grumbling intensifies @cyanopicacyana - Tumblr Blog

“What is a personal website even FOR?“

When making a personal website for the first time, you may ask yourself this!

The answer is: fucking anything. Personal websites don’t have to be “presentable” if they’re not tied to your IRL identity or whatever. Look at old captures of geocities, tripod, angelfire sites. You had dedicated single-topic sites, sure, but you also had sites that were arbitrary, slapdash little hoards of the website owner’s Favorite Things, no matter how unrelated they were.

Some suggestions:

links to your 3 favorite other websites.

an essay about how cool hydraulic engines are

a sanctuary for all your favorite images, such as memes, that you’ve collected over the years

facts about centipedes you think everyone should know

competitive hardcore sims 2 speedrunning strategies

a portfolio of your artwork, or links to other people’s artwork you enjoy

elaborate lies and hoaxes (maybe even a whole arg)

useful survival tips specific to where you come from (personal recipes, trustworthy doctors, good music venues, eats that are both good and affordable, hot goss on who’s up to what horseshit on your city council/school board/university faculty/whatever)

original fiction that noone on social media cares about because people only like and reblog about what they already know. explain your entire fictional country that you wanna put in a real novel one day.

making people not have to dig through your tags to know where to find all your dracula meta (including the shipping manifesto you wrote 10 years ago)

speaking of fandom, you know that one piece of media you love that nobody else seems to have heard of? you post into the void and nobody reblogs or likes? nothing in the tags? Yea. Built a shrine to that explaining why EVERYONE should care about it. tell me how that pirated copy of Telefang made you the human being you are today

explaining your personal philosophies on life without worrying that you will get reblogged by randos calling you cringe

just generally being fucking a weird, unrelatable, unmarketable, extremely specific ass human being

aniamra

*bangs pots and pans* BUILDING A WEBSITE IS THE BEST THING EVER!

Are you pumped at the idea of making a website from the words above but don’t know how to make one?

For absolute beginners that have no money, Blue Griffon has a free GUI HTML editor which can be much less intimidating than going pure HTML. But if you’re comfortable coding it without a visual interface I personally like Brackets best. (it’s got color and image previews and tag autofill/suggestion that makes scripting faster) But if you have money to spend, PineGrow is the best option I’ve found for a professional-grade GUI website editor and they have one time license purchases. If you’ve done any customizing of the CSS for Tumblr, there’s going to be a lot you’ll find familiar.

Don’t know where to start? I’d suggest a template but this one is more difficult. Back In My Day™, you used to be able to find website templates all over the place, now they’re almost impossible to find ones that are simple to use for beginners but this site is still alive and has free-to-use basic HTML templates and website graphics to give you an idea of what you’re looking at vs the code used to make it show. Some more advanced templates that aren’t on a dubious website can be found here. Or just steal code from other people’s websites. I’m serious! Most of what I learned was from opening up the View Source on a website and copying the CSS scripts to pull it apart. (now if it’s PHP, ASP, CGI or anything like that, you’re not going to see it, just HTML, CSS, and some JS.)

As far as where to put your site, Neocities is the clear choice for any beginner. They only allow HTML hosting so you’re not going to be able to use anything that requires a database or advanced languages but if you’re cutting your teeth, you risk nothing by starting a free account there. (and it allows sexually explicit content as well, just make sure your account is marked correctly) But if you want something more robust than that, you’re going to have to pay for it. You’ve probably head of places like Dreamhost, Bluehost, and HostGator, but I’m going to point out AMS Hosting because they got this 2.50 USD a month deal that includes Email and hosting multiple websites and that is unheard of at that price. And if the site you’re building fits the requirements listed you may be able to get free hosting from here. But that does mean you’ll need to get a Domain Name (NameCheap is pretty good) or a free subdomain if you’re feeling adventurous.

