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• Post #4378910

  Seeking beta testers for a new opt-in Fediverse service - FediAdhan https://fediadhan.org/ Have you ever felt your #Mastodon timeline was missing something? You get regular updates about the weather, the bongs of Big Ben on the hour; perhaps even that one account that toots like a chicken. But you've been missing timely updates about the Islamic call to prayer. No longer: with FediAdhan, simply pick your location on the map and you'll get an account you can follow from your #ActivityPu...

• Post #4276344

  This week's theme for #AlternateFridayMusic is #BreakUp and this is the first thing that came to mind for me. Evanescence - Call Me When You're Sober https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RrA-R5VHQs

• Post #4104085

  Serendipity

• Post #3068005

  It's #WorldBicycleDay and a good time to mention this graph from Scientific American, first published in 1973, and updated 2025. A person on a bike is the world's most energy-efficient mode of transport, and it's not even close. Salmon use three times as many joules/g/km to get around, and then it's jet aircraft at 5x. #BikeTooter #Climate

• Post #2080427

  So where were you for timestamp 1777777777? Me, I was asleep because it was 04:09 local, and I've just landed back in England last night. Guess I'll wait and see what 1800000000 brings.

• Post #1810961

  The solar revolution, Pakistan: a classic example of the combination of unreliable infrastructure and access to cheap panels. This array is at a local doctor's office in rural Punjab, and covers all their diagnostic and dispensary needs for the office day, in conjunction with four tabletop-sized lead acid batteries.

• Post #1810960

  RE: https://ecoevo.social/@benlockwood/116482333413258787 Something you may not know if you're a recent follower: I used to moderate /r/collapse back when I was an avid/addicted Redditor. My claim to fame, were such a thing to exist, is the following wording which is still in the sidebar: Overindulging in [material relating to the collapse of civilisation] may be detrimental to your mental health. Anxiety and depression are common reactions when studying collapse. Please remain conscio...

• Post #1810959

  I've always found transliteration fascinating for some reason, perhaps because it's most used for loanwords. I'm in rural Pakistan for another couple of days, and loanwords from English are everywhere.

• Post #1810958

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@astronomerritt/116488019903713789 A short related note on asbestos: if you have or have seen anything with asbestos in it in the UK (cloth, roof tiles, engine heatshields, etc), chances are that it came out of Turner Brothers Asbestos of Manchester. My father was on the production line at TBA after his degree in textiles, and later moved to QA until the place shut down under the weight of asbestosis litigation. Dad was the only person on the line to wear a mask, as he...

• Post #1606975

  I'd entirely forgotten that it's CSS Naked Day today, when participating websites remove their CSS entirely and allow the content to shine through like it's 1993. My blog is one of the sites participating: https://imrannazar.com #cssNakedDay #IndieWeb

• Post #1374152

  Back on my occasional hobby of trying to translate classics of Turkish rock into English, while attempting to keep some sense of both the rhythm and shape of the words. The first track I did was Bir Derdim Var (from Mor ve Ötesi) which actually renders quite well, so I foolishly thought Şebnem Ferah's work wouldn't be a problem... She's quite the lyricist. "Bu sert iklimli ıssız hayata" roughly translates as "this desolate inclement wind of li...

• Post #1374151

  Doing some data cleansing on a dataset of city names in the world, as one does on the weekend to relax, and it's amazing what you find in here. I'm trying to give each city in a given country a unique reference that isn't just an ID number, and you'd expect to find duplicate city names in the same country: the classic example being Washington, DC versus (say) Washington, UT. Which'd be fine, except there are two Washingtons in Pennsylvania, and three in N...

• Post #1374150

  It's late afternoon, and I only just realised it's I'm A Teapot Day (HTTP 418). As the writer of the tea-brewing extensions to Hypertext Coffeepot Control Protocol, I really should've picked up on that sooner... Happy 418 though, may there be much caffeine in your future.

• Post #1374149

  #SilentSunday

• Post #1136488

  So that's interesting: Mastodon's "Translate post" feature doesn't cache the translation result, so if you want to switch back and forth it makes fresh requests to DeepL each time. Wonder how much of a pain it'd be to cache that clientside? Unless it's already cached serverside, and /translate only calls out to DeepL if it hasn't already done so for this status?

• Post #1136487

  @pheonix Appreciate how this full-planet view lets you see the angle of the day-night terminator; always found it cool how you can directly infer the time of year from that angle (straight up-and-down being an equinox). And yeah, I have family in that red zone west of India; they're actively melting right now.

• Post #1136486

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thedoh/116397696700792038 It used to be that, if you wanted a link to come up in a fancy modal on your website, you'd capture the click event on that link and do your fetch for the fancy modal, so at least people could still _get to the linked page_ if their #JavaScript had fallen over. Sometime in the last little while, it became fashionable to throw the link away altogether, and present a button that's styled to _look_ like a link, so now there&#...