• 10 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle
  • When you say it like that, it sounds really mundane.

    Ignoring the how of it all, here’s how I imagine it working subjectively. They have a much wider visible spectrum compared to humans, but they can’t perceive the whole thing all at once. They have four pairs of nictitating membranes that act like bandpass filters. Between the bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, they “tune” to different spectra, and can even narrow the bandwidth of the received signal. They can sense light polarization by aligning or misaligning their eyes to the direction of polarization, and because their eyes don’t rely on focusing a light to a point, they can stare at the sun without harm or discomfort.

    Subjectively, they have no fixed concept of color, as objects appear different depending on how their eyes are tuned. Their languages lack simple color words, and must rely on analogies to objects that are similarly colored, much like most (Western) languages have no simple terms to describe odors beyond relating them to their sources (“earthy”, “fruity”, “floral”, etc).

    The low-end of their eyes’ frequency range isn’t set, but they can at least see thermal radiation emitted by living bodies, and the high end is set at the threshold of ionizing radiation. Because their eyes work equally well during the day and at night, they and other species in their clade that share the same eye structure are neither nocturnal nor diurnal, and have active and rest periods that do not sync with the day-night cycle. Upon achieving sapience and developing a structured society with the concept of timekeeping, they do not use different time zones.










  • an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

    First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…

    Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

    This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.






  • I assumed they were aware of each other and simply differed in moderation style or the type of user they wanted to attract.

    I have, however, been toying with establishing a presence in the fediverse for conlangers/conworlders to congregate; likely not Lemmy, but NodeBB, as I like the more permanent nature of forums compared to more modern social media. As for non-federated conlanging communities, there’s the CBB where I hang out most, the unrelated ZBB, both running phpBB. But the granddaddy of conlangery on the internet is probably the conlang mailing list.

    I can only vouch for the CBB, as I’ve merely lurked briefly on the ZBB and have never checked out the mailing list, though it’s on my todo list.



  • I was on Reddit from mid 2012 to mid 2023, across a few accounts and with a hiatus of a few months here and there. I had been passively looking at less centralized forms of personal interaction on the web, trying to find traditional forums to replace the subs I frequented. Like a lot of people here, the API issues and the news of Reddit courting investors left a bad taste in my mouth.

    I deleted my account, but I still lurk on a few subs, and my IT job means I have to dig through reddit posts on a regular basis for troubleshooting purposes.





  • I looked up Cloudflare tunnels and tried setting one up. Some things future readers may want to know:

    1. You have to set Cloudflare as your domain’s authoritative nameservers.
    2. You need to set up an account (not a problem) but also have to register a payment method, even for the free tier (no me gusta).
    3. Regarding NodeBB specifically, if you set up a tunnel, you can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but it fails when you try to log in. A few minutes of searching leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets, and the solution requires you to partially expose your IP address, defeating the principle purpose for me to use cloudflare in the first place.