But if you really want to use a Website Builder I guess you could do the Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Zyro thing. (both Wix and Zyro are the only ones that allow sexually explicit stuff.) I just think building it by hand gives you more control and freedom. (And before anyone says anything, carrd is not a website, it is a single page with its other ‘pages’ hidden. Fine for a small amount of info, but very difficult to use if you have a lot to share.)

gittetj

And if you think it’d be cool to dig around in the code you start out with to alter it, or even write something from scratch, there’s a ton of free resources out there for learning basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

For example, I think Codecademy’s tutorials are pretty good for people who’ve never tried coding before since they’re very learn-by-doing. You can type along in the browser and immediately see what happens when you change your code. Here’s one where you learn basic HTML

For various technical reasons, it’s getting harder and harder to find websites you can easily “steal” from, so it helps to have a loose understanding of what you’re working with when trying to cobble together scraps of different templates and bits you did manage to copy from somewhere or other

froghearted

Otherhearted Ask Game

I've never seen an ask game for hearttypes specifically so I wanted to make one! I did my best! Be sure to specify which hearttype you want to know about if they have more than one!

1. What about you and your hearttype are similar?

2. What about you and your hearttype are different?

3. How did you discover (and confirm) your hearttype?

4. Any headcanons/theories about your hearttype?

5. Any habits you picked up from your hearttype, or any you had before you even knew about it?

6. Any hearttypes that developed from a different thing like a synpath or copinglink?

7. Anything you personally don't like about your hearttype? Could be personality, something that happened/happens to them, how they function, etc.

8. Are you a "deep longing to be", "deep admiration and empathy of", "ideal self", "should have been", and/or other experience 'hearted person?

9. Would you take your hearttype's physical body? Anything you'd change?

10. Do you experience shifts of your hearttypes?

11. Any hearttypes you're questioning at the moment?

12. Do you ever feel desires/urges or emotions that are due to or influenced by your hearttype?

13. What was the hearttype that took you the longest to confirm?

14. What's a song that reminds you of your hearttype?

paper-mario-wiki

Visit Original Link

I really dislike Kawaii Future Bass or whatever this genre is called so I made it sound shitty with a bunch of random samples.

writing-prompt-s

You are a long forgotten god. A small girl leaves a piece of candy at your shrine, and you awaken. Now, you must do everything to protect your High Priestess, the girl, and her entire kindergarten class, your worshipers.

dycefic

The stone was immovable, in the past. Indestructible. A spire of granite no mortal hand could even alter.

But mortal hands build clever tools, and these last few hundred years I have lived in dread that they will break this, my sacred stone, the last link that preserves me, a faint shadow of a forgotten god. While my sacred stone stands, I do not, quite, fade away.

I am in a park, now, clipped and tamed, my forests long gone. But they landscape around me and my stone, admiring its beauty, so I do not complain. While they take pleasure in the stone, I am safe.

There is a playground a few lengths away, and the laughter and happy shrieking rouse me a little from my sleep. I watched over children, once. It’s nice to hear them again.

But I don’t truly awaken until the Offering is made.

Little hands touch my stone, with curiosity and a sort of reverence that only the very young feel now. For a child young enough the world is still a mystery, and even an ancient granite stone provokes wonder. So I stir, when she touches the stone, becoming hazily aware.

And then, solemnly, the child places a tiny colourful object in the roughly shaped alcove in the stone’s side, the place where offerings were laid two thousand years ago and more, and I awaken. Many people have put things in that alcove, of course… to take pictures, usually, these days, or putting a lost object where it will be seen. Merely to place an object in the alcove isn’t enough. A true offering is given as a gift, with intent.

As this is.

Keep reading

hjarta-deactivated20260124

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

scienceoftheidiot

They existed *before beetles*

somethingaboutsomethingelse

spacedandelions

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

ignescent

https://xkcd.com/1259/

Bee Orchid

sepdet

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.

kaelio

Recipes from Portland's famous but long-closed Rheinlander restaurant. This cookbook was produced in a limited window before Chef Mager's death. All of these fucking slap.

ladyvean

For my fellow vegan/vegetarians, these sound scrumptious and look pretty simple to make substitutions!

kaelio

just to be clear

markv5

припарковались

oarfjsh

“parked”

vodcar

when the capitalists die out either thru global warming or revolution will we be able to start homegrown internet

vodcar

been reading about dual power and how to grow my own tomatoes and i’m wondering how and if we’ll be able to start commie internet lol

like obviously the internet is this huge electric capitalist controlled hardware infrastructure thing so after all that shuts down is there a way to do it ourselves lol

vodcar

i want to come home from a hard day on the communal allotment, kiss my Wife, crank up my generator, and start sharing meams!

anarchopuppy

GOOD NEWS: the homegrown commie internet is in the works! Across the world, people fighting against censorship and for a more democratic internet are building mesh networks (meshnets) of long-range wifi (LoRa)

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing

You can read more about this kind of stuff here (or here if it’s cloudy in Barcelona)!

