feonixrift @feonixrift@hackers.town

This is hard for me to say, because in ordinary times I oppose it, but these are not ordinary times...

Check on folks. Make sure no-one just .. goes silent. Don't find yourself wondering, a month too late, why you haven't seen them in a while.

So apropos of… something… we got to talking about the etymology of 'gunwales', and thence of 'gun'.

It turns out that “…Gunnhildr … was a name frequently given to ballistæ … on the introduction of gunpowder, be given also to cannon … the regular ‘pet-name’ in Old Norse for Gunnhild-r would be *Gunna , which would give Gunne in Middle English”

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/82559?rskey=txXsKS&result=2&isAdvanced=false

It is the very first instance of “I call it Vera.”

#words #language #etymology #firefly #whedon

Today might be a good day for backups. It's almost always a good day for backups.

consider:

This is cool: People are hacking old games to remove the full-screen flashing effects so people with photo-sensative epilepsy can play them safely! https://www.romhacking.net//#article2423

It took me a LOT of stitching to make, but how cool is this mask?

attn anyoen who knows anything about #cellular communications:

I know that cellular carriers keep a record of a SIM card's serial number, because it has to be mapped to the IMEI of the phone and a customer account for payment tracking. What else do they keep about a SIM card, though?

Would it be possible, in theory, to get a clone of a SIM's contents from a cellular carrier?

@cadadr @alcinnz I have my problems with NPM (horrible from a reproducibility standpoint) but I actually don't think it's possible for package managers at this point to provide total safety. There's just too much to manage.

But there is an alternative option. An object capability approach to package management means that the event-stream type incident wouldn't happen https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-event-stream-incident-45653ecbda99