#Paris has removed the paving from its city hall square and transformed it into an #Urbanforest
#Urbanism #OWGF #SolarPunk #ClimateAction

@GossiTheDog I just don’t understand this… people mostly hate talking to voice response units (VRU) and this is literally the same thing.

When I call a company, the first thing I do is try to figure out how to get routed to a human.

Psychologically, it seems to me that when a company tries to force me to be screened by a bot/ #AI/recording, it means they don’t care about me even a little bit.

Hey, something that regularly bums me out is that #Lego continues to make Harry Potter products. Lego brings me a lot of comfort, but their complicity in JK Rowling's hate campaign sours that significantly.

As a trans person, it makes me feel kinda helpless and invisible.

So I'd appreciate it if y'all could help me boost this petition across the fediverse, and share it around with group chats, and other socials if you're on them!

Not necessarily because I expect Lego to listen to a change.org petition, but because it would give me a lot more hope and faith in people if the voices saying "Hey, it's really messed up that Lego is doing this" were a lot louder than they are now.

(Alt-text: a change.org petition called "LEGO: End your relationship with JK Rowling and the Harry Potter franchise.")
https://chng.it/mgvbH5qw5h

Today I have a more serious topic than usual, please consider reposting for reach:

My wife and I are urgently looking for a specialist in neuropediatrics or a similar field for our autistic child with a diagnosed, but not further specified, movement disorder (myoclonus and/or spasms) to finally find a cause and, above all, an effective therapy. The symptoms are bothering our son ever since he’s born, now for more than nine years, seriously affecting his sleep. The usual processes and medical contact points have failed us unfortunately and he seems stuck in this condition.

We’re based in Berlin, Germany but really any contact with a specialist who would be willing to take on this case we’d be grateful for!

To reach use you can DM me or contact us via Email at unclear.condition@gmail.com

Good Morning To Balcony Dog

#dog #dogs #dogsofmastodon

Man, we keep having accumulating archivist/librarian layoffs happening at major private universities, at OCLC, at state libraries/archives, etc. I feel like the archives-interested public is aware of what's going down in the federal government but there is very little awareness of how much it's spreading outside of the feds. This shit is so bleak. I really don't know what the future of the profession looks like and that scares the shit out of me.

Digging into the drive in my NAS that faulted, I'm reminded that magnetic hard drives are preposterously magical technology.

Case in point, using Seagate's tools I can get the drive to tell me how much it's adjusted the fly height of each of its 18 heads over the drive's lifetime, to compensate for wear and stuff. The drive provides these numbers in _thousandths of an angstrom_, or 0.1 _picometers_.

For reference, one helium atom is about 49 picometers in diameter. The drive is adjusting each head individually, in increments of a fraction of a helium atom, to keep them at the right height. I can't find numbers of modern drives, but what I can find for circa ten years ago is that the overall fly height had been reduced to under a nanometer, so the drive head is hovering on a gas bearing that's maybe 10-20 helium atoms thick, and adjusting its position even more minutely than that

This is _extremely_ silly. You can buy a box that contains not just one, but several copies of a mechanism capable of sub-picometer altitude control, and store shitposts on it! That's wild.

Anyway my sad drive apparently looks like it had a head impact, not a full crash but I guess clipped a tiny peak on the platter and splattered a couple thousand sectors. Yow. But I'm told this isn't too uncommon, and isn't the end of the world? Which is, again, just ludicrous to think of. The drive head that appears to have bonked something has adjusted its altitude by almost 0.5 picometers in its 2.5 years in service. Is that a lot? I have no idea!

Aside from having to resilver the array and the reallocated sector count taking a big spike, the drive is now fine and both SMART and vendor data say it could eat this many sectors again 8-9 times before hitting the warranty RMA threshold. Which is very silly. But I guess I should keep an eye on it.

Joey resting his paw on me #blackcats #voids #CatsOfMastodon #voidsofmastodon

Canada is on the verge of adopting a national standard requiring N95s in healthcare—and your voice can help make it happen.

This proposed CSA standard would:

- Require N95s (or equally protective alternatives) for all healthcare workers, patients, and visitors.
- Protect the most vulnerable.
- Set a historic global precedent for clean air in healthcare.

Quinsam and Skeena are enjoying #Caturday on a catio that is undergoing repairs and renovations.

#caturday #blackcats

@tobiaspatton Drought + windstorm?

My friend said he’s either a really cute bear 🐻 or fried chicken 🍗 😂 #cats #gato #neko #cats #pets #cutepet #CatsOfMastodon #mastocats #caturday

#caturday

Wanted a #Caturday picture but Bridget wasn’t cooperative so here’s one from yesterday. Her paws look so soft when her death knives are sheathed! #cats #CatsOfMastodon #catstodon

"Dad, I'm hungry! Dad, I'm hungry! Dad... where did he go?" A juvenile blue jay begs for food, then takes off after dad when none is forthcoming. #birds #birding #birdwatching #birdphotography #wildlife #wildlifephotography #photography #nature #naturephotography #HoosierMast #video #bluejay

Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees unseen for 80 years. Via @live_science #Conservation #WildLife #Zoology #Nature

Return of wolves to Yellowston...

The secret to getting good at writing is being very weird but also caring a lot about other people being able to understand what you're saying.

You gotta be in touch with your own weirdness first. Then you gotta be able to make it relatable to the audience.

This is especially true for technical writing. You need to figure out what your audience already knows or believes, and tie whatever you're explaining to that.

So, like, you can explain Diffie-Hellman mathematics with paint-mixing and "secret colors", right? There are videos that do that. Except instead of colors, it's large numbers.

And it's not a perfect analogy, but it's serviceable.

The thing is, you don't get good at writing by scoring higher on some imaginery hierarchy. It isn't "who's the smartest nerd?" Winning nerd trivia isn't essential.

You fucking need empahty.

You have to care about the reader. Or, at the very least, about the time they're investing in your words.

But if you say it like that, people assume you're talking about fiction.

So. Jetzt aber.

Tadaaaa, die Mönchsgrasmücke!

#GeschichtenAusDemGarten #birds #birdphotography

“Hey! Did you forget it’s Caturday?”

#caturday