4amsnow

there’s also the work being done by the DCPT, left-behind Detroiters meshing together their neighborhoods to share overpriced high-speed connections among the community and producing these good good educational documents, especially this rad resource page. building meshnets to share a global uplink is very similar to building meshnets for the purpose of intracommunication and these resources are useful in both cases

anarchopuppy

I’ve had a couple people ask about how to join/organize something like this, which is great! The best list of active projects I know of is here, though you should also do a search online if you don’t see one in your area in case they missed it. For those without a nearby group, put a pin here and try contacting nearby pins as well - you can use the instructions on buildyourowninter.net as well as the DCPT’s resources as linked above to get set up!

Please reblog this version so others can get involved!

queeranarchism

Never ever turn off your phone: rethinking security culture in the era of big data analysis.

Back in the 80′s if you were a pissed off anarchist that wanted to burn down a building, you probably checked your home for listening devices and made a plan. If you were the same kind of pissed off anarchist in the late 90′s, you turned off your phone and encrypted your online traffic. In the 2020′s we’re gonna have to change our strategies once again. Intelligence gathering has adapted and so we must adapt too.

To get a head start at this, let’s look at how big data analysis is being used. To do this, we’ll need to talk about 3 things: metadata, patterns and networks. Those sound boring and complicated but I’m not a techy and I won’t bore you with tech language, I’ll keep it as easy as I can.

Metadata: In the context of online activity, ‘content’ means ‘the message you send’ and ‘metadata’ means ‘everything other than the content’. So, for example, if you send your friend a text about lunch, the content might be “Let’s go out for lunch” and the metadata might be “Message send at 01/04/2018 11.32 from phone 0478239055 to phone 079726823 using Signal”.

This information is registered by your phone even if the app encrypts your actual message. Your metadata is very badly protected by technology and very badly protected by the law. No matter which country you are in, most of your metadata if freely available to intelligence agencies regardless of whether you are a suspect in anything.

Patterns: Whether you realize it or not, your metadata has a pattern. If you have a daily job you might have a very consistent pattern, if you do not your pattern might be more flexible but you have a pattern. If someone wanted to know the rhythm of your day, they could very easily do so because your pattern is in the metadata.

For example: Maybe you use the wifi at your favourite bar on most Sunday nights until about midnight, you wake up around 10 AM and check your Signal, you use your public transport card to get to class every Monday afternoon and you spend on average 1 hour on Tumblr twice a day. All this is part of your pattern.

Networks: You have online networks. Your facebook friends, the people in your phone adress book, the dropbox you share with coworkers, everyone who bought online tickets to the same punk band you attended, the people using the same wifi points as you. Take your networks, combine them with other people’s networks, and clusters reveal themselves. Your work community, your family, your activist scene, etc.

If you are in an anarchist community that will probably be abundantly clear from all your minor network connections like going to the same band and knowing the same people as other anarchists. Even if you never liked an anarchist facebook page or pressed ‘going’ on an anarchist facebook event, your network is hard to hide.

Now, let’s say you commit a crime,

the kind that would result in some serious research. Let’s say that on Sunday night 3 AM, you are your friends go out and burn down a nazi’s house. It’s obvious that anarchists did it but there are no other clues. You use traditional style security culture: you burn your notes, you are careful not to communicate about your plans near technology and you do not leave physical traces.

But because you commited the crime that night, your metadata will vary strongly from your usual rhythm: you stay at your usual bar until 2 AM to wait for your friends, you do not wake up at 10 AM in the morning so you do not check your Signal or Tumblr until 1 PM. You do not go to class. Your metadata pattern is very different from your usual pattern. The metadata patterns of your friends are different too. If one of you is clumsy, they might generate a super suspicious metadata signal like a phone being switched off at 2.30 AM and activated at 4AM. You wouldn’t be the first.

