Menno Finlay-Smits @menn0@mastodon.nzoss.nz
Tech lead at the Cacophony Project, among other things. Curious crafter of artisanal bits.
Joined Feb 2018
Beautiful and strange wavy clouds over Christchurch this evening
Menno Finlay-Smits
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RT @SteveStuWill@twitter.com
Incredible visualisation: Birds migrating across Europe, tracked by GPS.
You learn something every day. I've been using DuckDuckGo for ages but didn't know about the "bang" feature. I usually set up other search engines directly in the my browser but this means I don't have to. Neat! https://duckduckgo.com/bang
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😭❤️🌱🌳
RT @hallaboutafrica@twitter.com
Super green. Ethiopia tries to break world record by planting 200million trees in one day. Ends up planting 350million. Ethiopia is determined to reclaim lost forests, which covered 35% of country in 1900 but only 4% of country in 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/29/ethiopia-plants-250m-trees-in-a-day-to-help-tackle-climate-crisis
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/hallaboutafrica/status/1155885766494568448
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circa 1980. "And we concluded that one excellent way to protect people was to collect less information about them."
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We need much more of this! https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/113564439/veteran-environmentalist-tells-farmers-to-brace-themselves-for-change excellent article in which an environmentalist in the Taranaki points out that many farmers don't realise the degree to which their "profit" is currently the result of subsidised "free" water, and the ability to be a high carbon emitter and polluter, putting that cost onto the rest of society, not their bottom line. He points out that much farming will cease to be profitable when farmers bear the real cost of their production.
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TIL: In the Netherlands, refugees are required to learn 3 skills: the language, swimming, and how to ride a bike.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Google just gave 2 billion users a reason to switch to Firefox
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/05/30/google-just-gave-2-billion-chrome-users-a-reason-to-switch-to-firefox/#62afd35f751f
(Well not me - I'm already a happy Firefox user)
Caught up on all of the amazing good/worrying Trump Inc podcast after a few weeks of binge listening. Crucially important investigative reporting, yet also entertaining and engaging. Highly recommend. https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/trumpinc
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TIL: In the Firefox inspector you can right click a node to get a contextual menu… and one of the options on which is “Screenshot node”.
This will snap the whole node, even the bits above or below the viewport. So snapping <body> will give you a scrolled screenshot: no need for a special tool to screenshot entire pages anymore.
Just awesome.
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In New Zealand, we prefer our comms gear to be backdoored by the USA, not China, thank you very much.
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Looking for help on what's wrong with my apple tree.
Some parts of the tree have started shrivelling and going brown, whilst the rest looks healthy. In my 'pests and diseases' book, the only think close to what this looks like is frost damage, but we haven't had frost for months. I cannot see any pests on it, so figure it must be some kind of disease, but what?
Any ideas? And if so, any suggestions on what to do?
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If you find yourself sitting in cars now and then, this might be interesting to you and help you prevent accidents.
So if you open a cars door from the inside, you open the door with the hand that's not next to the door. This means that you turn around you body which automatically turns your vision in the direction where other cars or bikes might come from.
I was taught this early on I believe, anyways this is the way I have always done it.
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#Mobilizon: "A free and #federated tool to get our events off #Facebook!"
Please help fund this! :)
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fsck should be called mkfsgreatagain
I was honoured to accept a NZ Hi-Tech Award on behalf of the Cacophony Project last night. It's wonderful for the team and our amazing open source contributors to be recognised for all their hard work and innovation.
Menno Finlay-Smits
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RT @jessfraz@twitter.com
One thing that seems to have gotten hidden from the GitHub announcements is actually THE MOST VALUABLE feature for open source maintainers:
The ability to have private discussions and code review about security vulnerabilities WITHIN your repo.
https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-maintainer-security-advisories
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Editor-in-chief of @linuxjournal Doc Searls on a sort-of erosion of #FreeSoftware principles within the broader #Linux (as commonly named) and #OpenSource Software community: We Need to Save What Made Linux and FOSS Possible 👉🏻 https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/we-need-save-what-made-linux-and-foss-possible
Tech lead at the Cacophony Project, among other things. Curious crafter of artisanal bits.
Joined Feb 2018
