Ten years ago I subcontracted there and we were within walking distance, so we could have lunches together, that was nice.
Just after that there was another 10% layoff and I said you're safe, right, you've been there 30 years, and she said nobody is safe, some people who were there longer had to go.
The severance is pretty good though, if you're 60 you can get 70% of your salary until you're 65 and retirement kicks in.
I learned in one of those threads that the US doesn't actually have the long weekend. Twelve states get Friday off and California gets Monday for un-Easter-related reasons, nobody gets both.
Sorry about the once-successful separation of Church and state.
#hongkong is doing great on the holidays front, we get Christian holidays and traditional Chinese holidays *and* Buddhist holidays.
So we have Easter this weekend, Ching Ming next Thursday and Buddha's Birthday the month after.
Also we have Labor Day on the original May First as declared by the Second International, not for Chinese reasons, but for British reasons. The Mainland gets the whole week off.
We went to bed early and got up super early, so we could watch the premiere of #MurderDrones episode 7.
There were no English subtitles, and lots of people speak with glitched voices, so the dialog was pretty hard to follow.
So we watched the episode without subtitles, and then we watched it with German subtitles and I filled kid in on some of the missing bits. The translation is pretty liberal though, so still couldn't be sure exactly what the English said.
Halfway through, we discovered that English subtitles had been added, so we started over again with English subtitles. ๐คฃ
It was a stroke of luck that the English was missing and the German ended up the default fallback, because the German subtitles are by far the coolest and we never would have discovered that otherwise.
Other subtitles (we checked several) are plain text, but the German ones actually glitch when the speech glitches. Tibetan overlays will flicker in and out (you know, like in the eldritch "he comes" in that classic StackOverflow answer about parsing XML with regexes). Terrible for usability, but cool for effect.
Also the German subtitles are super detailed, translating things on-screen and even making jokes (in Englishโฝ) about things happening on-screen.
We checked German, French, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Japanese audio too, in one key scene, just for fun (I only understand the German well enough). Voice acting is top notch, but the effects don't measure up to the English.
It's mind-bogglingly impressive how much effort an indie project like this is able to put into internationalization!
I've been plugging away at #Returnal since January of last year (with a long-ish Hiatus to play through Baldur's Gate 3 twice), but today I finally beat it. I only died 260 times!
lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Mar-2024 08:38:33 EDT
lnxw48a1In the 20 years or so that I've been travelling for work, I have had to scan receipts. First of all, there was often a deluge of paperwork and receipts, and there's no way I could carry those around and keep track of them. They had to be scanned, though they originally had to be on paper, so I could fax them in.
After a while, $EMPLOYER stopped requiring receipts to be faxed and allowed us to upload .pdf and .tiff documents ... so paper became a special case and even more burdensome.
And of course, I've used the submit receipts and delete local copies method because even dealing with electronic receipts across personal and employer computers is too much hassle.
Now, however, every company wants to do electronic receipts and "pull" type billing (where they hit your card or bank account periodically without any action on your part, and if they make an error, you have to depend upon them agreeing and sending excess funds back ... while any related overdraft or overlimit fees would remain your responsibility). They also all want you to submit an e-mail address and a cell phone number so they can spam you with unneeded and unwanted notifications.
This happened just as I no longer had access to a receipt scanner (or any other scanner ... I've long used the "tape receipts to a sheet of paper" method and a regular scanner), so going fully back to paper hasn't been a viable option either.
One might say that my relationship with various methods of receiving bills and receipts is "complicated".
And that's not counting the ones where you have to log into their site every month to download an encrypted file and copy the individual file's passcode. Nobody has time to securely store a file-by-file passcode. Either give it to me unencrypted or use a single passcode that applies to every file.
(This topic came to mind because of @clacke's discussion of storing his receipts in #DeltaChat (which AFAIK is just a chat-like interface atop e-mail ... so I guess all that would also be available in his inbox).
I'm in the market for a GS instance to move my presence there. Also for a Friendica instance that isn't Libranet.de (intolerably buggy, and since I've hosted ~F instances in the past, I know it wasn't anywhere near this bad in the past).
While I'm at it, I'd like to set up new secondary accounts on a couple of Misskey instances.
In all cases, I desire an easy ToS and less power-mad administrator ... but not so easy or hands-off that racists and a$$holes congregate there.
lnxw48a1 (lnxw48a1@nu.federati.net)'s status on Friday, 29-Mar-2024 08:24:12 EDT
lnxw48a1My mom sent me an SMS to remind me that I came home one day and excitedly shared "'Yellow River' by IP Freely" (I believe it was something in MAD Magazine). I was laughing so hard that I could barely say it. For months afterward, whenever I thought of it (or read that issue of MAD, purchased because of it), I laughed like some sort of maniac.
