Tootfinder

Grindr introduces "gay I", some privacy invading thing you have to opt out of. This is the same company that once sold their users HIV status to advertisers.

I signed up for the USPS's "send photos of your mail" service so now every day I get an email with pictures of spam.

Hi #LGBT! 🏳️‍🌈
It’s been a minute since I last showed up on Pixelfed. Thought I’d drop by again today and check in 👋
If you’re up for it, you can follow me at @… ☕

One of my most useful tools these days are things that take screenshots. Greenshot, a Windows tool with excellent usability. And Powertools Text Extractor which lets me OCR bits of text on the screen. Usability is important here: press one button and stuff is copied to clipboard.

I finally blogged about our amazing Phnom Penh street food tour. Highly recommended if you are in the area, or street food tours in general.

Die @… kann was, gebt ihr nen Job!
https://tech.lgbt/@sp4rk/115445802558758222

@… lol I bought Yotei to try it out before a long trip only to realize it doesn't unlock until about 3 hours after I leave

YouTube and Microsoft makes me puke: #Microsoft

Watching a video making the case that The Ronettes' Be My Baby (1964) paved the way for shoegaze.

Why the actual fuck would it even cross anyone's mind to connect a fucking bed to the cloud?!
"hey, look, internet, they're rabbiting right now and... oh, it was just 2 minutes."
Holy shit. These people are utter morons. Honestly.
https://tech.lgbt/@LilahTovMoon/115413

Google Workspace is full of dire warnings about how you can try things but they won't work for a long time (maybe). Sometimes that's because of DNS and Internet caching problems. Sometimes it's because Google made a decision in 2001 it was OK to store data in databases that didn't commit immediately and they thought it was OK to show the user inconsistent state. Twenty-four years later that awful decision persists, even if my data doesn't.

One of the great all-time technical book titles:
!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks
It was an O'Reilly Nutshell book from 1993, by Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams. There's a copy on archive.org.

Government that’s going all in on “AI” urges you to delete old emails and pictures to save water. You couldn’t make this shit up. https://tech.lgbt/@Natasha_Jay/115016993942039602

Natasha Jay (@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt)
Attached: 1 image Did AI recommend this? In a new digital twist to environmental responsibility, the #UK government is now suggesting people to “Delete old emails and pictures” in data centres to help with the current drought 🤪 This country ... (no words) https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-drought-group-meets-to-address-nationally-significant-water-shortfall

Ich kann nicht einschätzen ob das wirklich so ist, habt ihr dazu was aus anderen Quellen gelesen?
https://jungle.world/blog/von-tunis-nach-teheran/2025/09/zoff-der-gaza-flotilla-wegen-lgbt-teilnehmern

I have for very many years used #NearlyFreeSpeech #NFSN #Queer #LGBT

On my 11th power outage in the last twelve months in Grass Valley, CA. Thanks Piggy!

Days in San Francisco since feeling threatened by a deranged man in need of help: zero.

TIL that % routing of email (ie: nelson%example.com@relayserver.com is basically dead and gone. It mostly hasn't worked for years because of spam issues but modern mail systems don't even recognize it. Source routes got deprecated in RFC 2821 (from 2001) and fully removed in RFC 5321 (2008).

Something better than decorative gourd season is coming. (Attn @…).

#NonBinary #Enby #LGBTQIA #LGBT

You can pet the fox.

I am setting up Google Workspace so I can use it for my new email address. I'm flummoxed though, it looks like this is a whole second Google account? I have a 24 year old account with all sorts of stuff in it: photos, email, etc. Can I merge them somehow? Should I?

I've now fully transferred everything in to Porkbun. For my simple needs Namecheap and Cloudflare would have been fine too. But Porkbun is nice, and cheap, and feels like they have innovated recently. Good choice for now, inevitably some private equity firm will buy it and enshittify it. (That's what ruined Gandi.)

That moment when “what are you?” becomes “an experience.” 🫶
#NonBinary #Enby #LGBTQIA #LGBT

Our pool works at night too!

Gay hookup app Sniffies has put out new Hallowe'en-themed default images for profiles without pictures.

I posted something less than sufficiently anti-AI for the audience and got some thoughtful argument and some "AI is terrible and stupid and doesn't work" replies. I understand the anti-AI sentiment but I regret the shallowness of so many replies. To claim that LLMs are completely useless is deliberately ignorant. There are lots of interesting critiques of LLMs: copyright, human agency, effectiveness, privacy, even existential threats. "I hate this new thing I don't understand" is a bad start to a conversation.

Shout out to Namecheap which has a way to expedite a request to transfer a domain name away from them. Hover makes you wait the full five days.

I wrote about Tex Mex gravy, the definitive sauce for cheese enchiladas.

Two different people at this restaurant are playing noise from their phone speaker.

A Nevada City, CA newspaper article from 1852 describes a talk from someone raising capital to build a local telephone network. "A medium better befitting our wants and feelings—a tongue of lightning." What a great phrase.

