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in RWC, from Bernal Heights

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Last Notes

2026-10-20 15:31:59 UTC

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The need for a globally unique name is a high bar.
Suppose you and your friends form a band, and pick a cool name.
Pre-internet, if some other band in another city randomly had the same name, no big deal. Probably neither band is ever going to get famous anyway. And if one of them actually does, the other can quietly rename.
Nowadays everybody's on bandcamp etc so you need a band name literally nobody has ever thought of.

2026-09-24 00:02:47 UTC

Looks like there's a fire on #AngelIsland.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/117/323/077/654/610/055/original/ee92f9adb1e4cda8.jpg

2026-09-07 14:52:25 UTC

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I see different font sizes. I don't think this really came from a typewriter.

2026-06-09 17:26:51 UTC

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We have an anti-junk-fee law in California:
https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees
I think it does help.
It seems that restaurants are specifically excluded, which is BS. Admittedly nobody really *needs* to eat in a restaurant, but the law seems particularly relevant here since the model of "eat first, then get the bill" makes abuse so easy.

2026-06-03 15:44:41 UTC

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I know that most of the fretting about low birthrates is really just racists worried that there aren't enough *white* kids.
But still, I think there are a lot of people of all backgrounds who would like to have kids, or maybe stopping with one when they'd maybe like another, because they just can't see how to make it work. Which is really sad. The parasitic classes are *literally* killing our country to line their pockets.

2026-05-06 16:10:09 UTC

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When I first read about this, and saw headlines like "protests in front of synagogues", I thought that was going to far--until I read the details.
Protesting in front of a place of worship is not nice, but if the place of worship is being used as a real estate office for stolen land, it's not a place of worship, at least for the time.
And this is where I started to figure out that almost every time I heard about brazen antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, if you read the details, not really (in the US, at least).
And there really is brazen antisemitism out there. The fact that pro-Palestinian activists are being smeared as antisemitic is just obscuring that fact and making it harder to see, really.

2026-04-03 22:46:11 UTC

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It's 4,204,640 football fields to the moon.

2026-03-21 04:11:06 UTC

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These are really nice!

2026-03-14 16:05:45 UTC

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I take it these languages do not have geminates (doubled-up consonants)? Because if they did, the kk for uvular would get confusing.

2026-03-10 22:32:53 UTC

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"x" is the phonetic symbol for the ch sound in Loch Ness, or L'chaim, and that's usually how it's used in transcribing American Indian languages. "š" = sh (Linguists in other countries use a different standardized symbol for this sound; apparently, American linguistics picked up a few bits of Czech spelling from linguists fleeing the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia.
"q" is a k sound prounced farther back (or lower) in the throat (which is found in Arabic); if you're trying to incorporate these words into an English sentence you can just say "k". The apostrophe glued on top of another consonant means "glottalization". A glottal stop is the sound you make in the middle of "uh-oh". To make another consonant "glottalized" you either say that at the same time as the base consonant or afterwards.
That's probably more information than you want!
But the "x" and "š" are pretty easy to do.

2026-02-13 18:44:04 UTC

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I have, fortunately, managed to avoid ever having a political disagreement lead to a physical altercation.
It is good to explain what you mean, if people will listen.
If you want a world where Israelis and Palestinians are peaceful neighbors in whatever you want to call that place, say so.
If you identify as Zionist or anti-Zionist, people will assume you mean one group should have it exclusively. They don't want to talk to you, they want to be mad. Don't give them the excuse. If someone asks you if you're pro- or anti-Zionist, they're not looking for a conversation, they want a fight. Don't take the bait.

2026-02-13 18:14:01 UTC

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Zionist, and its prefixed derivatives, are just not useful words.
If you use them, people will intentionally misinterpret what you mean.

