For those that wanted to do something to remember our friend @geordie Here's advice and a request from his family.

#RememberingGeordie https://eigenmagic.net/@trent/112896611520706429

I'd forgotten about this until just now. In the mans own words:

https://geordieguy.au/logging-off.html

In 2008, when Senator Conroy was trying to fuck over the Internet, Geordie wanted to show the absurdity of the “Refused Classification” category.

It was already illegal to publish RC material in Australia, but hardly anyone knew what what it meant. So he illustrated it. Literally.

One of the criteria for RC is “publications which are intended to instruct in the commission of a crime against the Commonwealth.” Obviously intended by wowsers to censor information about how to cook meth or whatever, but people who wrote the rules weren’t very precise and they cast an absolutist net.

In his various travels, Geordie had discovered that it’s a Commonwealth crime to graze livestock on the Parliament House lawns in Canberra.

So he commissioned an artist to draw a cartoon which provided step by step instructions to teach the reader how to transport a herd of giraffe to the ACT, tether them on the roof of APH, and induce them to eat.

He published the giraffe cartoon on one of his blogs and publicly dared ACMA to issue a takedown notice, which they declined to do, proving that ACMA was arbitrarily and selectively enforcing a very clear cut online content regulation, perhaps making them poor custodians of the power to determine whether the Christian lobby could successfully ban abortion information.

He LOVED finding weird loopholes like this. We’d spend ages on the phone cackling about how to exploit the most absurdly obscure regs to humiliate the regulator. Top shelf.

My wife told me to take the spider out instead of killing him.

Went out. Had a few drinks. Nice guy. He's a web designer.

Specialises in debugging.

To celebrate the X Window System's 40th birthday, I did a deep dive on something about it: the iconography of its boot-up stipple (that gray pattern you first see as the X Server starts up):

https://matttproud.com/blog/posts/x-window-system-boot-stipple.html

Did you know the stipple has a name, age, and cultural significance to the ecosystem? I'll share my personal history with it. What's yours?

#XWindowSystem #UNIX
#History #RetroComputing