If I wanted to solve this crime using data analysis, what I would do is:

let a piece of software run a pattern analysis of the local anarchist scene to generate the 300 people most connected to the anarchist scene.

let a second piece of software analyse the metadata patterns of those 300 people over the last months and identify the biggest metadata variations around Sunday night as well as very suspicious metadata activity

Illiminate pattern variations with an obvious cause or an obvious alibi (people who are on vacation, people who are in the hospital, people who lost their job, etc).

Do indepth research into the ones that remain.

Which is how, out of a massive amount of people that I couldn’t possible all listen to at the same time, I could quickly identify a few to monitor closely. This is how I could find and catch you.

So, now what?

If traditional security culture doesn’t protect us as well as it used to, how do we adapt? Well, I don’t have all the answers but for a start, I’d say: know your network + know your pattern.

In the case of the crime above: leave the bar at midnight, return home and put your phone on your bedside table. Check the apps you check before going to bed and set your alarm to 10AM. Return to the bar without your phone. Commit the crime. Wake up at 10AM and check your Signal. Drag yourself to class or ask a comrade to make the trip with your travel card and do not use technology in your home while the comrade is taking your travel card to class. Stick to your pattern. Never ever turn off your phone.

You might also be able to manipulate your network but that seems much harder to do. Not having a smartphone and dropping out of all social activity online is a big commitment. Knowing your data pattern and making sure your data pattern doesn’t look out of the ordinary? Much less commitment.

Some of the old rules will still apply: don’t talk about a crime around devices with microphones, don’t brag after a succesful action, etc. Other rules, like ‘turn off your phone when planning an illegal act’ need to change because their metada looks too out of the ordinary. No one switches off their phone anymore. We look suspicious as fuck when we do.

This is just one idea on how we could update our security culture. There are probably other people with other, better ideas about updating our security culture. If we start the conversation, we may get somewhere.

Finally: we need to keep adapting.

As technology changes, more information is becoming available, including data we have very little control over. Smart-tv’s and ads in public spaces that listen to every word we say and the tone of our voice when we say it are examples. Data analysis projects are currently using license plate reading software on security footage to map the travel patterns of cars. A lot suggests they may soon be ready to do the same with face recognition, at which point the presence of our face in public space becomes part of our metadata. More information means more accurate data analysis. Our metadata may soon be too vast annd too complex to completely map and mirror. Which means we will need to adapt our counter measures if you want to hide something.

How do we keep it all under the radar? I don’t know. But let’s try to figure this shit out. These are some first thoughts about what security culture should look like in the age of modern big data analysis and I’d be very happy for any insights from comrades that have some thoughts on this.

Also: feel free to distribute and rework these words without credit.

rabbitindisguise

You can work silence into patterns though. Like, say for example you go on your computer to do stuff for hours- or read stuff, or do homework. Start turning off your phone randomly. It will just look like you’re developing habits. Or heck, make your phone die in a place without a wall plug.

Also periodically go through permissions, delete apps that use voice permissions that shouldn’t, download apps to force permissions.

queeranarchism

To be honest, I think if you turned off your phone regularily you would stick out because the only people who do that are activists. Your own pattern would be consistent but it’d be so different from the general population that it would raise eyebrows. So it is bothmore effective and less work to simply leave your phone on but make sure it is not with you when you plan and do actions.

whysperingwoods

The FBI has been known to use “blackout” periods as signs of when to try and associate criminal activity (for an actual reference, I remember they used it in the Isreal Keys murders). It’s way easier to rely on your pattern and replicate it than to try and create a blackout habit with no pattern, not to mention you’re really just opening up the potential for them to associate you with other crimes related to your other blackout patterns if you end up going that route.

doomsdayrainbows

cyberpunk resistance organization / but this is FUCKING IMPORTANT

flakmaniak

So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.

But specifically… I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one’s own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between “things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)” (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and “things on the web” (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I’m interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

Specific programs can access the internet; that’s fine. But my OS’s functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.

hotvampireadjacent

#someone in the notes mentioned shut up windows 10.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

i haven’t used this myself but i’ll be looking into it

self-critical-automaton

Literally spent multiple hours lobotomizing my Windows reinstall when I upgraded recently, the amount of awful shit they had in nowadays makes me long for the age of win98, when software was merely bad, rather than actively harmful.

leylin3

the exact setting in shutup10 for this issue is “Disable extension of Windows 10 search with Bing” it’s at the very bottom under misc.

hunter-rodrigez

There are 2 programs that will turn Windows 10 from an advertising riddled, bloated mess into a useful tool.

