Tootfinder

Long story about Scratch and a vast empty field full of tiny bears
My son and I do some simple game projects in Scratch. Scratch is cool. But the situation has a problem: the Boy likes to show the stuff we make to his friends at school. They have Chromebooks provided by the school. Chromebooks come with Chrome installed, and the kids can't install stuff, so Chrome is the only available browser. Chrome has a bug: one webpage can have at most about 500 distinct images. Google is aware of this bug and has been for a long time - they don't seem to have any intent to fix it. So, if you start using sprites with animations, for an RPG, say, you will quickly blow out this 500-image limit. One mob might easily have 30 or 40 frames.
So I had an idea.
The scratch screen is 480x360. What if I "blew up" a spritesheet so that each 16x16 image had a 480-pixel transparent pad between it and its left and right neighbors, and a 360-pixel transparent pad between it and its up and down neighbors? Then I could just load one image - the exploded spritesheet - and when I drew it I would set the offset so that the one image I wanted was at the screen coordinates I wanted. Because of the pads, all of the other images would necessarily be off the screen.
So I wrote a C program to call ImageMagick programs to explode the spritesheet, and that worked fine. The exploded spritesheet is about 9000 x 6000 pixels, but it's only 90k. But then I tried to upload it and hit Scratch's image size limit, enforced on upload, which is like 900x700.
But (the forums said) you could defeat that by making an svg! You can tell it the svg size is whatever pixels, it's stroked. Sure, it's 900 x 700 with a lot of tiny little bears in different poses, each smaller than a pixel.
Unfortunately automated png-to-svg conversion is not something current technology has really solved, or at least not adobe's online converter. It turned all of my bears into little brown smears.
My next plan is to bypass Scratch's image upload size limiter by exporting my scratch program, unzipping it, inserting the image directly in there, rezipping it, and reuploading. I have had some luck with this sort of thing before. But I am about out of energy for this project for today so I thought instead I would write about it on here.

$125K stolen in 10 minutes
From Kim Komando's newsletter —
"Feb. 16 was a typical Friday night. Barry and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.
We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were shining lights all over our property. A recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”
As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed Phoenix SWAT team members with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”
The police told me to go inside
When I asked again, a SWAT member said, “Ma’am, it’s a South American gang targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next. Do we have permission to enter your property?” I said, “Yes!” and then he asked something like, “If we find anyone, will you pursue charges so we can arrest them?” I replied, “Of course!”
I opened the driveway gates to our property and the guest house while Barry tossed the police keys to open the security gates. People asked me if I was scared. How could I be? There was a team of really professional police officers protecting me from who knows what.
Turns out, when the gang saw we were home, they likely diverted their attention to the house next door. A house four doors down from us wasn’t so lucky.
The homeowner left at 5 p.m. to have dinner and got a notification his security cameras were offline at 5:05 p.m. He thought the internet went down. Nope, the gang broke in and took $25,000 in cash and valuables worth $100,000. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
How are they getting away with this?
The gang places cellular and Wi‑Fi jammers around the homes they’re targeting. This way, security cameras and phones are useless. A Phoenix police officer told me the gang probably noticed nothing was down in our house.
We have our cameras and internet hardwired. Even when they tried to jam our signals, the red lights on the security cameras still showed they were recording everything.
But how frightening is that? Your phone doesn’t work. Your cameras aren’t recording anything. On the upside, the gang doesn’t carry guns. This way, if they get caught, they’ll spend about six months in jail before being extradited to Chile.
Nothing is random
The gang scopes out homes beforehand. They drive the neighborhood and look up houses on real estate sites to get an idea of where the primary bedroom is located. They look for dogs, too.
It’s not just in Phoenix, by the way. This is happening all over the country. A friend was robbed by this gang, and he lives in a guarded, gated community in California. Kudos to the Phoenix Police Department — they arrested three members of the gang who were in my neighborhood that night.
So, what can you do?
☑️​ Wireless cameras go kaput with no signal. Try a wired camera for a backup.
☑️​ A cam with SD card storage will still record if there’s no Wi‑Fi.
☑️​ Put up motion-activated lights; they make it harder for anyone to sneak around.
☑️​ A femtocell (think of it as a mini cell tower) could be enough to keep your connection if thieves use jammers — T‑Mobile or Verizon.
☑️​ Have an Amazon Echo? Away mode lets you control your lights so it looks like someone’s home.
☑️​ Make it look like someone’s watching TV at your house when you’re not there with a Television Simulator.
☑️​ A University of North Carolina survey of over 400 incarcerated burglars found security system signs deter thieves.
☑️​ Check Zillow, Realtor⁠.⁠com and Redfin for photos of your house. The more crooks know about the layout, the better for them. Ask to have them removed.
☑️​ Blur your house from Google Maps and Apple Maps while you’re at it.

PRO TIP: If you are sending cold marketing emails to people who are almost as excited about deleting them as they are about not getting them in the first place, make sure you remember to actually state •what the hell you’re asking for•.
Yes, I can infer what they mean — DO NOT explain in my replies — but the vagueness of this email still cracks me up. Their head is so far up the butt of their employer they’ve forgotten that “having a story live” is in-job jargon, meaningless to their r…

This just happened in my terminal :)

"Just move to Matrix, Discord is insecure”
I mean, yes*. But also: the community will cease to exist if you try to move it. Communication technology is situated. Community is in its connections, and if you bifurcate it, it becomes two different communities.
If you wholesale shut down the old and start the new, you'll have a very different community when it arrives.
Maybe, if you get a bulk of people together and organized, you can pull it off. It means the slow careful work of mapping enough relationships so that you know you have a coherent cluster of people aligned to do the move.
* I have a whole rant about what "secure" means in the context of community but you'll have to wait or ask for that.

I have a son turning 18 tomorrow. He is #autistic, #aspie, #bipolar, and has #tourettes. It's a beautiful combination of conditions, but as you can imagine, it doesn't set him up for success in the social skills department.
Now he's turning 18 and has very few people turning up as his party. What can I do as a dad to help? There's the "fix it" side of me that wants to get creative on ways to get people to his party. But I don't know if that will make things worse.
I'd love to hear from others #neurdivergent and #actuallyautistic folks.
EDIT... Sorry I forgot to mention that my son has complained about how few people are coming. So I do know he wants more people.

I have a son turning 18 tomorrow. He is #autistic, #aspie, #bipolar, and has #tourettes. It's a beautiful combination of conditions, but as you can imagine, it doesn't set him up for success in the social skills department.
Now he's turning 18 and has very few people turning up as his party. What can I do as a dad to help? There's the "fix it" side of me that wants to get creative on ways to get people to his party. But I don't know if that will make things worse.
I'd love to hear from others #neurdivergent and #actuallyautistic folks.
EDIT... Sorry I forgot to mention that my son has complained about how few people are coming. So I do know he wants more people.