I continue to want to publish zines and rage against machines

The lates release of OnionShare (v2!) brings a pretty incredible list of new features. @micahflee's post is a good intro but you really need to dig into it https://micahflee.com/2019/02/onionshare-2/

Do I know anybody here who (a) solves US-style crosswords with some regularity and (b) is at least kind of a programmer?

The fact that an Authors Guild spokesperson says, *unprompted*, that they might support a rollback to life + 50 year terms, is astonishing to me https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-planning-another-copyright-extension-push/

"The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy" –Pinboard

Do I know any pywikibot developers (or users) on here? I'm poking around for the first time in a few years and I'd love company

Anybody have any suggestions on how to automate web screenshots that have an ad-blocker in place? Headless Chrome doesn't (yet?) support extensions. I haven't worked with PhantomJS or Selenium but could learn. I'd rather not have to modify my system's hosts file but could in a pinch.

The new release of Signal has support for encrypting and sending arbitrary files. That's a very big deal: for many users it has long been an unsolved problem to securely share documents or recordings, and now it's as easy and sending a text. Update out now for Desktop, iOS, and Android!

"Building Mastodon to be frozen"

https://parkerhiggins.net/2017/04/building-mastodon-frozen/

I'm thinking about how we can build archiving and preservation tools right into Mastodon — where the Fediverse presents some risk — and what other opportunities that might unlock.

@catalina that would be one part, sure, but I'm thinking more like the Tweet Archive you can get for your own account, but for an entire instance. So the public timeline like that tool shows, but also rendered out profile pages, conversations, etc

How difficult would it be to export a static view of a Mastodon instance that would be easy and cheap to host indefinitely in a read-only setup?

Seems like that would mitigate some of the worst consequences of a major instance collapsing, and also open the door to presenting interesting discussions by "temporary communities" around a topic or event.

Anybody working on that?

The final remaining patent on the MP3 format — "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENCODING DIGITAL SIGNALS EMPLOYING BIT ALLOCATION USING COMBINATIONS OF DIFFERENT THRESHOLD MODELS TO ACHIEVE DESIRED BIT RATES" — has expired today.

RIP Bob Taylor, who played a role in the creation of the ARPAnet, the personal computer, Engelbart's mouse, Xerox's desktop metaphor, and more. Also (this guy didn't slack) co-wrote "The Computer as a Communications Device" (1968) with Licklider.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/technology/robert-taylor-innovator-who-shaped-modern-computing-dies-at-85.html

Here are some pictures of the old pinball machine, which incredibly appear to be taken with a camera fashioned out of another pinball machine https://mastodon.xyz/media/kpkGnG_IZ83BnPOqD1A https://mastodon.xyz/media/uTwt84ZvbQEApOe8mqc

Oh gosh, a friend in LA is giving away a (functional, needs a little work) 1976 Bally Old Chicago pinball machine to a good home. Anybody want it and can pick it up?

Who loves the instance they're on? And why? (Bonus points if you're not an administrator of said instance, but I'll take those, too.)