I’m always pleased when Slack appears in the logs. Again, it’s a walled garden and I have no more context than that. But it’s still nice to know that somewhere, somehow, I’m wasting some company’s time.
Back when the web was just the web, I would occasionally make unexpectedly popular Content, and it was fun to look through the referrer logs, see where people were coming from, browse around in those communities and so on. With the youtube stuff, 'external' is only ever a few percent, and within that it's basically 'discord' which could be anything. But it's still quite fun seeing little clusters of comments from people with the same angle on it, and trying to work out their thing.
@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.
It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.
I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…
Edit: it seems I was misremembering this as a company rather than a university. It was called Peep (The Network Auralizer). The entire design and architecture was written up for USENIX: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/gilfix/gilfix_html/
This may be the start of something big, I'm starting my own content channel.
https://ko-fi.com/post/Starting-Something-I-Control-Myself-A0A71YHD17
A lot of stuff is shitty but the rise of solar to be the cheapest, most efficient energy source kinda rules
Leekspin came out 20 years ago today. Happy birthday!
https://leekspin.co/
Right, last #Hackster round-up of the week and then I'm off to enjoy the rare sunshine I can see out of the shed window.
First up is... well, nothing short of incredible. A working Game Boy Color... in a smartwatch form factor.
"That's easy," you cry, "emulate it on a microcontroller." Nope: this uses the original CPU and RAM, it's an honest-to-goodness clone. And has swappable carts. Physical carts. Yeah.
I just saw the most amazingly corporate expression of "we did what the bosses wanted us to do, even though the research didn't support that." The actual phrase was:
The research employed a methodology that prioritized stakeholder voice over researcher interpretation.
I wonder if a data scientist slipped that in to make it clear to other folks how this happened. You don't have to write stuff like this if the boss wants to do what the research says is a good idea. You only have to write this if the research says one thing and the boss says another.
@mattround have you found Madonna’s grave? 😆
Steve:
frequent overthinker, compulsive fixer, digester-then-explainer, "why?" question relishing father, minor-irritant partner, excessive disassembler, original-form hacker, high-efficiency googler, borderline-competent car-fixer, expert-level car-breaker, faster-by-qwerty communicator, indiscriminate photo-taker, Leatherman owner.