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Just did some #teeline (shorthand) practice. Looking at what I'd written, you might think I'd suffered a stroke or something, but that's more or less what it's supposed to look like.


Now that I've broken out my #FountainPens again, I find myself wanting to take another crack at learning #teeline (shorthand).
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

So I've decided that I'll be giving my business to my local(ish) fountain pen store instead. It's a bit of a drive, but I prefer to support local businesses where I can.

screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Oops, the above was meant to be a reply to this post.


Oh God,

I'm back on the Goulet Pens web site.

I'm normally pretty non-materialistic, but this never ends well for my wallet.




I got a new tunnel. You can never have enough tunnels.

Susan ✶✶✶✶ reshared this.




Oh God,

I'm back on the Goulet Pens web site.

I'm normally pretty non-materialistic, but this never ends well for my wallet.

Shannon Prickett reshared this.



Is there a large #FountainPens community on the fedi?

Anyhow, I have a dedicated blue #Lamy Sarafi that I used to use for my #BaystateBlue ink, because it's notorious for permanently staining everything it comes into contact with. A while ago, I accidentally let ink dry out in this pen, and I haven't been able to get the feed flowing properly since. I've cleaned the pen several times and left everything soaking in water for several hours on a few occasions. I've also tried changing the nib. Eventually, I just emptied it, cleaned it out, and left it sitting on a shelf for a while.

I recently pulled it out again, cleaned it once more, and inked it up. Same problem. I'm going to leave it sit inked for a bit to see if maybe capillary action will eventually set in, but if this doesn't resolve the issue is there anything else I can try? I can always replace the pen, but I'd rather not if it can be avoided.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

So someone elsewhere recommended soaking in a 10:1 water:vinegar solution. I've considered this, but don't know if it'll damage the feed. Thoughts?

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

no, vinegar won’t damage the feed. But I’m not really sure it will help in this case. If you want something stronger than normal pen flush, try Rapido-eze. It’s designed for technical pens and can clean out some stubborn particles.
in reply to paradoxmo

@paradoxmo I've heard mixed responses about pen flush. Many have stated not to let a pen soak in it.

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

if it’s standard ammonia-based pen flush, you should not keep the nib or the barrel submerged in it. You should fill the pen with it like you would with ink, and leave it there overnight. This is different than soaking.

Shannon Prickett reshared this.

in reply to paradoxmo

@paradoxmo Ohhhh! That's the part I wasn't understanding. I was just running it through the pen.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

vinegar is pretty safe in general and you can always dilute it. I think the safari has a plastic feed, too.

if it were me I would use a little dishsoap and an old toothbrush first and try to get into the feed's nooks and crannies. if the suds turn blue, it's working

in reply to Nick

@Nick Oh, there's an idea. I might give that a go if I can find an old tooth brush.
@Nick
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

idk if it's large, but will tag my fountain pen friend @coffeentacos (not sure that's your primary j.c. if not I'm sorry!)


So my sister is confident that she can fix the bag mentioned in this post. Dropping it off with her. In the meantime, I've had to distill its contents into the absolute essentials and transfer them into a smaller bag for the day.

It's weird, but it'll do for now.


I've known I have #ADHD since I was first diagnosed in high school, but sometimes I wonder if perhaps I might be somewhere on the #autism spectrum as well. Let me explain a thing that's going on right now to illustrate what I mean.

I have a canvas messenger bag. I've had it for years and love it. I keep my whole life organized in this bag. Everything has a place and I know exactly where everything is. Recently, one of the snaps that holds it closed gave out. Within a couple of days the second one went as well, so the bag just falls open, which is fine if I keep it upright, but is kind of a pain in the ass.

The place I got it from essentially has a lifetime guarantee. I'm sure I can trade it in for another "equivalent" bag, but I'm sure they won't have this exact one since it's been several years since I bought it. This causes me an enormous amount of anxiety, because the new bag will be different, and I won't just instinctively know where all its contents are (because the configuration of the internal pockets will likely be at least a little different). It's not just the act of replacing the bag, but knowing that it'll mess me up for weeks afterward too.

I feel like this dilemma could possibly be explained by ADHD alone, but I kind of wonder...

Does this resonate with anyone in the #ActuallyAutistic crowd? I am of course not looking for a formal diagnosis or anything. It's more of a curiosity.


screwlisp reshared this.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Just got it back. Holy shit! You'd never know anything had ever been wrong with it. One of the snaps is a little stiff, but that's a problem that will solve itself in time.

I have the greatest sister ever!