10AppsManager

With one click, this will remove ALL THE BLOATWARE Windows comes with. Seriously, you need NONE OF THESE apps, and if you do, you can just uninstall all the ones you don’t need individually.

Winaero Tweaker

This program will give you almost complete control over Windows 10’s behavior. Disabling the web search in the start menu, op rightfully complained about, is just one of the many things this thing can do

For example, with a single setting you can turn off any ads from microsoft, system-wide

It is a powerful tool, but it can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily every single setting comes with an explanation about what it actually does, and most settings can be easily reversed.

manga-and-stuff

Tech tip from my personal blog

bonefarm

I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.

creekfiend

Making accessibility devices evil is just like so Disney villain

prismatic-bell

My mom is blind and without her Alexa literally could not cook, go shopping, or do a million other things. Because Alexa is voice-activated, she doesn’t have to fumble with knobs or write a list she can’t read.

I will never forgive Amazon for how much I hate a tool that allows my mother to live her life.

olivia0823yxa

Open source and secure alternatives for some of these:

- Voice activated smart speaker: Mycroft (can be purchased as a complete unit, or DIYed with a Raspberry Pi and microphone+speaker array) https://mycroft.ai/

- Smart Home automation: home-assistant (cannot be purchased, originally developed by MIT) https://www.home-assistant.io/

- Zigbee (the wireless protocol for smart lights and other smart devices) bridge: Conbee II (this takes the place of a Phillips Bridge, for instance. And is in many cases better because it works with all brands of smart light that use Zigbee–which is almost all of them, including the cheap IKEA ones–and also works for devices that aren’t lights. Cannot really be DIYed because Zigbee needs special hardware, not just software) https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2

I don’t know any alternatives for locks, vacuums, thermometers, or anything else sadly. None of these are that difficult to set up with just a little bit of tech know-how, and extensive guides already exist for almost all problems you could run into because the open-source community is almost psychotically dedicated to its projects, unlike Amazon, Google, and Apple where it’s practically impossible to get help with any problem that’s even slightly unusual.

bonefarm

Oh thank you!! These area really neat

ryncoon

Oh thank you so much! My grandmother has an alexa and it’s really improved her enjoyment of life, but I hate even talking around it. It’s linked to my amazon and I’ve gotten suggestions based on things it’s heard. That wigs me out so much.

seperis

Can confirm, Home Assistant is amazing; I transitioned everything I could for it to control and right now that’s literally everything. It can also be integrated with other voice-activated smart speakers than Alexa as well as Alexa. It also comes WITH an Add-on called Ada for voice. So far, there is very goddamn little on the market that isn’t either officially supported or community supported and stuff is being added at the rate of literally weekly. If you do scripting and have a taste for diy, you can be Dr. Doom and your home is your supervillain lair.

Because of the market, most smart appliances and devices are Alexa enabled, but unless they’re made by Amazon, that doesn’t mean they’re Alexa exclusive and even then, someone is hacking their way into the API and pulling the endpoints. Right now, the only thing I can’t work in here (yet) is my Nest Thermostat and HA is working on adding that back in right now.

Home Assistant is fully compatible with the zwave and zigbee standards as well as wifi and bluetooth; you can directly control zwave and zigbee items or link up your existing hubs for it to control like SmartThings.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

It can be run in several ways; I’ve done it on a Pi 4 both 4G and 8G and a VM on my Ubuntu server and while the Pi is recommended–I recommend it too for convenience–it’s one of several possibilites. Currently I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4b 8G with a solid state hard drive instead of SD card. You can purchase z-wave and zigbee modules to add to it for direct control of z-wave and zigbee devices or use your existing hubs (or both). Beneath the HA umbrella is also links to the blueprints of building your own zigbee and zwave devices with Arduino just to start that HA can also control. I’m not saying you’re going to be building your own smart thermostat on the weekend, but apparently, some people are doing just that.

