Gratitude Day 18: Loss
This is... a difficult subject, especially in the context of gratitude.
What I wanted to write about is some of the people I've lost along the way. One thing you begin collecting as you age (without warning) is departed loved ones and friends. It's not a fun process.
And honestly, I can't stand it when people say things like, "Well, death is just a part of life." That's some serious carrion comfort to me.
But I found I couldn't start writing about departed friends without it geting extremely heavy, and I felt odd sharing things about people who are not around to have any say in it (even though they would be very good things).
So, what I will do instead, and what I would like to invite you to do with me, is to just stop for a minute and give thanks to all of the people in our lives that helped propel us forward, helped safeguard ourseves from harm or self-harm, encouraged, nurtured and loved us selflessly.
Because we've all had people in our lives like that. If you don't believe me, talk to Fred about it.
Gratitude Day 17: Permacomputing
Since I spoke on Retrocomputing yesterday, I wanted to talk about its sister discipline/concept: Permacomputing.
Now, I can't talk about it at length as anything remotely approaching a subject matter expert, but it is something I've been fairly interested in for several years, ever since I learned about uxn …
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Gratitude Day 16: Retrocomputing
This morning, I came across an article which the official Hackaday fediverse account linked yesterday: "Rosy Retrocomputing."
And... no hate. Albert has a good point. As much as I enjoy the rosy-colored glasses myself, there are some real pain points to retrocomputing, or as we called it when I was …
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Gratitude Day 15: Mental Health Awareness
One thing I struggle with is seeing how much worse things are today than 30 years ago. Our capitalism is unhinged, rapacious, and vulgar. Our leaders are utterly clueless sociopaths. Our technology is manipulative and vapid. Injustice is reaching biblical levels.
But dang if mental health awareness isn't on fire …
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Gratitude Day 14: Apple Video Codec
I'm continuing to explore lossy compression algorithms in my "Unsung Heroes, Human and Algorithmic" sub-theme of my September Gratitude series.
The Apple Video codec from 1991 is one of my favorite codecs: not because it's particularly efficient/effective (it's horrible), nor because it's popular (you'd be insane to use it …
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Gratitude Day 13: Re: G.A.S.
Hyde, who is a fedifriend I have had the pleasure of collaborating with in the past, wrote today about G.A.S., also known as "Gear Aquisition Syndrome."
In keeping with the theme of gratitude, and keeping the tone positive, I won't spend too much time on why I'm happy …
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Gratitude Day 12: A-law & µ-law Audio Companding
Our first foray into lossy compression will be in the audio realm, looking at a pair of companding algorithms (short for "compressing and expanding") used extensively in telecommunications: A-law and µ-law.
Now, these algorithms don't exactly belong to the same category of the more well-known audio codecs, such as MP3 …
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Gratitude Day 11: Lossy Compression Algorithms
For the next couple days, I'm going to take a look at lossy compression algorithms, what makes them so amazing, and how they enable the internet experience that we all know and love today.
Especially when dealing with video formats, we would be extremely limited if not for lossy compression …
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Gratitude Day 10: GIF
Continuing my "Unsung Heroes, Human and Algorithmic" subseries in my September Gratitude series, I want to talk about GIF, the venerable and stalwart Graphics Interchange Format.
First of all, a little housekeeping: It's pronounced JIF, like the brand of peanut butter. If you insist on pronouncing it like you're having …
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Gratitude Day 9: Run-Length Encoding / PackBits
I'm taking this little detour within my gratitude series because I want to explore some of the very basic algorithms that are an essential part of our daily lives, for which we have little awareness, and to which is given little thought or thanks.
Data Compression has always been a …
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