This is an IBM tape library robot. It’s designed to fetch, load, unload, and return tape media cartridges to the correct bay in large enterprise environments.
One fateful ‘workend’, I made one serve drinks.
It went back into prod on the Monday…
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In a story reminiscient of those anecdotes about early computer science students competing to “race” hard drives across the lab by writing programs that moved the heads in a way that vibrated/walked the devices, @SecurityWriter shares a wonderful story about repurposing a backup tape management robot to act as a server (pun intended) of drinks.
103: Early Hints (“I’m not sure this can last forever.”)300: Multiple Choices (“There are so many ways I can do better than you.”)303: See Other (“You should date other people.”)304: Not Modified (“With you, I feel like I’m stagnating.”)402: Payment Required (“I am a prostitute.”)403: Forbidden (“You don’t get this any more.”)406: Not Acceptable (“I could never introduce you to my parents.”)408: Request Timeout (“You keep saying you’ll propose but you never do.”)409: Conflict (“We hate each other.”)410: Gone (ghosted)411: Length Required (“Your penis is too small.”)413: Payload Too Large (“Your penis is too big.”)416: Range Not Satisfied (“Our sex life is boring and repretitive.”)425: Too Early (“Your premature ejaculation is a problem.”)428: Precondition Failed (“You’re still sleeping with your ex-!?”)429: Too Many Requests (“You’re so demanding!”)451: Unavailable for Legal Reasons (“I’m married to somebody else.”)502: Bad Gateway (“Your pussy is awful.”)508: Loop Detected (“We just keep fighting.”)
With thanks to Ruth for the conversation that inspired these pictures, and apologies to the rest of the Internet for creating them.
You’ve got 37 unpaid parking tickets. You just got pulled over for speeding. In your defense, you were texting your sister about how drunk you are. Plus there’s all that blood on your windshield. Obviously you know it’s deer blood, but the police officers walking toward your vehicle don’t. Still, in the time it takes them to figure that out, maybe you’ll sober up. Or escape on foot! Either way, it’ll probably be fine.
User Tags: Poor Choices / Story Rich / Multiple Endings / Parkour
Collect dead seagulls and build a zoo to house them all. Beautify the zoo with artistic flair and deodorizing sprays. Design creative group promotions to stir up interest! Is that a customer? You’d better hope it’s not the owner of the live seagull zoo down the street, because he’s probably got some questions.
User Tags: Hard Work / Supply / Demand / Diseases & Parasites
Of course, you don’t strictly need a digital wallet to use EGX. But as we’re in a culture where people invariably ask “is there an app for it?”, I thought I’d make one.
You can install it as an offline-first progressive web application, which means that this could be the first ever digital currency to have an app that works without an Internet connection. That’s probably something no other digital currency can claim to have, right?
Here’s what it looks like if I send 0.1 EGX to my friend Chris using the app:
Naturally, I wouldn’t be backing Emma Goldcoin if it didn’t represent such a brilliant step up better-known digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ripple, and Etherium. Specific features unique to Emma Goldcoin include:
Using it doesn’t massively contribute to energy wastage and environmental damage.
It doesn’t increase the digital divide by helping early adopters at the expense of late adopters.
It’s entirely secure: it’s mathematically impossible to “steal”EGX.
Emma Goldcoin is so simple that you don’t even need a computer to use it: it “just works”.
Sure, it’s got its downsides, and I’d encourage you to read the specification if you’d like to learn more about what those are. Or if you already know what EGX is all about and just want to try a new way to manage your portfolio, give my new site EGXchange.org a go!
EGX fixes all the problems with all the existing cryptocurrencies once and for all. In particular it fixes the problems around security, environmental impact and ease of use that beset all other known blockchain-based cryptocurrency offerings.
Security
Due to the unique way in which the EGX blockchain is constructed, EGX cannot be hacked and will never be hacked. Period. There are and never will be any security issues with EGX. No other cryptocurrency on or off the planet can claim this.
Environment
Whether based on Proof Of Work or Proof of Stake, all other blockchains have a non-negligible and non-zero environmental impact. EGX however is based on neither of these. Instead it is based on Proof Of Existence, described below. PoE has a minimum environmental impact that is provably zero. Individual EGX implementations may have greater environmental impact than this, but that is entirely on the implementor. EGX PoE can be as low as zero if you wish, and we can prove this.