This does not require a high tech start value; most integrations are automatic, you just say yes and login and let it happen, it even creates your Dr. Doom dashboard with TABS.

Again, you DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING BUT COMPUTERS EXIST AND HOW TO CLICK YES AND NO TO USE THIS. For me, it was actually easier than a lot of setups with shit I had to pay money for that said they were easy. This is open source, but that is not synonymous with user unfriendly; a lot of work was done to make this accessible to the casual automation user. The UI is card based; when you first start, HA does it all for you and creates discrete cards that control different things on your dashboard; no effort on your part, you can turn on and off any light in here or turn them red while someone is in the bathroom because that’s fucking funny. But as you get more comfortable, you can start to create your own configurtions, take direct control of the UI, and mix it up; it’s up to you.

But.

If you are a DIYer or just want to be or never knew you wanted to be but feel the vibes and need a place to start, this is the perfect sandbox for learning and escalating. There are a metric ton of tutorials, community add-ins, and message boards to consult. If you can imagine it, it can be done and its likely someone is working on version eight right now. The primary languages are python and javascript with yaml for configuration files for DIY. You can create your own layouts, your own sensors, and your own cards if you don’t like what they have. If you’re like me, you may also go in to community addins and add new stuff to their code so it runs like you want it to; it’s all up to you.

I am not a dev pro, I’m a QC analyst with a scripting hobby; I do this quite literally for fun on weekends or when I’m bored or anxious and need to soothe myself with coding.

Here is the home page of my MULTI-TAB dashboard. Yes, that is a floorplan of my apartment and those glowy orange and dark grey bits are things that I can turn on and off from the comfort of my bed. It’s fun.

I seriously would kill to get more people into this and have someone to play with and enjoy the feeling of controlling all within my (apartment) kingdom with but a single command. Dear God tell me if you’re into it; we’ll be best friends and hopefully you’ll be okay with that.

Here’s an intro to Home Assistant I wrote back in September in DW when I first started, with screenshots. You’ll also be able to see my Dash when I first started compared to the dash above. Feel free to ask me anything from the perspective of someone not a dev professional, an engineer, or even has a degree in anything, much less anything like this, and yet is a QC lead who codes their own testing tools and for whom this is just something cool and fun.

Home Assistant: An Introduction

youcandalekmyballs

this is cool af! reblogging for anyone interested in automation but not bezos!

thatautisticadhdfeel

Concept: an apocalyptic or post apocalyptic tv show centred on a group of disabled protagonists

Must include:

-enough details about how they survive that no one can call it “unrealistic”

-mental and physical disabilities

-a character who isn’t necessarily contributing to the survival of the group, but is not abandoned or looked down upon

-at least one character whose disability is actually less of a problem for them now that the world is ending/ended (example: autistic character who used to be constantly overstimulated but no longer is)

Optional features:

-abled person says “the only disability in life is a bad attitude” and gets told where to stuff it

-creatively weaponized mobility aids/assistive devices

-character who abled people think isn’t worth helping because of their disability, but actually has at least one skill essential to the survival of the group

-every time an abled person says something ignorant, all present disabled people look into the camera like they’re on the office

trash-slvt

- character who only survived the initial apocalyptic event because they had an assistive device which just so happened in that one circumstance to give them an advantage over everyone else

-the abled camp wearing rags and eating meat on sticks cooked over a crude fire. pans over to our heroes and they have perfect clothes, a variety of food and also music.

“what? how did you do that?” “well, jane’s special interest is the medieval production of cloth and, like 8 of us can sew. Turns out those of us who can’t go out much develop a LOT of hobbies.”

luidilovins

A character who scares everyone when a zombie bites them but literally every one of their limbs are amputated.

shiisiln

“They…. they bit Gina.”

