Isocat / is on Nostr

I live with my husband in a purple house in BC, Canada I have a stripey, orange, fuzzy Tiger cloak—nothing bad is to happen while I'm wearing it; that's the law.

Beards, cats, plants, kitties, food, tigers, beards, astrophotographs, thoughtful words, beards, witty cleverness, grinworthy art, kitties, tigers, beards, the occasional interesting carburetor, and loosely related are all YES for me on here.

Politics and badness are (hard!) NO.

#NoBridge

Last Notes

2025-04-09 23:33:37

Oops! Oh, dear.
https://tiggi.es/system/media_attachments/files/114/310/605/722/777/295/original/b8ee052f795a7193.jpeg
https://tiggi.es/system/media_attachments/files/114/310/606/002/714/189/original/df00f7132bc85713.jpeg
https://tiggi.es/system/media_attachments/files/114/310/609/261/549/623/original/393f1c19ff5584cb.jpeg

2025-03-28 15:58:36

Feel the burn!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngZ0K3lWKRc

2025-02-23 18:24:06

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@nprofile…xlhv good GOD yes! Whoof. Wow. Hoo.
Hit reload; I wanna go again.

2025-02-08 02:17:37

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@nprofile…7klc Shit, there's a Bitly saga, now, too‽

2025-01-06 22:40:13

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@nprofile…fe4j "Oh, no, mm-mm, I am sorry, you are going to have to log in because we are unable to verify that you are authorized to use this Adobe product on this machine at this time in this country. Also your files are unavailable right now, because your files are unavailable. Also we are training our 'AI' on them whether you like it or not, in accord with our updated terms of use" will be just as infuriating on the couch.

2024-12-26 16:31:43

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@nprofile…lwhf I know not what a chumba casino is, and that suits me.
Automakers are developing ways of pushing in-car audiovisual ads selected by listening to occupants' conversations, because of course they fucking are.
https://winepressnews.com/2024/09/14/ford-files-patent-for-in-car-ads-based-on-conversations/

2024-12-22 17:10:47

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@nprofile…q5wq Wow. I'm not into RPGs, but this…!

2024-12-22 01:53:23

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@nprofile…fe4j Ah, I see.
I like Tetris. And VIC-20 Moon Patrol.

2024-12-22 01:50:24

The 1988 sci-fi film "They Live" (which I've seen called "'The Matrix' for the analogue generations—I agree) is based on this 1963 short story by Ray Nelson, called "Eight o'Clock in the Morning".
It's just 1,755 words; if you were to start right as the fight scene in "They Live" starts, at a normal pace you could read it about ninety times and still not miss the fight's last 45 minutes.
https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%80%99clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf

2024-12-22 01:13:26

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@nprofile…fe4j Oh.
What's EA?

2024-12-22 00:50:05

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@nprofile…fe4j What's DLC?

2024-12-18 22:01:00

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@nprofile…5wev
> It's interesting to have lived
> through a time when operating
> system upgrades were major
> jumps in functionality, and now
> be in a time when OS upgrades
…invariably take away useful functionality and break stuff that was working fine.