Edit: typo



nerdy showerthought
A device only connected via wifi/bluetooth is technically air gapped.


I love living so close to a major Oktoberfest venue. For the past 10 minutes or so, someone's been screaming at someone else, over what specifically, I don't know. I can only make out bits and pieces.

My favourite was "you can't talk like that to me!" My friend, I don't know who said what to you, but I think you've waived your right to complain about that at this point.



another autism question

Another question in the "is it just #ADHD or is there some #ASD in there too" series:

I've recently learned that some people with autism have a tendency to repeat back phrases verbatim when people talk to them before answering.

I do not think this happens to me (at least not with words I hear) but I do have a tendency to do this with written text, stuff on billboards when we're driving, that sort of thing.

I have no idea why I do this. It's not like it's everything I see either. It's just sort of a compulsion that occasionally strikes for no apparent reason. Is that a thing that makes sense to anyone, or is it just me? I guess I just write it off as a weird thing my mind does when it wanders.

#ADHD #asd

reshared this

in reply to Susan60

another autism question

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in reply to 🍵 holly

another autism question

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in reply to 🍵 holly

another autism question

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in reply to 🍵 holly

another autism question

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Looking into getting into matcha. My god there are so many variants.

I am in over my head.



Looks like the network cable that connects the server to the router is starting to fail. Have a replacement, but running it will be nontrivial. I expect it to be completed by the end of the weekend though.


story time (long)

Just had the biggest scare of my life.

Some context is necessary. Katy works an evening shift, so we usually sleep in to 10-11AM. She also likes to sleep in absolute darkness, not a single photon in the room. To this end, we've taken drastic measures to ensure that we can have the bedroom very dark, even at noon.

This morning (and I use the term loosely) I woke up to notice that the outlet my phone charger and the nightstand lamp are plugged into was emitting a distinct orange glow. Nothing plugged into it is causing this; it's coming from the outlet itself.

I woke Katy up with an urgent sounding "ummmm". I thought we had a small electrical fire inside the outlet. I ran to the breaker box in the kitchen to throw the breaker for the outlet and grab a screwdriver so I can get into (and hopefully extinguish) the outlet.

Turned off the power and was reaching for the drawer with my screwdriver and Katy says "I think I know what it is."

Turns out, this outlet shares an electrical box with an outlet on the other side of the wall and the sun was shining on it. In the total darkness of the bedroom, the glow I was seeing was sunlight from the other side.

Anyhow, that's how the server abruptly lost power today.



Been getting back into #minetest again lately. Thinking about maybe doing a live stream, just for shits and giggles, but I don't know.


Since the spawn area's become too crowded to expand the farm, we've opened up a community garden which is accessible from the teleport pad at spawn point (in the big blue box).

Same rules apply in the community garden as in the spawn farm (e.g.: replant what you take).



ph, infosec

Aargh! Trying to get a continuous blood glucose monitor, but my pharmacy doesn't carry any that have a standalone reader. They all need to be paired to your phone with some proprietary app. There's no way in hell I'm forking that kind of data over to a black box that probably feeds it into some corporate cloud.

There are standalone meters on Amazon, but I doubt I can get my insurance to cover it if it's not coming from a pharmacy.

Edit: typo




Thought I was maybe starting to become somewhat proficient with the #soroban. Then I saw this.

youtu.be/s6OmqXCsYt8

At least I know how proficient it's possible to become.



question about ADHD vs. ASD

I've known I have #ADHD since I was first diagnosed in high school, but sometimes I wonder if perhaps I might be somewhere on the #autism spectrum as well. Let me explain a thing that's going on right now to illustrate what I mean.

I have a canvas messenger bag. I've had it for years and love it. I keep my whole life organized in this bag. Everything has a place and I know exactly where everything is. Recently, one of the snaps that holds it closed gave out. Within a couple of days the second one went as well, so the bag just falls open, which is fine if I keep it upright, but is kind of a pain in the ass.

The place I got it from essentially has a lifetime guarantee. I'm sure I can trade it in for another "equivalent" bag, but I'm sure they won't have this exact one since it's been several years since I bought it. This causes me an enormous amount of anxiety, because the new bag will be different, and I won't just instinctively know where all its contents are (because the configuration of the internal pockets will likely be at least a little different). It's not just the act of replacing the bag, but knowing that it'll mess me up for weeks afterward too.

I feel like this dilemma could possibly be explained by ADHD alone, but I kind of wonder...