A friend points out you can make these Silent and Minimized. They're still on screen but at least it's not quite so cluttered.

It was a gloriously warm day in SF yesterday and all the boys were out sunbathing in their short shorts. (Today is 100% fogged in.)

Went out to The National in Grass Valley and saw Lorraine Gervais perform. She's a local singer and always has a great band, sort of jazz / cabaret. Good fun, a nice thing about my small town.

AT&T sends refunds to one-off debit cards. Each card has to be registered with a new account. But you can only transfer money out to a bank bank account from one account.

Made some pickles. Jicama, blanched carrot, jalapeño with apple cider vinegar. This farmers market jicama is so fresh and juicy it's kind of a shame to pickle it.

How many pillows do you have on your bed?
1-2
3-4
5-6
7

Now watching Obama talking about Hamilton on YouTube. This was us just a few years ago, before the Orange Cheeto. It can.be us again

Just watched Joel Kim Booster on the Seth Meyer show being very gay. Talking about his gay bachelor party for his gay wedding. And thinking what a wonderful change this is in our our culture. 20 years ago that was unimaginable

Alaska Airlines stopped flying airplanes today because of an "IT outage". This is the second time in three months they stopped being an airline because of some computer problem. They've never been great but this kind of failure is unacceptable.

Wired: Gen X
Tired: Middle aged

Giving up on the idea of charging my car to 100%. Volvo's software has a bug where you change the charge limit but it doesn't commit to the charging circuit. It's had this bug for over a year. This and other bugs are why I'll probably never get another Volvo.

Android makes it hard to run background processes, but one hack to work around it is to display a notification. So my entire phone's notifications screen is now filled with notifications that allow background jobs to run. GPS tracker, fitness tracker, web messages access, syncthing, doze stopper (itself to fix another Android bug). This is a very bad user experience.

Anyone got advice on how to import some 15 years of .mbox email archives into Gmail? Hoping for some Linux command line tools.
Google has an official tool but it looks clunky and relies on Python 2.7 (!). I found GYB which I think might work, but maybe there's something better?

I recently started going to a gym and it's mostly chill but there's these guys who seem to have 100% fascist wardrobes. Every t-shirt they wear is a picture of a gun, or a Punisher logo, or an American flag with bullets instead of stripes. Our culture has a sickness deep in it.

Had to blow up a screenshot to recognize these icons for a call on my Android phone. The third icon is "HD ", the ~2017 carrier standard for higher bandwidth phone calls. This is literally the first time I've seen it work.

Saw this cool 3d map at the North Star Powerhouse Museum. It's a gold mine. Layers of the mine are painted on clear panels and they are stacked to show the 3d view.

Good news everyone! May he find his Just Reward with mean, smallminded people just like himself. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/us/politics/james-dobson-dead.html

A trans friend of mine just sent me engagement ring photos and I am so happy for her!

It is 7:00 a.m. and still dark out in California. Daylight savings time is incredibly stupid.

After some 30 years of using monkey.org I'm going to change my primary email address. Anti-spam measures has finally made using it with Gmail untenable, too many messages are disappearing. My new plan is to give a different domain entirely over to Google Apps for email. I am sad about this, the monkey folks are great.
Email used to be an open medium. It has now been wrecked by spammers and captured by a few companies.

What if every time we copy-and-paste an emoji, we propagated the history of that particular instance too? So I copy a ❤️ from my friend Alice and send it to my friend Bob, and Bob sees a ❤️ and when he taps on it it says "this ❤️ was from Alice. She got it from Chuck, who got it from David, ..."

I bought a cheap fitness tracker watch. And it has all these incredibly abusive upsells. Here they are offering me a discount because they like how I am sleeping. This is so unethical. How did anyone do this?

Why did I cover up the colors stuck inside my head?

Internet snow day

Lands End no longer has a return button from their order history page. You now have to go to a different page and type in a 7 digit order number.

Which registrar should I use for a bunch of .com and .org domains?
Gandi
Namecheap
Porkbun
Cloudflare

Pre theater dinner at Bob Bob Ricard.

And some other beautiful objects.

The wonderfully cluttered Cast Courts. Reminded me a lot of the Enlightenment Room at the British Museum: similar exhibit not just of objects but how those objects were originally shown 150 years ago.

Phenomenal day at the Victoria & Albert. It's as great as the British Museum but instead of singular historical works it's full of collections of terrific manufactured things. Lots of photos! Here starting with four sculptures.

Had a phenomenal dinner at Akoko, a fine dining West African restaurant in London. French cooking and saucing techniques with Senegalese, Nigerian, and Ghanaian flavors. Also lovely front of house.
Very exciting meal, one of the best I've had in years. Run by Aji Akokomi, current chef is Mutaro Balde. These flavors are terrific and don't normally get the fine dining treatment, a real pleasure to enjoy.
Everything was great but our favorite dish was thin ribbons of squid in a sauce with coriander and a meaningful chile heat.

