benbrown

A goat, screaming at the moon.

old internet. grew up on gopher and irc, never wanted to leave. made a bunch of weird stuff. corpo drone day job. adult goth. austin, tx. my pronouns are he/him.

before you follow me, set up your profile with an image and a bio.

Major interests include #Zines #Austin #Libraries #PostPunk #FactoryRecords #Comics #ShippingContainers #MaxHeadroom

personal web: https://benbrown.com
finger: https://happynetbox.com
pixel art: https://makepixelart.com
My sci-fi book: https://shop.benbrown.com

Public Key

npub1appr2cyfal8j4s8cl5mk8jcfvez5t6xyh2y2vzsjjh8vuhkryk2sw7pmrd

NIP-05 Address

benbrown_at_hackers.town@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswss34vzy7lne2cru06dmrevykv329arzt4z9xpgfftnkwtmpjt9g34lgv5

Author Public Key

npub1appr2cyfal8j4s8cl5mk8jcfvez5t6xyh2y2vzsjjh8vuhkryk2sw7pmrd

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Last Notes

2024-06-14 22:09:26

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do you enjoy them? I mean, I gotta say, a nice occasional email about new types of plastic boxes sounds pretty good to me

2024-06-14 22:02:56

I don't mind getting occasional emails from companies I like to buy things from, but some of them email so much as to make it ridiculous. How many times can an action figure company email you in one week???
McFarlane: 6x including twice today
Super7: 7x including 2x today and 2x yesterday
Kidrobot: Only 3x, wow missed opportunity
That is 15 emails I won't be missing next week.

2024-06-13 14:33:35

Whoaa!! We need to get this and get it ripped for posterity since this stuff is super hard to find!
This is a VHS copy of "The Best of Max Headroom" which is from the *talk show* not the drama and has Max doing weird interviews with 80s celebrities like Simon Le Bon and Tina Turner. WHOAAAA!!!! I have never seen this before.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/387081222552

2024-06-09 19:46:15

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about 30 minutes

2024-06-09 17:25:04

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Here is video of our inaugural test flight, filmed by my 8-yo son.
THE MESH DRONE TAKES FLIGHT!
https://hackers.town/system/media_attachments/files/112/587/823/615/052/366/original/21c8cba22eb38405.mp4

2024-06-09 17:17:05

I went to the AustinMesh.org meetup this past week and met a bunch of nice folks who share my very geeky interest in these tiny LoRa radios and what they can do. It inspired me to do something I've been pondering for a while... I put a mesh radio on MY DRONE and sent it up into the sky above my house!
Normally, my mesh radios cannot see any other nearby radios from the house, alas. However, at >= 50M up, I was able to send and receive messages with people who were ~5 miles away, on the other side of downtown. Whoa!
Imagine if there were a few radios up at that height. We could relay messages for the whole city!!
https://hackers.town/system/media_attachments/files/112/587/775/902/691/687/original/99569cf680d1f1a2.jpeg

2024-06-09 01:08:20

I feel a desperate need to emulate Crazy Taxi at home if uh, anyone knows how to do that

2024-06-06 16:01:56

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yeah i know there are a bunch of "team chat" apps out there. I want something that is explicitly 1) for fwends 2) self hosted and not dependent on 3rd parties of any kind

2024-06-06 15:25:19

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i just don't trust anything i can't run myself anymore

2024-06-06 15:18:10

I am tired of having my friends chat in Slack that is now owned by Salesforce, so I decided to build a self-hostable thing to replace it that is more focused on fun chats and sharing links and files and not about staying up to date on business messaging.

2024-05-23 22:17:03

Currently wearing my stormtrooper helmet on a work meeting.

2024-05-17 15:07:18

Have you tried unplugging it and then just leaving it unplugged

2024-05-15 13:44:45

Early in my career people fought and died so that we would use paragraph tags to indicate a paragraph in an HTML document instead of fucking BR tags blasted all over the place but now the best developers in the world just slap a react element on the page with a CSS JavaScript class name assigned at random and we call this modern technology, i fucking hate it.

