borneo girl living in singapore trying to make the world more compassionate ✌️
👩💻 doing tech @ abillion — opinions my own. shares are not endorsements.
let me know where & when i can be better 💖
alt: @dafne [deadinsi.de]
#FreePalestine #TotalLiberation #QueerRightsAreHumanRights
| pronouns | they/she |
| blog | https://dontreinventbicycle.com |
| code ✨ | https://codeberg.org/kiyui |
| code 🤮 | https://github.com/kiyui |
i spent $89 on a fan that overheats in the humid 34°c equator weather.
their support says this is normal.
i literally created more e-waste in an effort increase the threshold before i need to use the AC.
please don't buy this model. so many people have complained about it on tiktok too:
the world is so cool and we still have so much do to
i just love the way the writers here work, lol — because this column is the best one in The Economist
https://economist.com/business/2025/03/13/the-importance-of-repetition-in-the-workplace
Here is a template. If you follow this template for your binary file format's magic number, you will be doing it better than a depressingly large number of senior software engineers.
First eight bytes of the file:
Zack Weinberg0xDC 0xDF X X x x (0x01 0x00 | 0x00 0x01)
0xDC 0xDF are bytes with the high bit set. Together with the next two bytes, they form a four-byte sequence that cannot appear in any valid ASCII, UTF-8, Corrected UTF-8, or UTF-16 (regardless of endianness) text document. This is not a perfectly bulletproof declaration that the file does not contain text, but it should be strong enough except maybe for formats like PDF that can't decide if they're structured text or binary.
X X x x: Four ASCII alphanumeric characters naming your file format. Make them clearly related to your recommended file name extension. I'm giving you four characters because we're running out of three-letter acronyms. If you don't need four characters, pad at the end with 0x1A (aka ^Z).
The first two of these (the uppercase Xes) must not have their high bits set, lest the "this is not text" declaration be weakened. For the other two (lowercase xes), use of ASCII alphanumerics is just a strong recommendation.
0x01 0x00 or 0x00 0x01: This is to be understood as a 16-bit unsigned integer in your choice of little- or big-endian order. It serves three functions. In descending order of importance:
It includes a zero byte, reinforcing the declaration that this is not a text file.
It demonstrates which byte ordering will be used throughout the file. It does not matter which order you choose, but you need to consciously choose either big- or little-endian and then use that byte order consistently throughout the file. Yes, I have seen cases where people didn't do that.
It's an escape hatch. If one day you discover that you need to alter the structure of the rest of the file in a totally incompatible way, and yet it is still meaningfully the same format, so you don't want to change the name characters, you can change the 0x01 to 0x02. We both hope that day will never come, but we both know it might.
when did #leather get so trendy again? every other “fancy” item on the market feels the need to maximise abuse[1].
take this e-bike[2] for example. they could have just as well used PVC — which works better for equatorial climate, mind you, but they go with leather anyways.
leather has this yassified green-washed reputation of it being biodegrable when really it very often isn't [3].
processed leather is the nugget equivalent of a fur coat. it makes you forget the animal behind the consumption.
also piñatex is punk as heck. make animal leather embarrassing again.
[1]: https://www.slay.film/
[2]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mihogo-air-longest-range-carbon-fiber-ebike
[3]: https://jlse.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s42825-024-00151-z#Sec11
i have some regrets getting something other than the latest and greatest 🤏
first off? this suffers powering my 5k display even with GuC and HuC enabled.
then there's the matter of upgradability — none.
the wifi card acts up a little with the mesh router setup in my partner's place but it's soldered on so upgrades aren't an option like i did to extend the (quality of) life of my previous laptops.
i can't add a modem in either because it hasn't the cables, but perhaps that's a nitpick.
i'm glad i went with 32gb but gosh, 32gb on #linux does not go as far as 16gb does on #macos running the same exact development environment 😬
...except it doesn't. macos can pull all of that off while running #docker / #podman containers in a VM.
grr. so much for the benefits of PC.
every time i listen to this album it just sounds better.
https://cattledecapitation.bandcamp.com/album/the-anthropocene-extinction
12 track album
why did it never occur to me before to install regular packages inside a #toolbx container before & alias them with a `.desktop` file 🤦♀️
i'm baffled and embarrassed by what 3 years of using a macbook has done to my brain 😑
i apparently was working on christmas day 2025. your sense of time and my sense of time are not the same.
do you time-travel to overwork yourself?
i think not 😒
