This is part of the power of a makerspace, to me. To show up and work on my own thing, whether or not someone asks about it, whether or not someone offers to help. Those latter things are where I usually focus, but the first is important too.
The funny thing is, the space really has a garage door (two, in fact), and when the weather permits, we love to work with them up. Occasionally people wander by and inquire, and get a tour, and some of them have joined as members.
And we were just getting a breath of fresh-air after being restricted to local phone calls (or paying ghastly long-distance phone bills). Finally we could communicate anywhere for one price!
Without that context, it all falls flat, I agree.
I've considered trying to make a speed-of-light-ping-limited BBS that can _only_ be connected to by actual-locals, but reality is harder. (And the moment it got popular, nefarious actors would just rent or compromise a box in-radius.)
And if the sysop had upgraded to 28.8 while you were still on 2400, you were probably persona non grata for tying up the line for so long!
Some of the most popular boards had minimum connect speeds; if you couldn't connect at at least 9600 or 14.4k, it would immediately hang up on you, for this reason.
I just opened multiple copies of the browser; I'd have 5 or 10 running most of the time on my 98se box. It's where I got my habit which I still use today, of opening outlinks as I read the page, so they can load in the background, then once I finish the content of this page, I'll go skim those to fill in context.
It meant I cared _less_ about page load time, even on dialup, because they were happening in other windows. I could happily tolerate a 2-minute load time as long as the first page took more than 2 minutes to read.
I've been to several retro LAN parties recently. They're wonderful, and they cost nothing to run. 10/100 switches are free, and cat5 nearly so, and the people attending can probably bring plenty of both.
Today is Friday. Send out a group text right now. Saturday evening. Bring whatever. We'll order pizza, it'll be a good time. Make it happen.
Logistically: One was specifically focused on the CDROM era. Any game that shipped on CD or came out roughly 1995-2005 was fair game, and the organizers mentioned a few by name that you might want to pre-install. The other was anything-goes, networking optional; I brought a TI 99/4A and a handful of cartridges, and it was very popular, apparently that grabbed a bunch of folks right in the childhood, in between rounds of Quake.
I found myself doing a particularly intense stint of work the other day, finally had all the source documents and the destination program all lined up, happily finding and comparing and synthesizing and entering, and I realized it was going to take all night. Or realistically until the middle of the next day.
I put the laptop into airplane mode, to block any updates that might unceremoniously reboot it and wreck my layout. Figure if I needed to be on Teams in the meantime, I've still got a phone for that.
Airplane mode already exists, it's _wonderful_ for this, and I should use it more often. If I'm not actively internetting, just toggle that and the distractions can wait.
Haptic schmaptic, I just want my Framework's enormous trackpad to respect deadzones and stop detecting my palms. I had to entirely disable tap-to-click, because nothing else would work.
I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.
> For Linux libinput “Disable While Typing” (DWT) problems, this page claims libinput will only use the DWT setting if the keyboard and touchpad are either both identified as internal devices, or are both identified as the same device.
That sounds like what Privacy.com does, but the virtual cards can still charge right through after you shut them down. NYTimes did that to me, after my trial sub expired, and Privacy did nothing to block it.
The funny thing is, the space really has a garage door (two, in fact), and when the weather permits, we love to work with them up. Occasionally people wander by and inquire, and get a tour, and some of them have joined as members.
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