Fenner Brockway, an exuberant sculpture in Red Lion Square Gardens, London.

Highly competent sourdough

Cries for help from our dying local newspaper:
Due to external issues we have been unable to produce a 16 page newspaper and have had to make the tough decision to go down in our regular page count from two 8 page sections, to 12 pages yesterday, and 10 pages in today's edition.

Also some good museums..

• The Maritime Museum (aka "our friend, the offshore oil platform").
• Provost Skene's house with a remarkable secret Catholic ceiling
• The Aberdeen Art Gallery which has an interesting and unusual collection, particularly of glass and ceramics

A lovely day touring around central Aberdeen. Here is Marischal College, an enormous 19th century granite building. The stonework is quite delicate, almost lacey albeit with simpler shapes.

Last morning in Aberdeen, had a nice suburban walk to take a peek at the Rubislaw Quarry and the Johnston Gardens. Aberdeen seems quite livable, nice houses and mellow traffic.

Remember NFTs?

Almost back home. Here's my postcards thread from Mastodon should you want to see it all in one place.

Do not share news stories via Apple News. This is what I see.

The main reason for Fraserburgh is the excellent lighthouse museum there. Perfect visit for us: lovely landscape, a bunch of lenses, and a climb up the old lighthouse itself.

Had a nice day driving to Fraserburgh, the northeast tip of Aberdeenshire. Lovely weather today, lovely scenery. And lovely people, everyone in the area has been so friendly and personal. Like the folks at Nooks and Crannies, a very old fashioned cafe. (Not depicted: my ham, cheese, haggis, and apple compote toastie.)

Celebrating two days of renting a car and successfully driving on the left every single time we turned. I'm having a mezcal negroni which is very good. Includes a pinch of salt.

Today we visited Oyne and Culsamond, two little spots 30 minutes drive west of Aberdeen. Ken's grandparents came from this part of Scotland. We saw his grandfather's home and the church we think he was baptized in. Beautiful part of the world and fun to connect to his story in this way.

Yeah sure I've read this flyspeck and evaluated my contractual options. What are we really doing here people?

Today has been 7 hours on an LNER train from London to Aberdeen. Long ride but comfortable and restful. Lots of pleasant views that are hard to photograph.

At that point in the trip where I'm looking forward to being home. But one more day in London. Going to the V&A tomorrow: any suggestions what to look for in particular?

More from our Greenwich trip: Royal Maritime Museum, a view of the Shard framed in the Tower Bridge.

Went out to Greenwich, home of so much timekeeping and navigation research. Didn't love the observatory visit but it's lovely out there.

(This still happens to me about once a month, where I question talking about my partner in the most simple natural way. I'm 53, we've been together over 25 years. It never entirely stops.)

Internalized homophobia is being uncomfortable referring to your male partner when talking to a trade worker.

Marketing websites called "blogs" that don't have a feed.

Today is a day for getting rid of things. Just gave away my old 8" Dobsonian telescope to the local astronomy club. Junk haulers next. Best feeling.

Once again as a tourist in (near) Europe, reminded that Organic Maps and OpenStreetMap is so much better at walking maps than Google.

More from the African collection. This collection of Benin bronze plaques is phenomenal but a heartbreaking story of British rapaciousness. I was glad the placards were forthright about their provenance.

Some of the African collection. This room was very exciting to me, much more vibrant and interesting than a bunch of old crumbling statues. A lot of this is contemporary art. Well chosen!

The Enlightenment room at the British Museum. This is is a favorite, both for the cabinet of curiosities pleasure and also for its detailed explication of historiography and European intellectual culture. These photos don't do it justice.

British Museum today. First the obligatory Egyptian Greek stuff.

Waiting for a waymo to come down the road to back out of my driveway. They are the only cars that will stop in San Francisco.

Been experimenting with Shortwave, a frontend to Gmail with serious AI capabilities. So far it impresses me and is able to do the things that Gmail Gemini was failing me at. Main drawback is it's fairly expensive for a consumer product.

After 28 or so years I closed my Amazon Associates account. I long since stopped making any money from it. In the early days I wrote a plugin for a blog engine that used my associates ID by default. I think I made about $200 that way, plus another $50 with my own links. I was never very ambitious about it.

Had a proper Sunday roast, including skirlie, a dryish oatmeal porridge with a whole lot of fat.

I'm using ChatGPT so much as a tourist this trip. Today's example: where can I go on a walk from my hotel? It found me a nice a promising suburban garden I never would have found on my own. Also got the wrong direction (it's west, not east) but it was enough to find my way.

And Sambourne House, a successful 19th c. illustrator. Staunchly middle class but with a lot of taste and personality.

The website for my rice cooker has one of those annoying cookie popup things. And then this absolute joy when you tell it "no ad cookies". It took over 30 seconds to commit and let me read a recipe.

Sometime in the 1990s my mom bought these very fancy cocktail toothpicks. When she died in 2000, Ken took them from her kitchen pantry. We use a few every year and think of her every time.