2024-12-15 18:30:59

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Yeah…no.
It's clickbait, meriting a C+ at best. I'm sloppily quoted in it, and we also learn a group on the loud end of the Dunning-Kruger curve, insisting headlight glare is a simple, easy-to-fix conspiracy (it's none of those) amuse themselves by drawing a penis on a picture of me.
Altered photographs aside, I'm a subject matter expert in this field. I spent the first part of this year writing an exhaustively thorough report on headlight glare, commissioned by a national government. 38,000 words, 243 references, 37 figures. Headlight glare is real, and it is getting worse, but:
This is not at all like Dieselgate.
Headlight beams are defined by test points and zones: places in the beam with a specified minimum required and/or maximum allowed intensity. A low beam has to balance seeing for the equipped driver versus glare for others, so there are test points requiring high intensity just below the horizontal and just to the right (or left, in left-traffic countries) of the vertical centreline of the lamp. And there are upward-leftward (rightward, in left-traffic countries) test points limiting intensity directed toward oncoming drivers.
Past technology was such that a single glare-control point or small zone in the low beam specification effectively served to create a large low-intensity glare-controlled region covering most of the angles corresponding to the areas most frequently occupied by other drivers' eyes. Today's technology means high-intensity light can be put much closer to the test point without violating the intensity limit at the point or zone itself, so the glare-controlled low-intensity region is much smaller. This isn't cheating; it's fully compliant with the regulations.
And today's low beam patterns are much wider than those of the past; in particular, today's low beams extend a lot further over to the oncoming-traffic side. There is a lot more light in today's beam patterns—the highest-intensity part of a low beam of today can equal or exceed the peak intensity of past-model high beams.
So any given road user's eyes are more likely to be within a high-intensity area of any vehicle's beams.
Also, the light-emitting areas of the headlamps are smaller, and the light sources are bluer. More about that in a moment.
Today's headlamps are much more sensitive to aim in terms of both how well the driver can see and how much glare they are causing for other traffic participants. Unfortunately, in North America almost no attention is paid to headlamp aim. Most places don't have periodic aim inspections, and it's very difficult to get a good, correct aim job done even if you try hard and call around to shops. Even if you find a shop willing to take your money to aim the headlamps, they usually won't do anything like a proper job of it.
The types of headlight beams in use today were developed with the assumption that vehicles would be equipped with systems to keep the lamps aimed correctly even when the vehicle is loaded down (passengers, cargo, towing/hauling) or going over road bumps. But the regulations do not require such systems; most vehicles don't have them.
The rules on headlamp mount height are permissive in the US and Canada, and high headlamp mount height on trucks, vans, and SUVs, relative to driver eye height and sideview mirror height in smaller vehicles, is another cause of glare.
All of these listed factors (and more besides) add up to a lot more headlight glare than there used to be.
The relevant US/Canada safety standard (№ 108) does not even once mention glare, or any synonym for it. The same is true of the relevant SAE technical standards, which go out of their way to avoid the G-word. That's not new; for most of a century, the North American headlight regs have heavily prioritized maximum seeing light, while the European (more recently rest-of-world) headlight regs contain explicit and stringent glare-limiting provisions.
Neither approach is correct or wrong; it is impossible to point to a particular spot on the seeing light/glare light tradeoff as the perfect balance. As we age, we need more light to see any given thing, and at the same time we grow more sensitive to glare, which makes this a really thorny knot.
But glare complaints are sharply rising even in countries with more stringent glare regulations, not just on the laxly-regulated American island. That points at unregulated factors common around the world: smaller, bluer. There's sturdy science implicating those aspects of headlamps in increased glare, but stylists and marketers want the lights as small and as blue as can be, and stylists and marketers have long tended to win this kind of battle against scientists and engineers. Too, consumer-oriented headlight ratings prioritize seeing, and high star ratings spur car sales, but "Hey, the headlamps on this model won't piss off other drivers as much as headlamps on other cars" is not an effective sales pitch.
@nprofile…xs3w @nprofile…834n @nprofile…6tf2

2024-12-10 17:48:45

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@nprofile…fe4j KILL WITH FIRE

2024-12-10 01:22:42

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@nprofile…74hx You might have to sign up for an Internet Archive account—it's free.

2024-12-09 00:49:45

Today I learnt you can download the entirety of Wikipedia from before its massive pollution by "AI" slop. These ones are English-language, and the whole of 2022 (for example) is about 20gb. Other languages are probably also available.
https://archive.org/search?query=subject:%22enwiki%22%20AND%20subject:%22data%20dumps%22%20AND%20collection:%22wikimediadownloads%22

2024-11-16 18:18:35

The internet has a built-in adjustable cat. It is remarkably therapeutic. Heed the recommendation to use head- or earphones.
https://purrli.com/
#Caturday