calcifer @calcifer@hackers.town

Hello H.T

I've recently arrived from the Bauhaus, because you all have built a pretty sweet community here

I'm old, I'm all over the place, I get nerd-sniped on the regular, and I'm very enthusiastic about tech ethics

I like to fiddle with embedded stuff, particularly making stuff out of Arduino and LED pixels. I get cranky when "modern" means "we added complexity for no real reason". I think tech should aim for legibility and serve as a human enhancer; I get cranky when it's used to control or oppress or replace humans

I have no patience for stupid tech holy wars -- all hardware sucks, all software sucks, the documentation is provably incorrect, and the vendors all tell lies

I'm a dad -- so there will be dad jokes. I'm queer and polyam -- so there will occasionally be venting about that. I'm a nerd -- so there will be references and in-jokes aplenty

I should actually start a Church of Satin. All hail our slippery Lord.

No, my love, your cappuccino is caramel today because I wanted to treat you. Nothing at all to do with hiding the under-extracted mess passing for an espresso shot in it

Dude. DUDE. You don't get to be upset that I don't want to date you exclusively when I have been incredibly clear and up-front about being polyamorous and in several long-term relationships. Especially not on the second date

This weirdo genuinely thought that after two entire dates, I'd be willing to walk away from several 5+ year relationships (including one 20-year relationship) to "make it work" with him. This is a level of hubris I honestly didn't see coming

On the upside, it's good I didn't waste more time on such a dumbass

Do NOT disparage bats in front of my child, or she will subject you to a very well-researched lecture on Bats Are Amazing: Anyone Who Dislikes Them Is Wrong And A Victim Of Propaganda

Heads up, it's nearly "corporate effort to shame employees into giving to a specific charity that benefits the employer" season in the US.

Puns are a part of my religion

I'm an Aw,man-delorian

Watched Ghostbusters (1984) with my kids tonight. Best moment: "wait, does Gozer have Trans Flag lightning?! Is that because they can be whatever they want?"

If you really love the 80's artist Alessi, that's more or less Alessi Amore

I can't believe there's a lemon emoji but not a lime. When the Unicode Consortium gives you lemons…

It is officially "shirts aren't warm enough but sweaters/jackets are too warm" season

FWIW, I wouldn't consider that advice to be universal: not everyone is in a position to be choosy about their employment, not everyone can afford the risk of coming off as "disruptive", etc.

But for an in-demand middle-aged white cis dude? Helpful, and can even be a little bit of an impetus for change

Someone recommended to me that I should ask prospective employers pointed questions about how company culture supports queer and trans folks, people of color, etc. and it's been outstanding advice

I've already bailed on three companies because those questions opened the door for a manager to utterly show their ass

And I found out today that one of those instances at a smaller org led upper management to clean house and start a formal diversity program (probably I was just the proverbial last straw, but hey!)

Concept: small, inexpensive "rat drones" that autonomously find hard-to reach areas with power, hook in, and blast RF noise on frequencies used for control and monitoring of surveillance devices

Welcome to the World Wide Web. A technology designed primarily to link pages of HTML-structured text together and reference them with a unique identifier, which we now frequently use to share text by turning it into images and posting them to web servers via an API that only accepts JSON

One of my kids, gaming: oof, I just got knocked into tomorrow

Me: I wish I could get knocked into yesterday, I could use a do-over

Her: *rolls up sleeves* that can be arranged

She's 11 and already every bit the brat I am. So proud

So it looks like I'll have a number of colleagues in Israel soon. Does anyone have a good reference for reading and pronouncing Hebrew names? I can ask, of course, but it'd be nice if I could translate the Hebrew chars to sounds well enough to have a passable first attempt without having to ask

Kids' new service coordinator at school is starting in on the "well we don't want anyone to feel like they're different" tactic

I hate that so much. Adults pretending I wasn't any different caused me so much pain and bullshit as a kid. My peers trying to ignore that I'm different is a huge hassle in my everyday life

They ARE different. They parse and interact with the world differently than NT people. There's fuck all wrong with that, and all I want for my kids is that people see and accept those differences and not try to force them to pretend they're "normal".

I've used my own blog software since way back, so I didn't realize how ridiculous self-hosting using something ostensibly "off the shelf" has gotten. No wonder people give up and use Facebook instead, holy shit.

It should not be this complicated to set up software to let you post some HTML-formatted text and a few images and generate an XML for RSS/Atom and a bit of nav structure.