That was shared by a girl in my class named Cynthia. She seemed to be almost twice my height and more than twice my weight. The next year I changed schools and I don't think I ever saw her again. But she used to share lots of funny things (which often seemed to be sourced from MAD).
Making use of the Easter holidays to have the time to set up all the bank apps, authenticators and other things. Accidental spring cleaning might be good for me after five years, there's probably a lot of things I'm not installing.
I was planning to export @Delta Chat data from my backup phone, copy to some computer, copy to my reset phone, import ... but now it's as easy as just scanning a QR Code and the two phones will transfer account settings and keys over the LAN. Awesome!
It was a stroke of added misfortune that I fumbled my phone storage right during tax season, but my backups on Delta saved me from scanning the physical receipts all over again.
Everything submitted to HR and now I can truly enjoy the long weekend.
I'd like to compile a list of settings for Friendica to work on limited resources. Based on settings I'm using on my Raspi 4 but with the knowledge of all of you, as I'm almost certain that I missed some optimization possibilities.
Personal user settings
Account settings -> Social Media -> General Social Media Settings -> Followed content scope: select "only conversations my follows started". This is obviously a personal choice, but only follow (and importing) the postings from the accounts I follow and not also the content they interact with reduces the amount of postings that are imported into the system. If they think a posting is important enough to share it, then you'll see it.
Settings in the admin panel
Activate the "fast lane" worker. This will keep one worker process dealing only with the delivery of content. Afterall we want to share postings with contacts in a social network, so this should not suffer from other tasks the worker has to perform.
Limit public access
If non-logged in users have less access to potentially resource hungry parts of Friendica. This includes "Community pages for visitors" (None), "Disallow public access to addons listed in the apps menu.", "Only local search".
Discovery
Discovering potential contacts is great, but will use resources. So
set "Discover followers/followings from contacts" to None and just to be sure deactivate "Discover contacts from other servers".
Also "Only update contacts/servers with local data" should limit the data-waste filling up the database.
Remote content
Delete it automatically, as long as it is not protected by the users of the node. The settings for this are
"Lifespan of remote items" and also
limit the "Maximum age of items in the search table".
The "Lifespan of raw conversation data" is kept for 90 days by default, but the description claims it is save to delete it after 14 days so, take the minimum save value.
Don't forget to select "Clean database" and "Periodically optimize tables". The optimization will actually free the space the table is reserving on the storage (else the database will fill up the reserved space before claiming more).
Relays
Relay server are great to get content into your node, especially on small nodes (likely those with limited resources). Fill the global community page and have nice channel content based on them. But those postings will also eat the resources of the server quickly. So...
set the "Relay scope" to tags and define some tags your server should import. Also "Allow user tags" so that the user can set tags to follow from the relay. However
set the "Lifespan of unclaimed items" to 1 (or another low value) so that these posting will get deleted quickly again
Display of content
Limit the amount of postings and comments that are shown on one page.
Settings in the config file
system -> fetch_perents = false this will prevent Friendica to fetch missing parent posts
system -> optimize_all_tables = true this will optimizes all tables instead of only tables like workerqueue or the cache, so when things in the database are deleted, more space is freed.
What have I missed? I mean apart from optimizing the database settings and how the web server serves PHP content.
I put my winter clothes back in their drawer yesterday, so *of course* it suddenly became colder today and I took the nice warm fleece jacket right back out again.
The forecast says by tomorrow morning it will be almost down to freezing. Crazy stuff.
It was literally freezing if you went up in the hills a few hundred meters above sea level. If the weather freaks out just a little bit more, maybe next Christmas we can get snow.
Now postwinter is decidedly over and we're in solid presummer where the nights are slightly too warm to sleep comfortably with the window open, and it's time to diligently put all food in the fridge if the food isn't being actively served right now. No more leaving a box of cheese or a loaf of bread on the table for half an hour.
Yeah, but at least Hamburg is not so strict like the catholic regions. Here it is limited to 24 hours starting from 5:00 AM tomorrow. In other regions it is the whole Friday and Saturday.
None of our apartment building floor neighbors have ever seemed interested in being more than passing acquaintances, except this woman living with her partner and their 3-year old daughter weโve seen growing since she was a newborn.
However, a few months ago, she reported to my partner that her partner hit her once at the height of a heated argument. Within days, she moved out with her daughter to a place she wouldnโt disclose to us so that we couldnโt accidentally tell her now ex-partner who stayed behind.
We thought he would move out once the lease was up, and he did, to the next door on the same floor. So we keep bumping into each other in or out the elevator, and itโll now be awkward until either of us move out of the building.
And now our random encounters will always remind me how unfair that his mistake ended up costing his ex-partner a ton and us a friend, while he gets to carry on with his life seemingly unperturbed.