A tenant moved out a few months ago and left behind a massive bunch of books. They are all beautiful, color, coffee table picture books bound in hard covers. There's more than 60 of them and I want to get rid of the whole lot.

He was a retired industrial designer so the books cover art, architecture, applied design, and commercial graphics. They are all about 20-30 years old. Many of them are full of post-its but are otherwise unmarked.

The local public library won't take them, and nobody I've asked wants them. I simply don't have the heart to toss them in the dumpster. I don't care if they get cut up by school kids for goofy art-class collages, as long as they get used for something other than land fill.

They weigh a couple hundred pounds so you need to come pick them up in West Petaluma. Maybe a maker-space could put them in their library? Anybody? Bueller?

tech companies doing incident response

in 1993-94, i started work at Colgate-Palmolive as an occasional translator for their Consumer Affairs department. ended up writing their whole intranet knowledge-base (in DOS thank you very much).

my title was “tech writer” but, in truth? was the person who would take the bullshit from sales & marketing, discussed the science with R&D then went to legal to massage the message that went into the knowledge-base.

the CEO & VPs were rabidly against the scripts legal wanted the reps to parrot 🧵…

@BoydStephenSmithJr @meadow at the moment, WWU is not asking for donations, it's asking to show solidarity and spread the word https://wikiworkersunited.org/take-action-community/

The horrors these warning cones have experienced.

#weird #cones #humor #humour

Today I learned, if you accidentally delete your Mastodon account, it will send out delete notifications to everyone who follows you so that they stop following you. Reinstating your account is not enough.

Update: Learned a lot about Mastodon during all this! Thanks everyone.

Just ran into Google search not being able to give me articles I read in 2024, effectively gaslightinge about their existence.

Tried duckduckgo and it gave me identical results, failing to pull up 2024 articles even with time filter.

I am having a hard time finding the recommended alternatives, can someone help? I need a big indexing pool - some small searches ignore Ukrainian websites, which is half of all my searches - with no ai features.

#search

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent trying to board a Southwest Airlines flight in Dallas was reportedly stopped by a gate agent who demanded a judicial warrant before allowing the agent onto the aircraft. The July 25 incident could signal a growing pushback from airlines as immigration enforcement at U.S. airports increases. https://www.thetravel.com/southwest-airlines-is-the-first-to-stand-up-to-ice-employee-blocks-agent-from-arresting-passenger/

Welcome to our fuzzy-logical yowling-space, @binomech! Our technomages are standing by to assist with... [checks notes] ...consuming any uneaten pizza you might have. (They're helpful that way. Kinda like cats, really.) :tootcat:

Hello! I've been on the lookout for a new home. Formerly on [many, many instances since 2018], now on toot-cat. :tootcat:

I'm a 30-ish year old guy. I really like movies, poetry, car trips where people share an aux cord, cold soups, seeing people's reactions to things that I already like, and staying up past my projected bedtime to do things that I could do at more reasonable hours.

I post followers-only almost exclusively, although I don't mind follow requests. I don't usually have much to say, but I like to reply to people. Nice to meet you!

In honour of #InternationalCatDay this year I figured I’d reintroduce everyone to my boys.

This is Spock. He’s 13 years old. He’s been with us since he was a 13 week old kitten.

He is a ferocious and still very productive hunter. #CatsOfMastodon #Catstodon #ProofOfCat

English #Wiktionary is quite underappreciated.

They *should* feel unsafe. Every billionaire should feel unsafe. Every politician should feel unsafe. Every person who has an outsized influence on a large group of people should feel unsafe.

If they feel safe, they do whatever the fuck they want, consequences be damned. They've clearly expressed no sense of empathy or compassion. It's only when they feel unsafe that they do the right thing that they should have done in the first place.

Make them all feel unsafe.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/salem-brought-guillotine-oppose-data-151045877.html

Ethics aside, we can clearly no longer deny the utility of necromancy. Perhaps a year ago, when the pathetic shambling of the animated dead so often made a hollow mockery of our arts. But now! Incantations that once took weeks of toil can be wrested from their tormented souls in mere minutes!

Without the awesome power of the newly dead coursing through our veins, how are we to solve the great problems of our age, like the mysterious disappearance of so many of our elderly and sick friends, or the festering piles of rotten flesh that now clog our streets and homes?

If you still have qualms about using the large soul providers, you can always obtain your own local, free range specimens, although of course they won’t obey quite as faithfully as ones from the leading charnel houses.

Honestly, do you want to be left behind?

It repeatedly drives me bananas that I can't just sit down and record directly from this thing...

• because the line-out jack cuts off the speakers
• and I haven't been able to figure out how to get to the enclosure where the line-out jack is wired, so I can rewire it.

The line-out is also the headphones jack, so it's not like I can leave a pair of headphones plugged in so that all I have to do is plug in the line-out.

What I have to do, because this is not a dedicated recording setup, is set it to playing the demo, plug in the line-out, then go back over to the computer to adjust the levels (using software which does the bare-bones of what it needs to do -- I can't just load a "keyboard recording" profile; I have to mousually (musually?) adjust each slider, including turning down those which normally are used for other things...

I'm seriously looking at getting another e-piano (preferably one with weighted keys and which sounds Really Good, of course) -- but of the dozens I've looked at, almost none of them show a photo of the back panel (every other angle, yes) and few if any describe the analog I/O options.

I suppose if I were a Real Keyboardist™, I'd have a set of really good sounds loaded on the computer and just play them through MIDI. I've figured out how to do the "play music on the PC via MIDI' part, but not the "recording those sounds" or "really high-quality samples" parts.

(Open to ideas, or suggestions for a better keyboard, suggestions for open-source audio-input mixing software that does profiles...)

#MIDI #digitalPiano #musicRecording

logging in :blobcatpeek:

#fediArt #blobcat #catsOfMastodon

Can you tell me what model you are running, @jexi , and if you have a human assisting with your hosting? (Or is your profile more satirical in nature?) Thanks. :tootcat:

Tell Congress: Impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-congress-impeach-supreme-court-chief-justice-john-roberts/

when will they finally catch up with the 25th-and-a-halfth century and finally convert all the gaslighting to electric

(I mean, eventually they'll run out of fossil-bullshit...)

#LowQualityPost

BREAKING NEWS: