing its washing cycle, is the ability to monitor the charging state while it is, well, charging. And when it is not. Why is that possibly important, since the next charger may be several hundred metres away, out of sight, on a public street where they charge extra hefty fees when you park there and the thing is full or does not charge. Good feature to have also to not exceed the recommended 80% full by much.
So an iOS app was first to pair with the car. Sylvia used the car, parked it at the charger, started charging, walked to her office and called to tell me. First time users are like that, I am too. :)) I then opened my app, and something happened. Her app stopped updating the charging state. My app did show charging state and progress, but hers did not any more.
It took a version update of her app to "fix", which happened weeks later. No release notes saying "we fixed an annoying bug related to charge-o-metering".
Another issue with the app is, it notifies about the car state. Again, well-intentioned, but... implementation meh.
Lets say, I drive to the scrapyard to orderly dispose of electrical appliances, let the door open because no spare hand, take out the thing from the back seat. Lug over the thing towards the container, door stays open for more than 30 seconds, triggers an (invisible to me) alarm state. I do not know, receive no notification, then got rid of whatever, then drive home. Some 10 minutes later Sylvia's app triggers the alarm "door is open, do something, yes?" with no clear labels on the available buttons either. Terribly useless UI, and the delay of too many minutes means I do not know what she is talking about when she calls to ask "what happened to the car?" at first. Also, she does not get a timestamp of the event sop does not know "something" happened many minutes earlier.
We can smile this away, but quality assurance should have caught this.
We can smile this away, but given quality assurance for a Chinese make of BYD or Beijing motors that comes at half the price would probably mean better software.
We can smile this away, but we can attribute the 40% lower numbers of new Mercedes sold last year may trace back to quality assurance - it should have hjalped to prevent this.
Software must just work and get out of your way. German engineering forgot. Oh well, at least there's physical, tactile buttons for many oft-used features.
The one useful feature of having the app it enables per-user profiles for the in-car system controls and that allows me to switch off or turn to mid-grey all the interior LED blinkenlights. If you don't it feels you're driving around a mobile disco. They kept changing colours all the time, super distracting and depending on whatnot. The off feature is the best thing I've discovered yet.
I like it this way, it intrudes into a space combustion car users may have long thought is untouchable, in a way. Not it isn't, you too are supposed to see change is happening. It practically solves the issue of where the plug is. Park any way you see fit. Carsten Raddatz (@carstenraddatz@pixelfed.automat.click)
Speaking generally of making cities available to all, the other evening I walked along this electric charger set in #Berlin. Chargers being mounted on the road, in the lane where cars would park. The minor advantage here is pedestrians have no impediment this way. Electric cars still eat up too much space, as any other car will, but car users' perceived privilege of owning the road is broken.
I like it this way, it intrudes into a space combustion car users may have long thought is untouchable, in a way. Not it isn't, you too are supposed to see change is happening. It practically solves the issue of where the plug is.
As a kid, ofc I wanted to be an astronaut. Dunno how that changed, but it did before I was leaving primary school. And Cosmos the book stayed. The recent moon mission start makes me shrug, mostly, I do like that NASA is at it, not a BPPE (big phallic private enterprise).
Recently the UNOOSA something agency came to my attention. And "fragment creation events" that are more likely each time microsatellites are spewed into orbit. Kinda scary numbers.
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The lake we visited yesterday and like 99% of nature around it was still dormant. Spring is in the air only when the sun comes out. Here and there 1 out of 10 bushes and cherry tree will bloom, others are not quite feeling it. Still a good day outdoors, but at ~4°C you need a thick jacket.
Nothing recent to report, I'm getting to know Claude, Nono, and Goose. So much that my (unrelated, lalala) new t-shirt sports this friendly Riot Goose:
No LiteLLM involved, so very happy.
In other news, I liked the procedure of doing a what was supposed to be a boring support call once - this was quite a handful of years ago. Fellow employee had issues with something something Windows, and we thought why not just call for support. Which we had never ever done. So I did, after I elicited the number to call from a chat. No bots then, just humans.
The issue we had could not be solved by $person over the phone, then $issue was escalated. I took great care to be concise, friendly, and refer to the previosly shared information every time.
The 4th person (or nth, I forgot) picked up the phone and upon my first sentence angrily replied WHERE DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER FROM TELL ME THE NAME and made me say the name of the previous contact. (Sorry Chadenguna, you sure meant well.) I was unimpressed, except for the obvious fact that obviously the support dept did not know what they were doing, and complied. I may or may not have added insult to surprise by bothering the person with how important using the product was for us.
The issue was solved, as in "suddenly it works the next day", after a 1287 digit code was relayed to me by phone, but boy must MS version licensing have been a mess in their backoffice. Globally distributed system, my ass.
I guess this was the equivalent of the error message saying "this error message should never be shown", and a debug log somewhere that was found and quietly fixed later.
I usually sleep on my back. Also since my New York trip I wear this eye mask with cartoon eyes on it, to my wife's amused dismay. But I do sleep much better in the dark.
Am tempted to obtain a Pepe the frog version in addition to this goodie from the New York hotel. Really comfy!
At times doggo takes my spot on the bed, croissant curl style, and I fold around him 🥐. A two humans, one dog constellation is possible only when the dog picks the middle, in baguette position 🥖 long side parallel. Fortunately he leaves the bed at some point because the cool wooden floor is more comfy apparently, or any spot his Bedsure pillow is.
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Malte was awarded an award for lifetime cuteness of floofness recently. The gift associated with the award ceremony was one specimen like this, it was adopted instantly and carried like a trophy.
And it has survived to this day (handful of days).
I'm waiting for my peppers to grow abundantly, drowning my balcony in peppers. Alas, that will have to wait until August. But I am hopeful.
Just last week I pepared this year's chili sauce from 1.5 drawers worth of peppers from the last harvest and peppers I had bought here and there. The spiciest I ever made, and I learned the difficult word in Mandarin for a variety that features, 斷魂椒 which has the heat-indicative translation of soul-crushing pepper. Well yes, it is that hot. Start with a few drops of oil for a bowl of ramen, work from there.
The more painful part is that I wrote by hand the cultivar name on each label (lower right) on a segment of about 18x7mm. Ouch, my hand still hurts,
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This made me laugh, it was sent to me:
The dog in larger-than-life mangled through AI with four of his favourite females from when we still had snow beginning of the week.
The snow and ice was gone by Tuesday, the sign about mulled wine feels seriously out of place at 15C. Almost smells like spring instead, that was quick!
Aufsteller auf der Straße am Restaurant, gesehen von wenigen Tagen gerade als das Tauwetter einsetzte. Da zeigt jemand dürren Humor. Heute mit bald 15 Grad ist das der gefühlt wahre Schnee von gestern =) #berlin #restaurant #glühwein #winter #humour #humor
Speaking generally of making cities available to all, the other evening I walked along this electric charger set in #Berlin. Chargers being mounted on the road, in the lane where cars would park. The minor advantage here is pedestrians have no impediment this way. Electric cars still eat up too much space, as any other car will, but car users' perceived privilege of owning the road is broken.
