bryanthompson

as long as it gets those blob dollars!

I used Mosaic Magic back in my high school journalism class to design a yearbook cover 20+ years ago! Turned out great - it won some kind of award iirc.

Area51/Rampart here. It was a better, simpler time.

One really nice use case for dithering that I've found is for building graphics for 8-bit (Pico-8 and Picotron) games and toys.

I made a ruby script that can take a graphic and scale it to whatever size, then it uses a closest color match to substitute colors for the _very_ limited Pico* palette and applies dithering to make it look attractive. I like Stenberg the most, but have played with Atkinson and am still feeling around a bit.

Of all the IoT contraptions and ecosystems, I hate garage door openers the most. My opener came with some sort of goofy base unit where you can hit the "close door" button and it'll sound an alarm, trigger close, and then the happy little LED shows you that it is indeed, closed.

My solution, after looking into every off-the-shelf option, was to take an esp32 running esp32home + Home Assistant and hot wire it to buttons and status LEDs on a remote + base unit and stick it on the shelf in the garage. It's not pretty, but it works reliably.

The whole system is infuriating. I stay pretty well in one lane for what I want to watch, and if I _accidentally_ click on ONE music video, the whole feed is wrecked for months.

Almost all NFC you find these days is going to be a form of EMV and is encrypted.

There was a form of contactless magstripe (MSD) that was not encrypted and has been phased out of usage as of like, late 2019 via card update bulletins.

There are some reasons it still exists, however, it is no longer required and merchants/POS systems ought to start phasing it out.

In the US, the way we do tip on receipt is a lot more natural if you're asking for a signature. Without a signature, you're just handing someone a tip option, which is awkward with our current way of doing things.

Some merchants opt to keep signature enabled because it gives them a fuzzy feeling and it's a point of closure to a transaction.

Also interesting how there are such specific requirements at grocery stories. None of my US-based cards could be used in several grocery stores in the Netherlands. When the cashier looked at my cards, they immediately knew it was because I didn't support whatever networks they expect.

The liability shift in the US that affected most retailers occurred in October 2015 -- basically, merchants are and have been liable for fraud that occurs on swiped transactions. I'd be curious to find out how the example presented by the parent article could change this -- a valid-looking card that only has swipe would definitely be taken by a merchant for fraud, and if the card doesn't claim to be EMV-capable, it seems like this would not be the merchant's fault. I would think in 2020, however, a mag stripe only card would raise red flags with humans at the counter, but gift cards are this way, so perhaps they would just breeze right through.

Same here. I only follow woodworkers and immediately unfollow anyone who gets outside the line of what i want in my feed. It has allowed me to find interesting niches in the hobby and connect with people with 10x the skill who like teaching and talking about technique, but it takes a pretty brutal type of curating to keep the influencers & garbage out.

Proxima and Ultima by Stephen Baxter hit along this theme and are a pretty good read.

I'm one account flag change or one password reset from being in this exact situation, and it's terrifying. I have been an Audible customer since before Amazon bought them. Somewhere in their account aggregation process, I've ended up with at least four distinct logins for amazon that all use the same email address.

One email address... And i use one password for audble, one for amazon, one for aws, and one for amazon affiliate. If I password reset on any one of those services, my accounts are all bricks. I've made that mistake once and had to frantically call audible support & climb through the support chains until someone could basically undo my password change.

During the process, they offered to try and deduplicate my accounts, but I think we're going to need a team of senior-level DBAs to sort this shit out.

Did you ever play Defend the Temple scenario? Spent soo many hours on that one and I havent found anything close in new games. Really hope this gets released on time and someone makes a new DtT.