Would you, or anyone you know, be interested in a free SPARCstation 20 and be able to collect it from the South of Scotland in early April? Some more details here: https://mackenga.ro/blog/2026/free-sparcstation-and-more/index.html
Boosts appreciated if you think someone downstream of you might want it.
@neil very good point!
Are you familiar with the overview initiated by @mechko? https://codeberg.org/mechko/awesome-maintainer-funding
Lots of people are talking about "digital sovereignty".
I've seen (much) less about how they plan to sustain it, including funding it.
Any good reading recommendations on this would be welcome, please.
From DuckDuckGo back to DuckDuckGo via Mojeek and Kagi
> Politics finding its way into tech is one of the reasons we do not have innovation any more
was the final straw for me for Kagi.
https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/01/from-kagi-back-to-duckduckgo/
> According to recent reporting, in response to fears about accountability from the United States, Prabhat Agarwal, the head of the European Commission's enforcement team for the Digital Services Act (DSA), told a group of European regulators that his colleagues have "started sending messages via . . . an encrypted app, rather than email, and many now have messages set to auto-delete, with the 'auto-delete timings getting shorter.'"
Presumably European policy makers and legislators will have no problem with all EU residents using encrypted communications with automatically deleting messages...
I spent most of my day in a windowless room, talking about some stuff with 5GSA.
Mostly geeky problem solving, some influencing, and a small sprinkling of Actual Legal Advice.
I love what I do, but it is not exactly the kind of thing that gets taught at law school.
I sometimes wonder what my career would have been like if I had become a family lawyer, as I'd originally intended, instead of whatever it is that I actually do.
*grumbles*
It's my sodding phone.
If I want to unlock the bootloader, I should be free to do so, without hassle and inconvenience.
Fine, warn me. But it is my phone, and my risk to assume.
(Xiaomi Poco X3; on the Pixel 3a, it was pleasingly trivial.)
Changing it over was pleasingly straightforward. 18 screws, and components which came out easily.
Just under 10 minutes in total.
It seems that connecting it to a charger capable of doing 100W might have been a mistake.
Although whether that was a problem with the original charge port in this device, but would be fine with a new replacement port, I do not know...
I guess that I can add "can replace a faulty charge port on a Xiaomi Poco X3 NFC" to my list of not-overly-useful skills.
Because mastodon is like a 99% male audience, I will say this: if you have an aging mother you are in relationship with and care about, do NOT make her go through medical stuff alone. I am skilled & mean enough to fight through medical stuff and even so you would not believe how bad it is. Just accept that you cannot imagine.
I talk to a lot of people's aging moms and they are abandoned & alone even in nice families. I don't care how awkward it is, you have to try to ask them about it.
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@postmarketOS/116245241828987608
what I've been working on for the last year 🥳
For anyone following along my adventures with #BSSG, I have switched the markdown parser from the default (commonmark) to pandoc, because it turns out that commonmark cannot handle markdown tables.
@neil
Quantum follows on from liability though.
Ofcom is undertaking a paid survey for people who work for companies in scope of the UK #OnlineSafetyAct. If any of y'all are running Mastodon/Akkoma/Pixelfed/etc servers and have some kind of legal entity for doing so, drop me a line and I'll make an introduction.
I'm gonna ask if that's *just* companies or if any community forum counts.
i can't change the name of the inputs on my TV without an internet connection apparently. just the name. there's even a menu of preset names that has what i want, but if you select them it tells you to connect to the internet
Do I have a position on the legal ramifications of quantum computing?
Yes. Super.
⚠️ 450 FSFE supporters affected: Payment provider Nexi cancelled us ⚠️
Our long-term payment provider, Nexi, has terminated our contract without prior notice.
As a result, our supporters’ recurring credit card and direct debit donations have been halted by them.
This affects more than 450 FSFE supporters, whom we have already informed by email.
Read more here: https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260316-01.en.html
This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.
I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.
Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.
One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.
I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.
So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to https://dec10.uknet.net and login as guest, then follow the terse instructions from there.
In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.
I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...
Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.
** The front end is currently not happy with the number of connections- I will edit this again when I fix it, hopefully later today (18th March) **
#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering
(don't try this on a phone!)