2024-05-14 04:28:59

Tonight's winning line:
“I fixed your batteries,” it said. “And the printers too. True and False, what is wrong with your species?”

2024-05-08 12:49:55

Conan, what is best in life?
Download stuff, see it archived safely, hear the lamentations of the major media companies

2024-05-06 23:34:01

The only gala I want to be part of is the vampire ball at Devil’s Night

2024-04-25 16:29:12

someone at work requested a link be added to a widget but because the widget uses its own layout system the link cant be added with proper localization so someone proposed we put the text in a styled box that is not a link and then overlap it with an invisible button that would be a fixed size so would not match the localized text if it wasn't the same size as english and I gave an impassioned speech about if you ever find yourself building an alternate HTML renderer inside a web page you are lost and then it was silent on the phone for a while and then decided I guess we just won't add that link then

2024-04-18 00:45:00

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maybe automated by a linter rule?

2024-04-09 16:08:29

If you work for me at any level higher than intern and you write code that makes an external call over the network to a dependent system and the code you write does not include any error handling around the nearly infinite number of problems that could occur during that call, you are FUCKING FIRED!!!!
Or in other words, what you will learn as my intern is, EVERY NETWORK CALL AND CALL TO EXTERNAL DEPENDENCY MUST HAVE ERROR HANDLING IN YOUR CODE YES YOUR CODE YOU MAY NOT LET THE ERROR JUST BUBBLE UP TO THE TOP LEVEL OF THE APP

2024-04-05 18:55:12

Beautiful
https://hackers.town/system/media_attachments/files/112/220/128/745/500/008/original/4ca0e340e162d18d.jpeg

2024-04-03 16:19:18

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funny story the name originates from having to pick DNS for my dorm network jack, and my weird semi-abusive boss at the time was always making horrible lewd comments to us involving words like flabjab and it was just what i ended up typing into the web form.

2024-04-03 16:18:07

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thank you! Flabjab was super fun for me to work!! I was like, 18-20? I got to meet and work with and curate writing by some of the best writers on the internet at that time!

2024-04-03 16:16:50

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wow, wow, wow.
I got to see the creator of Puce a few years back, she spoke at my bot developer conference!

2024-04-03 11:26:41

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omg how do you know

2024-04-02 13:52:47

The best websites in the world, the ones that got us all hooked on the internet in the first place, people hand built them in HTML.

2024-03-27 22:05:27

oh no there are new Conan the Barbarian action figures!!!

2024-03-27 17:03:23

I made a book! It's a short book but it contains a story that I think is really rad, so I put it on paper FOR HISTORY and now you can buy a copy. There are also an extremely limited number of VINTAGE FLOPPY DISKS available but they will go fast. All purchases come with a drm-free ebook version to stash on your triple backup.
https://shop.benbrown.com
The story is called LIBRARY. It is a novelette - longer than a short story but not quite a novella - and it tells the tale of a group of hackers facing down a mega-corporation from their base of operations in a food truck parking lot. It is a cyberpunk thriller with details ripped from the headlines.
You can read the story online for free here:
https://benbrown.com/library
https://hackers.town/system/media_attachments/files/112/168/715/485/809/018/original/86662b3735ade414.jpeg

2024-03-23 19:34:24

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There are like 5 people here who are really really really showing off

2024-03-23 19:26:50

Brought the kids to a skate rink. The entrance is armored up and looks like a pawn shop. There is a door with a buzzer on it. But once you go through it is like 1984 in here.

2024-03-22 15:08:28

Tore the arms off my Hackers.Town shirt. Couldn't be constrained by those sleeves!!
https://hackers.town/system/media_attachments/files/112/139/963/911/553/835/original/2a646199cf244eae.jpeg