neo

I contacted Amazon customer service for the first time since I got my Kindle PW3 in 2017 with "Special Offers". Even after years of ads they want the full $20 to disable the special offers. I said thanks, but not for me! But as part of this process to get them to remove the special offers I preemptively turned on the WiFi on my Kindle for the first time in a long while. Somehow doing so deleted all of my Calibre-managed ebooks. I'm not kidding.

BTW, if you have a kindle do not connect it to WiFi! Especially if it's still on a blessed older firmware. You do not want to let it accidentally upgrade to a version that cannot be jailbroken, not until you are in full control and awareness of the upgrade process yourself.

So with nothing to lose and all my ~~apes~~ ebooks... gone, I said to hell with it. I jailbroke my Kindle following the instructions here (THANK GOODNESS I WAS ON A JAILBREAKABLE FW). This process involves wiping the contents of your Kindle, which effectively already happened to me.

Then I followed the instructions here to install MRPI + KUAL. MRPI is like a command line package installer and KUAL is a GUI one.

In my jailbreak journey I also referenced this page https://blog.fabricemonasterio.dev/kindle-jailbreak/ for some tips and workflow ideas, including how to get a dictionary for the next step...

Which brings me to the Knock Out punch of why this was at all worth it. I installed https://koreader.rocks/. KOReader is an alternative ebook reader interface. By analogy, the experience is like taking your old mp3 player and installing RockBox on it to make it actually good. KOReader is similar, but it isn't a fully alternative operating system. It just kills the default React Native interface process and loads its own when you choose to use it. It also supports epubs natively. It is way more featureful and customizable compared to the default Kindle reader. In fact, it's a bit overwhelming at first. After getting a bit more used to it, I really appreciate what it does, and the advanced customization it offers.

I will admit that navigating its UI is a bit clunkier than Amazon's UI, but I will take a bit of clunky any day when it adds native epub and superior pdf support.

So now I have a Kindle that can load an alternative, superior interface, get epubs pushed to it wirelessly with Calibre, shows me the book I'm reading on the lock screen, and doesn't display or present any advertisements anywhere. I really like my Kindle again.

Consider https://arstechnica.com/robots.txt or https://www.nytimes.com/robots.txt and how they block all the stupid AI models from being able to scrape for free.

Trivially simple script to automatically decrease the horizontal margins on the chat and video containers on hextube. By default both left and right margins are 15px per container. I set them to 1px for a 56px gain in chat and video viewing area. It's free real estate.

// ==UserScript==
// @name        New script hexbear.net
// @namespace   Violentmonkey Scripts
// @match       https://live.hexbear.net/c/movies*
// @grant       none
// @version     1.0
// @author      -
// @description 3/1/2024, 10:31:12 PM
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
    'use strict';
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("chatwrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingLeft="1px";
      document.getElementById("videowrap").style.paddingRight="1px";
})();

What is ViolentMonkey?

ViolentMonkey is an open source browser extension and small alternative to GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey. It can run custom JavaScript in your browser for you automatically to modify page behavior. If you install the extension you can create a new script and copy and paste the one I wrote above. Always beware of installing untrusted scripts that you don't understand.

Original Japanese title. しあわせのお面屋がピアノを弾くようです。

FNAF the movie was bad. But the one thing that is annoying me is I cannot find anyone else in the world commenting about how Aunt Judy is killed by Golden Freddy in the family living room (btw, they can just leave the pizzeria now), and then at the end of the film they all go home and eat breakfast the next morning. No comment on the corpse rotting in their living room.

It's just a massive oversight on the part of the filmmakers. It ties in nicely with the lack of scares and chills, the bewildering plot line, and massive under-utilization of some of the game's own tropes. IDK what they were trying to do with this movie, but that was some of the tamest "horror" I've ever seen in my life. And the only reason that is remarkable is because the game series it is based on is much scarier.

So, my concluding remark is that the movie is bad whether you are familiar with FNAF or if it is your first exposure to the franchise.

Without realizing what I was getting myself into, I wrote some code using C11's threads.h (EDIT: every time I use the angle brackets < and > they just get eaten, even in the code snippet block.) I'm realizing after the fact that this is basically only supported on Linux (gcc/clang). This is my target platform, but I guess if I could cross compile to Windows or macOS that would be nice, too.

C's threads nominally appear to be a great feature. Finally, a standardized and straightforward interface to threads that would be cross-platform compatible. The reality appears to be anything but.

So is it worth just replacing that code with pthreads? Is there some near-term development on C threads that might make this worthwhile to use? I'm kind of surprised it hasn't really caught on some 12 years after the standard was introduced.

AntiFascist Linux, folks. Get your fresh AntiFascist Linux right here!

Primer for those who don't know what AntiX Linux is: It's a Debian derivative without Systemd. There are sysVinit and Runit versions available. AntiX can be used on newer computers, obviously, with the new release and up-to-date Linux kernel. But it is probably one of the best choices for extremely low spec hardware today, like if you have a computer you're running from the mid 2000s and insist on keeping it going.

Its default desktop is run with IceWM. It will leave something to be desired, it's not the prettiest thing, but it is an extremely lean base system. Your CPU and RAM will all get blown up the moment you launch a modern web browser, of course.

Hi. If you can buy the podcast and wish to listen, please send Brendan and Noah some dollars. Support indie creators.

If for whatever reason you cannot, I have reencoded all of the episodes into 72kbps Opus for substantial space savings with a practically imperceptible quality difference, and cleaned up the metadata so the files look good in a good audio player. These files will work in any decent audio/podcast player (there are many crappy ones).

I'll delete this post in the near future.

{i deleted the link as i said i would}

IP is a joke. Fuck copyright. Fuck patents. Nintendo is out here patenting physics.

"The movement of movable dynamic objects placed in the virtual space is controlled by physics calculations, and the movement of the player’s character is controlled by user input. When the player’s character and a dynamic object come in contact in the downward direction relative to the character (in other words, when the character is on top of an object), the movement of the dynamic object is added to the movement of the player’s character.”

These aren't even inventions. They are just obvious models of the real world that would occur to anyone who is trying to replicate physical interactions in a virtual world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_mechanics

These are Japanese patents but I also have no fucking doubt a lot of this stuff has very obvious prior art even in gaming, to say nothing of other physics-based software packages.