Ease Of Implementation
Due to its unique properties, no other cryptocurrency is or ever will be easier to implement and work with as EGX. This is not an empty claim – again, we can prove this.
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Now here’s a cryptocurrency I can get behind. Shut up and take my money!
You may remember that I was excited to hear about the upcoming release of Dune (which I suppose should be called Dune: Part One). It turns out to be excellent and I’d recommend it to anybody.
But once you’ve seen it and while you’re in the two-year wait for Dune: Part Two (argh!), can I suggest you also enjoy this wonderful creation by the folks at Bad Lip Reading, whose work I’ve plugged before. Note: minor spoilers (amazingly) if you haven’t seen Dune yet.
Here’s a perfect example I bumped into earlier this week, courtesy of The Green Web Foundation. This looks like a hyperlink… but if you open it in a new tab/window, you see a page (not even a 404 page!) with the text “It looks like nothing was found at this location.”
In the site shown in the screenshot above, the developer took something the web gave them for free (a hyperlink), threw it away (by making it a link-to-nowhere), and rebuilt its functionality with Javascript (without thinking about the fact that you can do more with hyperlinks than click them: you can click-and-drag them, you can bookmark them, you can share them, you can open them in new tabs etc.). Ugh.
Something you can clearly type a numeric day, month and year into is best.
Three dropdowns are slightly worse, but at least if you use native HTML <select> elements keyboard users can still “type” to filter.
Everything else – including things that look like <select>s but are really funky React <div>s, is pretty terrible.
Calendars can be great for choosing your holiday date range. But pressing “Prev” ~480 times to get to my month of birth isn’t good. Also: what’s with the time “sliders”? (Yes, I know I’ve implemented these myself, in the past, and I’m sorry.)
People designing webforms that require me to enter my birthdate:
I am begging you: just let me type it in.
Typing it in is 6-8 quick keystrokes. Trying to navigate a little calendar or spinny wheels back to the 1970s is time-consuming, frustrating and unnecessary.
They’re right. Those little spinny wheels are a pain in the arse if you’ve got to use one to go back 40+ years.
These things are okay (I guess) on mobile/touchscreen devices, though I’d still prefer the option to type in my date of birth. But send one to my desktop and I will curse your name.
Can we do worse?
If there’s one thing we learned from making the worst volume control in the world, the other year, it’s that you can always find a worse UI metaphor. So here’s my attempt at making a date of birth field that’s somehow even worse than “date spinners”:
My datepicker implements a game of “higher/lower”. Starting from bounds specified in the HTML code and a random guess, it narrows-down its guess as to what your date of birth is as you click the up or down buttons. If you make a mistake you can start over with the restart button.
Amazingly, this isn’t actually the worst datepicker into which I’ve entered my date of birth! It’s cognitively challenging compared to most, but it’s relatively fast at narrowing down the options from any starting point. Plus, I accidentally implemented some good features that make it better than plenty of the datepickers out there:
It’s progressively enhanced – if the Javascript doesn’t load, you can still enter your date of birth in a sensible way.
Because it leans on a <input type="date"> control, your browser takes responsibility for localising, so if you’re from one of those weird countries that prefers mm-dd-yyyy then that’s what you should see.
It’s moderately accessible, all things considered, and it could easily be improved further.
It turns out that even when you try to make something terrible, so long as you’re building on top of the solid principles the web gives you for free, you can accidentally end up with something not-so-bad. Who knew?
For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all. This week I completed my Magnum Opus! A thread.
I live in Bromley and almost always shop at the same Sainsbury’s in the centre of town, here’s a satellite view of their car park. It’s a great car park because you can always get a space and it is laid out really well. Comfortably in my top 5 Bromley car parks.
After quite a few years of going each week I started thinking about how many of the different spots I’d parked in and how long it would take to park in them all. My life is one long roller coaster.
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A glorious story from a man with the kind of dedication that would have gotten him far in CNPS back in the day (I wonder if Claire ever got past 13 points…).
This is the kind of thing that I occasionally consider adding to the list of mundane shit I track about my life. But then I start thinking about the tracking infrastructure and I end up adding far more future-proofing than I intend: I start thinking about tracking how often my hayfever causes me problems so I can correlate it to the time and the location data I already record to work out which tree species’ pollen affects me the most. Or tracking a variety of mood metrics so I can see if, as I’ve long suspected, the number of unread emails in my inboxen negatively correlates to my general happiness.
