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#my dash is worried about ghosts? #my dash did a thing

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This is why we need more competition in this country. Two major airlines with regular flights across country. That’s it. Fifteen years ago I sat in the back row of an Air Canada flight and listened to the flight attendants trash talk certain passengers on the flight, assuming nobody understood them because they were speaking in French. The attitudes toward customers has only gotten worse and more harmful since then. The airline does nothing except shrug it off with a vague non-apology because what other options do customers have for air travel? We don’t even have frequent passenger rail in this country as an alternative.

WTF.

#I usually take an earlier or later flight with westjet when I have to travel for work even if it’s more inconvenient than air canad’s #because the lost and damaged baggage and rude service and poor logistics of loading two flights from the same gate at the same time #are not worth a couple extra hours of sleep #met a gentleman at the airport travelling who was an aboriginal drummer and asked how well his drum travelled with the chai he in humidity #”very carefully at my feet” he told me because humidity he could deal with #damage was fatal to the drum

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Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

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His Undulations

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oh my god. most of life really is about the little things. a good haircut, a nice playlist, trying a new recipe that turns out well, a poem that hits home, a comfortable spot in the sun, spontaneous messages, a pen you enjoy writing with, tea with the right temperature to drink, buying that thing you’ve been eyeing for a while, a warm bed. yeah. im so grateful for the little enjoyments

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I am sorry to everyone who tagged me in some tag game and I never responded. I saw it and thought “aww they thought of me” and proceeded to forget about it right after

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If humans ever go extinct, I hope some distant future species makes pop-up books with us roaring next to palm trees and volcanos.

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In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

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some of you may have seen a notice today from a tumblr-popular youtube show, saying they're putting all their content behind a subscriber paywall. This post isn't about them per say, only bouncing off what that has brought up into the following:

When is a digital subscription something i'm willing to pay for? Rubric edition

Disclaimer - my first news job was in the early aughts at a digital stock news company, so I've been keeping an eye on this subject for over 25 years.

So you want to access an entertainment or news service that has content behind a subscriber paywall. What steps should you go through, to figure out if it's something that you should pay for?

This post will go off the caveat that artists/authors/reporters (I'm not calling them content creators, that term is garbage) should be properly compensated for the works they produce, and the current business model in our late-stage capitalist society means we all have to deal with the worst possible way of engaging with art - the subscription-model paywall. It's a terrible garbage system but there we are.

Step Zero: Do you care enough about the content to consider paying for it?

It might not be important enough to you to want to pay for, and that's okay. On the other hand, you may want to continue watching/reading/listening, either because of the content itself or because you want to support its creation.

(I'm separating the above as they are two different reasons - personally, i'm in favour of paying an annual subscriber fee to my small local news room to keep them in producing the content because I think it's important they exist.)

Step 1: Can you literally afford it?

Everything costs more and salaries aren't rising. If the answer to the question is no, can you split the cost with someone? Is it something that can be accessed through your local library (in terms of audiobooks or magazine/newspapers)? Otherwise, moving to:

Step 2: Is the cost of the subscription in line with what you're willing to pay for the content?

I still subscribe to the newspaper i used to work for - I can read all the news and get all the quotes I'm interested in, and I know i'm supporting local news. I'm willing to pay money for that.

On the other hand, back last year when Disney Plus announced it was raising its prices, I decided that I wasn't interested in paying that amount for what I was getting, so I cancelled that one. Do I miss it? Yes, somedays. Would I go back to them if the cost went down? Honestly I don't know.

Step 3: Did the company/channel do something to lose your trust?

Sometimes, all the above have been met with the affirmative, but something about how the company is doing things sets your teeth on edge. Maybe it's how their business model is evolving, or how they treat their customers (Netflix and their password sharing crackdown was that tipping point for me - i no longer wanted to support a company that sees its customer base like that). Maybe it's how they decided to move to subscriber-only. Maybe it's their take on geopolitical or social issues. Whatever it might be, you get to make that call for you.

Summation: Don't feel pressed by FOMO to pay for something when you're not comfortable doing so.

Whatever the situation is, you get to decide where you spend your money. The corollary of that is that you may not get to see the new stuff created by companies/channels that you like, but honestly? That trade-off might be better for you in the long run (and I'm saying this with too many years of regret behind me) nothing poisons the enjoyment of art more than feeling like you were forced to pay/pay more for it than you were OK with.

The tl;dr: Take a step back and see if you're really comfortable with paying for all your electronic subscription fees for news or entertainment. Don't feel pressured into paying for something you don't really want to see, or what to support. Consider where you want your money to go.

It's hard economic times - do what you need to, and spend your money where you want to.

(And check into what your local library has on offer - they may have streaming services or digital content you weren't aware of - might be enough to tide you over for a while).

#This #its ok to say no and walk away #you don’t have to justify it to anyone #I feel there’s a lot of pressure here to not miss out on things #but honestly who can actually keep up? #outlets like Reuters and Al Jazzera are good sources f international news and are free #many local and national news services buy from them so if you want cut the middleman

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#how many times has this man uttered the words “hey you know what would be really cool?!”

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Tree roots following the pattern of concrete footpaths

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#don’t usually reblog for the audio but I promise it’s worth it

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Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn't even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun's light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

#eclipse #photograpy #it was not clear enough out here to get the full effect #but because it was slightly overcast everything here took on a sort of silver tone high definition

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going to start using these apps to track when I do things like change the water filter in my fridge, the oil on my car, clean the bathroom, etc. It’d be nice to get predictive reminders when to do household maintenance tasks.

#I mean I wouldn’t want to poison the data or anything

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#ok yeah I was not expecting that

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sitting in a live webinar on neurodivergence in the workplace and they just launched a poll asking how people who identify have cope/succeeded at work and i just counted 18 answers of people admitting that they are knitting or crocheting right now while they listen.

#adhd #fibre arts as fidgets

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Can confirm, the Brother laser printers are absolute tanks. I’ve had spare colour cartridges in storage for years because they just don’t run out - I’m still on the original cyan and magenta. The odd time it falls off the network I just power cycle it and I can print directly from my phone with no extra app required. Even our printer inspector here gives them a 10/10 for reliability and a 9/10 for napability (lost a point because it doesn’t stay warm long enough for her liking)

#got an Epson eco tank for photo printing #it started me the first couple of times it turned itself on to do a little shimmy to clean the print head and then went back to sleep #it too has been super reliable and ink efficient even when printing high resolution photos