Does this resonate with anyone in the #ActuallyAutistic crowd? I am of course not looking for a formal diagnosis or anything. It's more of a curiosity.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

re: question about ADHD vs. ASD

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in reply to Diligent Circle 丸

re: question about ADHD vs. ASD

@Diligent Circle 丸 Good to know. I was unaware of the other hashtag. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

As for how I identify, I guess my answer is... I don't really know. I have however learned a lot from the autistic community on the fedi, and am grateful for that regardless of my status.



religion: Mormonism

Just ran into some #Mormon missionaries in the wild. It's always interesting when they try to strike up a conversation with me.

[...small talk...]
Missionary: So, do you know much about our church?
Me: Yeah, I actually had my records removed back in 2019.
[awkward scilence followed by an abrupt change of subject]

#NotACult



I know I'm late to the #Friendica channels party, but the "Quiet Sharers" channel is really quite nice. It only shows posts from accounts you follow that aren't frequent posters, helping you to find stiff you might otherwise miss.

This is how to do an algorithmic feed* right.

* Yes, I know that sorting posts chronologically is technically an algorithmic feed.





meta: regex filters

So, I like to set filters that automatically collapse certain posts that I may or may not have the mental bandwidth to engage with at any given time. Friendica lets me do this by regex, but some of them are kinda ugly

Take my Elon filter for instance. I could filter on /elon/i, but that would falsely trigger on common words like 'melon' or 'belong'. I finally settled on /^(.*[^a-z])?elon([^a-z].*)?$/i, but that feels overly complicated. Is there a better solution?

Edit: proofreading is for suckers.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

meta: regex filters

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Oh no! I've made more hummus than will fit in the storage container I was going to store it in. I guess I have no choice but to bust out some veggies and eat some. Whatever shall I do? 🙃




So, my bank just required me to set up 2FA, which is fine... except that they did not give me any recovery codes. Nor have they provided me with any obvious means to obtain any.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Have confirmed with them that recovery codes are just not a thing they support. Why are banks so consistently terrible at infosec?
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Oh hang on, it gets better.

Apparently signing into the app on my phone using biometrics seems to bypass 2FA. 🤦‍♂️

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

My bank required me to set up 2FA. Via SMS. Only method available! So I did, but I wrote to an old friend (who happens to be their chief data architect) explaining why SMS was not the way to go. She spoke to somebody, and sure enough they soon grew the ability to use an authenticator TOTP in addition to SMS. Only issue now is: NO WAY to remove SMS as a valid method.

At least it doesn't reject a GVoice number, which is way safer than a real SIM-based phone in the wild.



I will not comment in that thread. I will not feed that troll.

...no matter how much I might really want to.

in reply to R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd:

@R. L. Dane :debian: :openbsd: I really don't want to look it up again.

The gist of it was that neurodiverse people should stay hidden and avoid drawing attention to themselves because there are bad people out there who would do them harm.

They seemed genuinely surprised that people took offense to this.



Does #Haskell's microlens-platform really not have a function of type Int -> Lens' [a] a?

That seems an odd omission.



Is anyone else having problem with a really slow transfer rate to their #Hetzner file storage?

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Maddie what

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So my local big box store has been selling a brand of chips that I haven't seen since the 80s. They're definitely playing on people's nostalgia, and I'll be damned if it hasn't worked on me every single time.

Edit: accidentally duplicated a word



Why do peoole hate .csv files so much? It's a dead simple format that can be read by a ton of software.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Also the quoting rules vary, line & row limits, space trimming, how decimals are represented, header or no header…

There's an RFC but I expect more non-conformant files than conformant.



ph: medication

I'm now on so many meds with such complicated rules about when and how to take them that working out a medication schedule kind of feels like solvong the wolf, goat, cabbage problem.

I guess that's just what it's like to get old.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

ph: medication

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Turns out all my new doctor's records are in "the cloud". Had an appointment today but their internet was down so he was forced to use pen and paper.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

haha that’s why I usually bake many on baking day (-period) and freeze what can’t be finished b4 getting “too aged”


Some of the YouTube vloggers that Katy watches are interesting. "Oh no, it's a holiday but I accidentally set my alarm [and also accidentally set up the camera to record myself being woken up by it]!"


So, once I'd becone reasonably proficient with the #soroban, my next step was going to be learning how to use a #SlideRule. Unfortunately, it seems as though nobody makes the latter any more.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

Yes quite a useful tool at the time but 55+ years ago for me and knowledge has faded. Calculators were banned as being economically elitist. A basic calculator could cost as much as a term's tuition.


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