2026-01-06 21:47:43 UTC

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I took a sick cat to one of these private equity vets once.
When I saw the lobby I knew I was in for it, and sure enough....
They use all the same tricks to inflate bills that you're familiar with from human medicine.
You can't drive around town bargain hunting with a sick pet, but I did a little research and knew where the cheap/honest/locally-run vet was next time.
Gouging pet owners is one of the lowest forms of PE crap out there.
Everyone has some kind of limit on what they can pay for their furry family member's care, even if they haven't though it through. It sucks that someone might hit that point and think it's time to say goodbye, when a traditional vet across town might charge half as much.

2025-12-31 15:54:06 UTC

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So many textures! Board-and-batten, two kinds of corrugated metal roofing. And I think the second barn/shed/garage peeking around from behind may actually be partly log cabin construction? Or at least heavy stacked-up timbers.

2025-12-20 07:10:17 UTC

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It was worse than I even thought.
Still, lots of interesting things going on here.
I know we've all been talking about vaccines but I'm not sure what part of this decrease is due to that. I suppose better nutrition and overall medical care helped too.
And what happened in the 1870's and 80's?
There's a bump around 1920--was that the Spanish flu?
Interesting that the 1930's, despite economic hardship, child mortality continued to decline.
But I also, if I'm reading this correctly, it was still somewhere around 2-3% in 1970. That's my cohort. I had no idea.

2025-12-15 04:25:24 UTC

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"Business heroes" is not a thing.

2025-10-03 20:19:38 UTC

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It's a secret benefit of biking. You find stuff! I have a couple of nice mugs, and some books, and the best was a set of TOS trading cards. Including a gorn!

2025-09-11 05:11:25 UTC

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There was a group (in Canada, I think) that methodically studied techniques that can subvert oppressive regimes.
One of the most effective tactics is to protest in ways that make the government look ridiculous in suppressing.
One example was to paint slogans on trash cans so the cops have to haul away trash cans.
Here we have another brilliant example.

2025-07-23 00:59:23 UTC

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Thx!
Oh, I linked to that Wikipedia page... because I wrote it :) But here's another better page with lots of pictures:
https://www.santacruztrains.com/2020/12/streetcars-watsonville-transportation.html
Wikipedia is great but one kind of annoying thing is they'll only let you add pictures to a page if you can really document that it's in public domain.
Obviously if a picture of a railway that went out of business in 1905 has to be in public domain, right? But they want a paper trail.
So I can't just upload a cool picture like this (I have other, non-watermarked sources) to the wiki page.
Oh well.
Not wanting to get sued is legit, I suppose.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/899/816/263/904/552/original/3a26479ae834d028.jpg

2025-07-22 22:35:52 UTC

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That first picture is a piece of ground I did some research into. A very long time ago there was a trolley line from #Watsonville to the shore. It went right next to that straight road you can see here. And just before it got to the ocean it veered off to the north (right). You can still see a curving road where it went (almost all the way to the water in this picture).
#WatsonvilleCA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watsonville_Traction_Company

2025-06-21 14:51:40 UTC

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This sort of thing always makes me torn between wishing someone would fix it up better and thinking it's beautiful like it is.

2025-06-10 15:18:14 UTC

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I can confirm this--flew into LAX last night, took the light rail to where I was going, everything's totally normal.

2025-03-21 17:50:35 UTC

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That's a great picture.
Where is this particular Fox theater, btw?

2025-03-09 16:39:39 UTC

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Before I scrolled down and saw who Summer was, I thought this post was a poem.

2025-01-29 16:35:28 UTC

Often in photography, you see something that would make a good picture but the sun is in the wrong place. This happens a lot when you're trying to do #streetphotography. In a dense urban area, some places only get direct sunlight during short windows of the day.
It would be handy if there was an app or a website that would give you the position of the sun in the sky at a given time and place, so you could tell the optimal time to go back to something you wanted to shoot. Such a thing must exist but I haven't found exactly this yet. Does anyone have any recommendations?

2025-01-14 01:42:37 UTC

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You know, it would be kind of fun if there was a tradition of each owner recording their name (and maybe city) in a book.
There could be "ex libris" stickers with a bunch of blank lines.

2024-12-31 19:55:46 UTC

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Paywalled, but I take it the point of this article is that healthcare costs make running a small business, like a restaurant, even more precarious?

