Aaron Brady @insom@tiny.tilde.website

Hey friendos! Ottawa Processing Day 2019 is over, which means my talk is done, which means I can experience joy again instead of just anxiety about giving my talk.

@tildetown got called out heavily, and especially @curio (for botany).

Please find attached this image of the Tilde Town Time Service that ran back in November 2017.

It's really more of an artists rendition - as it was created post-facto - but I actually built a working speaker amplifier on breadboard for authenticity reasons.

Hah the auto white balance on my phone is correcting it to a kind of gray, but I assure you it is amber!

Finally executed on the idea of an OpenGL shader that tints your whole X session amber. This way I can avoid buying an amber CRT from eBay that I do not actually need, just to tickle that nostalgia part of my brain and get it to leave me alone.

Shader gist is here: https://gist.github.com/insom/88c473a0980b43b59fcbabc64650513d

@tinyrabbit I enjoyed your 90% uptime post on your gemlog! I host a bunch of stuff from home for similar reasons (including a mastodon instance).

I did the math on power consumption and decided to move backups to Amazon S3 (out of my house) /but/ I moved my compute from VPS to my basement because Ontario's power is only 33% fossil fuel and I'd rather use that power than dirty power + carbon offsets that most VPS providers run on.

I think Facebook and other modern social networking has given me as "gotta catch em all" philosophy. It's so easy to "collect" all the people I've know in life; on Twitter, on LinkedIn and on Facebook -- back when I used it -- but I wasn't doing any of the work to maintain those relationships.

When I left FB I thought I'd lose touch with some of those people forever. I probably have. Is it so bad that I no longer know how to contact someone from my primary school I haven't spoke to in 30 years?

When irc.iol.ie shutdown, most of the regulars from there had moved to chat.phishy.net already -- but I still felt that maybe some old-timer who had gone away for a months and come back would not know, and we'd lose them to the community forever.

Then I didn't log on to phishy.net for weeks, then months, then years, and finally it's now gone -- given that its whole community effectively migrated away, it must have just been a burden for the admins.

And that's okay. We don't need a permanent archive of everything. I like this instance, but if something happens to me -- honestly it's way down on the list of things that I need to care for. And it's just an instance. Hopefully everyone on here would find some new place and reconnect with their friends. Some people might never make that leap. Sometimes that's how communities lose people. That has to be okay, too.

I was even thinking about putting some money -- enough for server fees for a year or two -- into a non profit org and transferring ttw to that.

In the end, I think the right way for me to think about it is that communities are _not_ permanent, they are more than the servers and the AWS accounts or whatever -- some of those instances lost data, some had instance drama, some had admins who just went "fuck it" and some just didn't survive in the cambrian explosion of social networking.

The new Mastodon (3.4.1) lets me see other instances that ttw isn't federating with, either due to temporary or (presumed) permanent problems.

And in the four years since this started, there's been a _lot_ of instances lost

My initial reaction was driven by fear: how can I prevent this? I have backups and snapshots, but I'm the only person with access to anything. I could use ssss to share a password between several people I trust, or deputize someone ...

I used a motor from https://www.bumblebeepro.com/shop/re-254-ribbon-microphone-motor/ and wrapped the element in a thin sheet of foam, CNC milled out slots in the metal hammond project box, then covered that up with a laser-cut microphone motif and some linen to act like a pop-filter (kind of).

The whole thing needs a _lot_ of gain to sound good, and therefore needed better RF/EMF shielding than I am used to, which made up most of the annoying parts of the project -- but it was still only a single day from start to finish.

New hand-built ribbon mic, featuring a custom case I'm pretty proud of. (Also it sounds good).

Downloading pkgsrc over a 115200 baud PPP connection and only getting 10KBps.

My first impulse was to debug it ... but no: this is exactly how fast thing were back then.

The duct tape is not an aesthetic choice (or at least, it's not _just_ an aesthetic choice). This thing was water damaged and came with broken hinges and a busted case. Tape, glue and soldering a new power connector brought it back to usable life. That feels good too. Buying someone's former e-waste and doing it back up. I'd repeat the experience but ... well I don't need another computer.

My current personal laptop is a liberated Chromebook running regular Ubuntu 21.04, folded back with a nice bluetooth keyboard and a trackball. ngl it's making me happy to use it. A change is as good as a rest.

All languages with loops are now "turing-likes"

<strike> Netflix and Chill </strike>
<strong> Play Kentucky Route Zero and Cry </strong>

Look at this beautiful thing!

Distribution Religion by Dan Sandin (1978).

Instructions on how to build a modular video synthesizer.

Read the first three pages of this and tell me it's not a hippy alternate history free [soft/hard]ware licence.

Then just enjoy the literally cut, copied and pasted hand annotated document until you've had your fill.

"Put in your own method of returning energy to me here"

http://www.criticalartware.net/DistributionReligion/DistributionReligion.pdf

That was the UPS going in, Statuscake reckons 9 minutes of down time or, as we say in industry: one nine.