There are SUVs bigger than the Suburban.

Budgerigars (small parrots).

They’re active, smart, and social. They fly.

So I made them a flight cage that takes up most of the room they’re in. I’d prefer a full walk-in aviary, but don’t have room in my apartment.

Cleaning isn’t bad, I just shop-vac out the litter tray & refill it with a 20lb bag of corn cob bits. Fresh food in the mornings, take it out & replace with pellets around noon. Clean water daily. Millet treats when I let them out (about an hour per day to interact with them).

Feathers get everywhere when they molt. And feather dust. Their room has its own HEPA filter.

Vet appointments are more expensive for exotics than cats & dogs. There are fewer exotic vets, and I always go to a board certified avian vet. Boarding when I go on vacation is also more expensive (about $50/day), especially since they’re flighted.

They’re not anywhere near as loud or destructive as larger parrots, but that doesn’t mean they’re quiet. Just means they might not damage your hearing from the next room. They wake up with the dawn, and let you know about it.

They’re extremely sensitive to airborne toxins (avian respiration is rather different from mammalian). That means absolutely no teflon cookware use, no air fresheners, etc.

Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Or anything Ed Wood directed, really.

I use wireless headphones. However, I like to have non-distracting background music at work (open-plan office), and I won’t put my personal files (music) on a company-owned laptop. So I run a wire from my phone’s headphone jack to the laptop line-in, and can thus play music without any mixing of data.

It isn’t that hard.

A soft-G gif believer! Heretic!

This poem by Jef Raskin includes several dozen exceptions:

“I before E
Except after C,
Unless pronounced A
As in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh’”
Education is forfeit for reinforcing such rules!
Sound a feisty reveille while eyeing the schools!
Neither will our heirs be agreeing to deceptions
Once seeing, herein, these sufficient exceptions:
We were seized by a feeling
For fleeing on the ceiling
To a leisurely meal
With Keith, Sheila, and Neil
We drank madeira, so foreign, in steins
Along with a surfeit of weird blueish wines
Being foolish, took codeine, ate ancient proteins
Therein guaranteeing these ogreish scenes
Wherein we’re canoeing to a new sovereign state
While deicing a kaleidoscope on a hot jadeite plate
And kneeing obeisance to an overseeing king
Our plebeian lips kissed his counterfeit ring.
Then we unveiled their sleight-of-hand trick
Deifying a heifer, with effect atheistic
And falling from the heights with a loud seismic crunch
We reignited the nonpareils we had heisted for lunch.
So I before E
Except after C
Unless pronounced A?
False decreeing, I say!

Tasha Yar dies due to the Exxon Valdez.

I can’t remember a particular first game. Nethack, various MUDs, Descent 1, Starcraft, and Unreal Tournament (1999) were all reasonably early.

Descent 1 here. I miss that series.

Knot Tying. Sure, there’s an International Guild of Knot Tyers, but it’s a rather small group.

PC.

2TiB NVME, 1GiB EFI boot, the rest split between NTFS for Windows and ZFS for NixOS.

Second 2TiB NVME.

8TB HDD for bulk storage

24TB NAS (4x 8TB HDDs in a RAID-5) for storing raw photo backups.

Several flies will seek you out to bite you. Horse flies, for example. Not to mention ticks & lice & mites & other parasites.

Baud rate is the maximum number of transitions per second of the state of a transmission medium. Hz is the actual number of cycles per second, so it varies degending on the data transmitted. Bitrate is the number of bits transmitted per second.

Usually bits are transmitted in groups with some redundancy to allow errors to be corrected. E.g. early Ethernet used 8b/10b encoding; 8 bits of data were transmitted as a 10 bit “symbol”.

With a 1b/1b encoding baud rate would equal bit rate, but in practice that was essentially never used so the numbers woud diverge. Bitrate is more meaningful to the user.

SI and binary prefixes can be applied to baud, so kilobaud is certainly a word.

Yip. Everything is always going to shit, but manure makes good fertilizer.

I’ll add Matiz’s “Flor de Garum” to the list of good fish sauces. The herbs used give it some extra flavor. It’s a lot pricier in the US though!

Asafoetida. When uncooked, the smell fits the hype of the various names from around the world: stinking gum, devil’s dirt, devil shit, satan’s shit, etc. Cooked, it tastes and smells like a very umami cross between garlic & leeks. Common in Indian cuisine, particularly vegetarian dishes.

Also Photoshop, along with DxO PureRaw.

My camera supports 10 bit/channel color. My monitor does too. GIMP only supports sRGB, so 8-bit color. It’s unsuitable for editing, and even worse for printing.

Old-school forums have single points of contact. They’re no more private than ActivityPub, but a takedown to the admin is a takedown of all instances. Obviously public data can be cached or archived, so as always you have to send takedowns to every archival service, search engine, and any CDNs too.

The GDPR “applies” whenever an EU resident’s data is stored. The enforcement requires some presence in the EU by the entity storing the data. For multinational companies that means if they have any banking services there (e.g. taking payments from EU customers) they have a presence. For individual fediverse admins, that’s not necessarily a concern. At worst their instance’s domain would get blacklisted to EU users.

1: Anything that’s federated is public (to instance admins) and can’t be reliably deleted.

For ActivityPub, that’s pretty much everything except user account.

For email (SMTP) that’s sender, recipient, subject, and usually body.

Etc. Instance admins can log whatever they want. Laws like the GDPR or CCPA don’t apply to all instances.

2: User signup is much harder because choice paralysis over which instance to join often sets in. That in turn leads to default recommendations, resulting in centralization in a few instances. E.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.ml for lemmy, Gmail, Apple mail, MS Live email, AWS email options for email.

Rural Scotland has a lot of single-track roads. One lane for two directions, 50mph speed limit, with pull-offs every few hundred feet so cars can stop and let others pass. FUN™.