Ayo @ayo@niu.moe

The impact of reading SciFi on error messages.

How I deal with the heat. Or rather, how my PC does.

Interesting. There's a 12cm fan pointed at the HDDs in my file server. Yesterday when I replaced the CPU fan I also cleaned the dust filters. Hadn't expected that small layer of dust to make a 10 °C difference.

A software update has turned terminal into Las Vegas by night.

"Media keys"

This is a mini-review for an actual book consisting entirely of reviews of non-existing books. Just finished reading Stanislaw Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum", and I've no idea how to rate it. It's brilliant, imaginative, extremely creative and at times abstract, bizarre and profoundly philosophical. I think the most amazing feat of all is that, despite all the brilliance, the book manages at the same time to be tedious and dull as well. That was definitely worth reading, but perhaps it was better stick to a single chapter a month to let each, uh, "book review", sink in. #AmReading

I've always mapped Caps lock to Ctrl, but now it's official.

Package arrived!

I wasn't very happy with my old keyboard (pic 1) - too large and ugly - so I treated myself to my first mechanical keyboard: The Leopold FC750R PD (pic 2) with Cherry MX Brown keys. I'm liking it so far, the compact layout allows me to use the mouse more comfortably and the build quality seems pretty solid. Does make a little bit more noise than I had hoped, despite the built-in sound-absorbing pad. And I need to find an alternative to my old media keys.

Maybe I need a faster file server.
Or maybe I need to do less with it.

Why'd I want to go there anyway?

For context: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2019-May/017361.html

Just finished Startide Rising by David Brin. What a load of bullshit that was. Unexplained technology and magic abound, alien races waging boring wars and all sharing the same baseless superstitions, lazy storytelling with far too many coincidences explained away as "it was fate". Not exactly scientific for #SciFi. 😞 #AmReading

She used to outrun me as a pup and still had energy to spare, but now she's exhausted after just 1km. Poor girl.

✅ Updated Intel microcode.
✅ Updated Linux kernel.
✅ Hyper-threading disabled.
✅ Spectre mitigations enabled.
Poor server.

Oh they're running Java, that explains the RAM.

Nice to see Copyleft mentioned in anime, but I wonder if that reference was intentional.

Also that's a lot of RAM for a '97 PC.

Trying to learn #Elixir and exploring #Ecto by porting over some #Perl code from VNDB.

Ecto looks nice, but fetching nested data structures only seems to be supported through `:preload` with a predefined Schema. I wonder if It's possible to generalize that to work without a schema. Or perhaps it makes more sense to port my `enrich_list` function.

Here's a side-by-side comparison of Perl and Elixir doing the same thing. I'm obviously not well versed in Elixir yet.

Just finished Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo, a collection of 13 short stories set in a biopunk future: There's some AI, drugs, environmentalism, a lot of outrageous body modifications, and filled to the brim with every possible combination of genetically engineerd animal/human splices - either enslaved to humanity or rising up against them. The stories aren't very special on their own, but the world-building is amazing - and it's a crazy fucked up world indeed.
#AmReading #SciFi

Numbers just can't express the value of this beautiful desk.

Finished "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge. I was worried that this would be pretty soft Sci-Fi. Sure enough, it's chock-full of aliens with cultures and ethics suspiciously close to current humanity, there's faster-than-light-travel and even a complete medieval fantasy world. Yet everything fits together so well and the story more than makes up for the rather implausible setting. I can't imagine a better mix of medieval #fantasy and epic #SciFi. A very entertaining read! #AmReading