There’s apparently a reliability bathtub curve for Mastodon instances. If it survived the first couple of months, it will survive the rest of the year. If it survived a year, it may only fall off if it’s a single-user instance or if there’s only a handful of users

The fediverse tends to self-select in that way

This is your weekend reminder to make a zine. If you've got an idea, paper, and access to a printer, you're 99% of the way there

We're leaving fewer and fewer hard copies of our lives in the real world and it's important to supplement our thoughts online with something you can hold in your hands

@HerraBRE Thing is, my IP doesn't change for months anyway and they charge $70 extra for the privilege of having 80/443 unblocked. I've had that package before and the "speed increase" they promised wasn't really there. And it wasn't worth it to me to pay that much when hosting them elsewhere is much cheaper

This is only an issue in areas where there's no competition. Of course, ISPs have lobbied the government here to make sure they hold a monopoly

Only thing keeping me from hosting all my sites from home is my ISP blocking port 80

Official explanation: “Because Port 80 is often used by malicious software, including viruses and worms...”

Nothing says “Net Neutrality” like contrived nonsense to push customers onto fast (more expensive) lanes

5:55AM. #Naptime!

https://mastodon.social/media/xbAOrDI7Qls-9A_SAuA

More #Biopunk than #Cyberpunk, but scientists in China have managed to clone dogs. What makes this project more remarkable is that they edited the genes with CRISPR before doing so, which means you could change the heritability of some traits

If this moves on to human trials, it has implications for preventing diseases from passing on and, less ethically, letting people select more favorable traits in their children

http://www.wdsu.com/article/biz-says-its-cloned-the-first-dog-from-a-gene-edited-donor-dog/14497140

This is a great approach to most things, not just technology

https://twitter.com/wycats/status/944740946830270464

I see this a lot with programming languages

If you use something different from someone else, that’s fine. Disparaging them for using that different thing is not fine. No matter what tools you use, the result of your creativity is what really matters

https://mastodon.social/media/MfbqBd94KOijCn_V3Nw

This is weirdly comforting despite me being a neat freak

“Serial Experiments Lain-esque setup”

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/3xqxcr/serial_experiments_lainesque_setup_xpost_from/
#Cyberpunk

https://mastodon.social/media/UAyIKMcIEFFlh4w7mbM

Today in the impending #cyberpunk dystopia:

People are taking out mortgages to buy Bitcoin

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/11/people-are-taking-out-mortgages-to-buy-bitcoin-says-joseph-borg.html

In this washing machine my mech

https://mastodon.social/media/ynlq8IdyF0OuyAd3S60

It's getting harder and harder to track down the histories of electronics devices. Back in the old days, there were manuals, specs, sales material and so on

These days, some new gadget appears, makes a bit of money for the makers and quickly disappears with barely any hint of it ever existing

It's sometimes hard to find info on ancient electronics, but it's there somewhere. Either in a newsgroup posting form 1995, an archived website, a forum or something

New devices are basically ghosts

So how was your day?

@HereticSoul That reminds me...

https://mastodon.social/media/y3dNVeE932Hw1e-ntak

Stellar waltz by Benjamin (Ben) Sack
#Art #Illustration

Now that's a floppy!

Well, actually, it's supposed to be a 2.2Mb disk for a Univac 9000 from 1966

Oddly enough, I can't seem to verify that. As far as I can tell, the 9000 series used tape drives and wire memory

Current status

@grainloom

@brennen Bummer!

There's a lot of those cases in custom shops

This is almost the same. They 'upgraded" from OS/2 to Windows 98 . The software is extremely obscure and the hardware manufacturer is long bankrupt. They're running these machines because there's still nothing that comes close to matching the functionality for the simplicity

The alternative is to buy vendor-locked hardware with less reliability for a boatload of cash. Not really an option here :(

Chrome's private browsing is broken

This defeats the purpose of Incognito. If any website is able to tell you're browsing in private mode, then the browser is leaking data that shows it's not private

Peak 90s