*Gina pulls of prosthetic arm* “It’s ok guys! They just got my decoy.”

punks-kissed-by-sunlight

(vibrates at the speed of sound)

I love this a normal amount

polyamorousmisanthrope

Defying Doomsday is an anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the “fittest” who survive – it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when everything is lost. In stories of fear, hope and survival, this anthology gives new perspectives on the end of the world, from authors Corinne Duyvis, Janet Edwards, Seanan McGuire, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Stephanie Gunn, Elinor Caiman Sands, Rivqa Rafael, Bogi Takács, John Chu, Maree Kimberley, Octavia Cade, Lauren E Mitchell, Thoraiya Dyer, Samantha Rich, and K L Evangelista.

thatautisticadhdfeel

*reblogs this version again in case you haven’t seen it*

mostlybats-partiallyrats

Oh fuck, there was an account I follow on Instagram….. Shit

They wrote this short novel which was this concept

It was five autistic teen-agers in the apocalypse (written by an actual autistic person dw)

Fuck I can’t remember what it was called

It’s Underdogs, by Chris Bonnello

Hell yes

hell yes!!!

!!!

Our Kickstarter ends in only 55 hours. We have also unlocked two free bonus novellas for all backers, if that sweetens the deal.

Back here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/twelfthplanetpress/rebuilding-tomorrow

janekfan

Neat!! :D I love me a zombie apocalypse!

mightyoctopus

[ID 1: Cover of Defying Doomsday

2: Insta post by AutisticNotWeird of a man holding up two books. One is titled “Under Dogs by Chris Bonnello” the other “Under DOgs: Tooth and Nail by Chris Bonnello”

3: Comment by inc-b: Just in case no one has mentioned already but a follow up compilation to Defying Doomsday called Rebuilding Tomorrow is going to be up for support on backerkit soon! See backerkit.com.au/call_to_action/501918d3-bdb1-4fa2-9fe1-1f6ec89cf5c00/landing Please back it! /END ID]

As far as I can tell, that link is broken, but you can pre-order the book on backerkit here: https://rebuilding-tomorrow.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/

cavern-of-remembrance-deactivat

nintendo is taking down the 3ds and wii u eshops next year

and they had this lovingly made totally not taunting message to leave about their virtual console legacy they’re destroying

(that they’ve, fun fact, taken down from their site now :])

cavern-of-remembrance-deactivat

this pisses me off so much because nintendo is AWARE we want their legacy of games put on their best selling system (literally, outside of the combined sales of every nintendo DS, lite, DSi, and XL, and the GB and GBC’s combined sales, the switch is at the top)

and yet they still do not care. it’s not about them not having this content either because 1 the wii u vc and 3ds vc. exist. and 2, even for stuff that isnt on the virtual console yet, we’ve been given internal proof from previous big nintendo leaks (namely the gigaleak) that nintendo does not mess around when it comes to keeping backups of their older content. its not a lack of money either, nintendo is literally one of the richest companies in japan. it’s just. a lack of caring

cavern-of-remembrance-deactivat

last thing im gonna say about this is that the 3DS and Wii U both have excellent, actively updated guides for softmodding them to run homebrew. the Wii and DSi do as well!

on top of that the emulation general wiki is an amazing resource for emulators for pretty much every generation of game system, including emulators for non game systems like arcade hardware, PCs, and mobile phones, along with emulators on game systems! so check the wiki out if you’re interested!

susurrationofthewind

And if/when you do softmod your 3DS, gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a site that safely and reliably hosted games for it, where you could even download them directly to your 3DS through a QR code?

queencatradora

i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”

queencatradora

it was in awe lmao

then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like

queencatradora

oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and

story time

okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.

to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.

i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.

i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.

all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.

so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?

however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”

LITERALLY the words that he said

which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.

my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.

so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”

bleachtrippin

This sounds like an X-files episode

ssunsh1nee

Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.

I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.

Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.

So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.

queencatradora

………………..yeah, you guys caught me

i grew up in tracy

also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true

what-even-is-thiss

Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.

lincoln--22

Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

worldheritagepostorganization

World Heritage Post

not going to delete this blog but I remade cause I can't figure out my login info for this one and I want to log in to my new blog on my phone but since this is the last place I'm logged in here then that'll be it.

New blg is run a bit different, we each have our own side blogs n the main that follows n likes is mostly empty. for now the icon is the same as this one so if you see that in your notes that's me.

I'm gonna q a bunch of my drafts n some of my likes here and then that will be it for this blog.

cassie-darlin

btw you can use whatever gender seasonings you want. paint your nails, wear breast forms, wear a binder, pack, tuck, dress however you want, whatever. you are adding ingredients to your gender soup.

the-conquest-of-shred

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