Catherine

Woman of many parts. Tech-wrangling geek, blogger, actress and mother. Curious about everything. Fond of dragons. Welsh learner.

2025-05-07

@glyph Interesting. @troyhunt's latest post finally persuaded me to try passkeys only because it assured me I could choose to store them in 1password. Storing secrets in any single hardware device is a recipe for disaster.

Catherine boosted:
2025-05-06

Microsoft Teams... where's the button for "I'd rather eat worms than give my voiceprint willingly to a company based in a nascent fascist country"?

Message that popped up in Microsoft Teams this morning.

"Complete your setup
Improve your meetings. Create a voice profile for voice isolation and automatic recognition. It takes just 30 seconds."

Two response buttons beneath read "Create profile" and "Maybe later".
2025-05-04

@ThameTheatre After being busy rehearsing (both on and off stage), I am enjoying a rare day off from the theatre today before we open on Tuesday.
It's going to be great show.
#Thame #Oxfordshire #Buckinghamshire #Theatre @theatre

2025-05-04

@andrewt Loving all your puzzles, and the new links between them. Spotted the odd one out too.
Celtix is the only one that doesn't offer you the other puzzles when you solve it. You have to use instructions (I'm beginning to remember this but I normally try options first).

Catherine boosted:
2025-04-30

Valhalla doesn't discriminate against the kind of battle you lost.
A Story in 8 panels.

writing-prompt-s

Valhalla does not discriminate against the
kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle
with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight.
Even facing addiction. After taking a deep
drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup
down and asks for the glorious tale of your
demise!

prismatic-bell

Oh my god, this is beautiful.

A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they
lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.”
Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup
and refrains from doing it again. He hears the
child's pain; no glorious battle this, but one of
fear and wretched survival.
Catherine boosted:
2025-04-29

There is a kind of greatness in British tabloid headline writing.

Newspaper headline reporting massive Spanish power outage: ‘Pain as Spain mainly off the mains’.
2025-04-28

@aloxe @mikestreety @11ty Any chance of someone posting a screenshot of the phone interface for that?

Catherine boosted:
Brian Slettenbsletten
2025-04-27

Maybe we are on the cusp of AGI…

"AFTER several unsuccessful attempts," the mathematician Timothy Gowers posted on Twitter on 1 April, "I found a prompt that got Grok to solve a maths problem (the well-known Dubnovy Blazen problem in graph theory) I've been working on for over a year. How long till it's better than human mathematicians across the board?"

This was, of course, a joke, signalled by Dubnovy Blázen being Czech for "April Fools" Several days later, however, others noticed that running a Google query for "Dubnovy Blazen problem in graph theory" resulted in an Al-generated search result that confidently proclaimed that it was "a well-known problem that Al model Grok solved after several attempts". It's wonderful watching the well of knowledge being poisoned in real time.
Catherine boosted:

I know I'm old man yelling at clouds, but I miss not only physical buttons on devices, but multiple physical buttons.

I'm really getting tired of the current trend seen on headphones. Hold for 5 seconds to turn on, hold 5 seconds to turn off. Tap once for volume up. Double tap for next song, triple tap to turn on noise canceling. Hold the button down for 20 seconds while patting your head and doing interpretive dance in order to pair Bluetooth.

Give me an on/off switch. Give me an analog volume wheel. Give me dedicated buttons for functions

It's like a generation of designers grew up with one button Apple mice, and forgot how much more simple doing actual work with dedicated buttons actually is

2025-04-26

@mia @SergeyChe I thought some of the testing frameworks could generate screenshots (but I don't use that kind of testing so I might be wrong).

2025-04-25

I have a new haircut, hair colour and a gin and tonic. It's a good Friday.

2025-04-24

@yurigaga Nope. I have never had a problem.

2025-04-24

@yurigaga Yes, installing CalyxOS has restored the battery life to normal.

Catherine boosted:

Let this be a warning. If you call your daughter's pet Hot Cross Bun "Buncifer" and let it watch an episode of The Borgias, it will, once you've gone to bed, try to raise an army of bunnies to overthrow the Holy Roman Empire.

Catherine boosted:
2025-04-20

Which one of you Fedi weirdos* was at the Edinburgh trans rights demo holding the sign saying:

private String gender
not
public const bool gender

* affectionate

2025-04-20

This passes as a normal Easter Sunday discovery in our house.

A (soft toy) hot cross bun is wearing a paper crown and riding on a lamb at the head of a Lindt bunny army. The first bunny carries a post-it and pencil banner.
Catherine boosted:
Bytes DeutschlandBytesDE@pubeurope.com
2025-04-19

bytesde.com/960983/ Das letzte Mal wurde jedes europäische Land eingedrungen und von wem #Karte #Karten #Map #Maps

Das letzte Mal wurde jedes europäische Land eingedrungen und von wem
2025-04-16

@vashti The white leaves. Very leeky (to me anyway).

2025-04-16

@vashti They picked the leek over the daffodil. Not entirely unreasonable.

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