Funny thing is, I bought the Harry Potter ebooks back when they were only available through Pottermore. Last time I checked, you couldn’t actually download them through the website anymore. Which is funny because the site only allowed 7 downloads or someshit. (I think that I failed to download one file, that counted as one download anyway, and the queer idea of “fuck this greedy hag” started to percolate in my mind.) How many downloads did I need? One. Thankfully in the unlikely event I need to access this shit, it’s sitting in my Calibre library. Where it has been sitting ever since.

You can, you know, read another book

For Harry Potter fans in particular, may I suggest The Guy We Don’t Mention in the Same Sentence. You know. Terry Pratchett.

I use the YouTube TV app.

If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I’m just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I’ll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

Protip: Number may go bigger, but I’m not changing this behaviour.

I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn’t like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

I’m old enough to have eaten burgers out of styro boxes, and IMHO it’s not one of the things I get nostalgic over. They held heat a little bit longer than cardboard/paper, but that’s basically the only advantage.

The places here that offer kebab/fries and sausage/grilled whatever to go still use larger styro trays here, and they’re less convenient and sturdy than the styro burgerware was. I’m actually hoping someone comes up with an alternative.

Well, we’re barely in the era where people can safely say “MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we’re pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too”. Patents expire on the day they’ll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don’t expire that easily.

Large bottles are sold as “2 liter soda”…that’s it.

I’m from Finland. It never stops being weird when Americans talk about 2 liter sodas. First, it being in liters, and second, 2 liter sodas are huuuuge. (Large bottles are usually 1.5 liters here.)

I’m a photo nerd. Uhhh… keys, flashlight, swiss army knife, phone, pocket camera (Ricoh GR III), wallet. If I go anywhere I usually pick up a bigger camera (Nikon Z fc, or if I get serious, the D780, with 50mm / 24-120mm / 70-300mm lenses). There’s also a whole lot of random mystery stuff in my bags. I don’t want to think about that stuff too much, I’ll just get a headache

My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)

Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

…I’m not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

In YouTube, Berm Peak channel folks bought an e-bike from a bankrupt app company, and went on to replace the control unit (plus sensors and the panel). Doable but not painless. Folks in the comments pointed out that a lot of the control units are reprogrammable, though - swap the SIM card and send new settings over SMS.

Edit: Here’s the video

I literally had to write a clock app on my own because Windows clock is pretty bad.

I was thinking that they’ll just replace the clock with Copilot eventually.

Windows 11: “It’s 11 pm sharp. I know that because I looked at the RTC.”

Windows 12: “It’s 11 pm sharp. That’s a phrase people like to say, apparently.”

…Don’t give Microsoft any ideas.

Maybe, just maybe, I use a lighter to light half a dozen candles, so I can get to the right headspace to play Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader?

To be perfectly honest I’ve sadly had little means to go around the town, bus tickets add up. But snow is melting, life is good, spring is coming.

If you want more riveting photography like this, check out my Pixelfed! Features both new and old photos.

There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.

My best memories of playing Civilization III?

My only memory of Civ3 was me going “ehhhh, this is too complicated” and going back to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri!

Now Civ II, that was the game! …but I didn’t play it that much after I got SMAC.

…I’ve been slowly trying to learn Civilization VI, only because Turtles are apparently a Thing! 😄🐢 Didn’t buy Civilization VII because Turtles Weren’t A Thing ☹️.

Follow the link
Get a website that has been incredibly shittily AI translated to Finnish

Riiiiight. And this is supposed to be your ultimate anti-AI defense?

My honour, I’ll rest my case and drop the mic. 🎤

Edit: Downvoted? AHA. GUILTY AS CHARGED

I’d be willing to get YouTube Premium just to get rid of ads, but they’re bundling it with YouTube Music and I’m not trusting Google with my music purchases any more, thank you.

They discontinued Google Play Music (fortunately only after a long long period of time allowing you to download MP3s with their bloody terrible client app, so no loss there) and told me that you can just import the purchases to YouTube Music. Which I couldn’t actually access.

Also I don’t want a music streaming service, I just want to buy the albums. It’s pretty sad that it seems the only remaining feasible local option for electronic music purchases is iTunes! Bloody iTunes!