2024-12-08 05:27:12 UTC

Next #KodakBrownie entry for the #ShittyCamaraChallenge
Sand Harbor Beach, NV side of Lake Tahoe.
#filmisnotdead #bnw #blackandwhite #120film #mediumformat
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/615/540/414/483/605/original/7d0f46aa9c43b7c3.png

2024-12-08 05:25:16 UTC

Took this back in October. I let a couple of rolls from my #kodakbrownie pile up before I got down to my fav lab.
This is the view out the rear car of the #Amtrak #CaliforniaZephy, passing through #Truckee, CA.
#filmisnotdead #bnw #blackandwhite #120film #mediumformat
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/615/530/680/512/634/original/8690329a0e799748.png

2024-12-04 17:55:02 UTC

I've been looking into building an rpi0-based handheld #RetroGaming console. (Or, I should say, *another* one, because my son & I built a PiGrrl Zero, which actually worked for a couple hours, but which was such a finnicky build I haven't ever had the guts to disassemble it and debug.)
There are kits for doing this, like the PiGrrl, and you can find various people showing off their builds on the internet, but basic explanations of how one might build a homebrew console from scratch is hard to come by. (I can't copy someone's build from a video; I need a schematic!!!)
But I just finally found a source:
https://bytesnbits.co.uk/raspberry-pi-powered-handheld-retro-games-console-project/
Now this is what I've been looking for:
(I feel like this is yet another case of "the information is out there, but internet search is broken"--I bet you the Google of 10 years ago would have taken me right to this).
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/595/826/302/945/937/original/17e3dd4c5b9c10cd.png

2024-12-03 17:32:13 UTC

What we build all this stuff to do...
#RetroGaming
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/590/081/019/423/756/original/da61426e3872d2d4.jpg

2024-11-27 05:48:33 UTC

Hi there #RetroGaming fedis!
I'm looking into building a hand-held console for emulation of old consoles.
My son & I once build an Adafruit PiGrrl Zero. It was a finnicky build, to say the least, and after it stopped working, I never got around to trying to fix it. I'm happy to have something a little less polished and compact, but where everything's accessible and debuggable.
This may lead to building another Pi Zero based handheld. One thing I'm trying to work out is if I can bypass RetroPie, because I find it a pain to configure, and a lot of overhead. I'm pretty centered on GameBoy family games, so if it's possible to launch straight into an emulator, that would be good. Maybe mGBA can do this? Also, if it's possible to work with a more minimal OS than full Raspbian, it'll be nice to turn the thing on and get playing without having to wait for a full Unix system boot.

2024-11-25 06:39:27 UTC

A fun soldering project I'm working on with my kid, a DIY game controller. It'll be equivalent to an #SNES controller. It's not exactly an original idea because I'm copying somebody on YouTube. But that poster did not share the crucial detail of a schematic, so I had to reverse engineer how to wire it. Also varying from the original by using a miniature surface-mount joystick on the left side instead of just buttons (serving the function of a DPad).
Should work well for #RetroPie emulation.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/542/205/480/566/335/original/a5eca3d82407d417.jpg

2024-11-21 19:41:35 UTC

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Obsessively looking for a good shots when you're walking around can actually increase your appreciation for the world, even when you don't take a picture.
You will see things you wouldn't have otherwise, and recording it would be great, but it's OK if you just see it for yourself, too.

2024-11-21 03:28:45 UTC

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Cool!
https://www.gocomics.com/little-nemo/2014/10/15
Now I need one of those monitors that can rotate into portrait mode.

2024-10-19 23:15:19 UTC

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Don't know about colors, but those are great names for *bands*!

2024-10-10 07:05:43 UTC

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Archive.org has a bit of geocities: https://archive.org/web/geocities.php

2024-08-13 03:51:15 UTC

This is my photography rig. #KodakBrownie
#ShittyCamaraChallenge
#believeinfilm
#FilmMastodon
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/112/952/667/848/962/883/original/9e43956f3bf3152d.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/112/952/672/635/912/960/original/ab36f6eb1fd2ffa1.png