Laurence Gonsalves

@laurence

I like old computers, making things, science, math, and science fiction. Currently making something new at @Nipht.io. Helped create Google Reader. @xenomachina@oldbytes.space on the fediverse. Formerly @laurence on the birdsite. IDIC 🖖

1784 Siguiendo601 Seguidores388 Publicaciones

Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y laurence.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· 14d

Consider who the character that said that line turned out to be.

Screenshot from Star Trek: Discovery. Lorca is saying to Stamets "... Alongside the Wright Brothers, Elon Musk, Zefram Cochrane?"

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· 14d

A still from Star Trek: Discovery. Airiam tells Captain Pike "The probe used multiple SQL injections. I've yet to find any compromised files."

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· 20d

The little guy on page 153 reminds me of Myst's "falling man", somehow. Was this encounter with the wave before or after he fell into the fissure?

Two human silhouettes, side-by-side.

The left one is Myst's "falling man" graphic, but rotated so his feed are facing downwards. He looks like he's trying to comically imitate a zombie in this pose.

The right one is the running man from page 153 of Zen & the Art of the Macintosh, blown up to the same size as the Myst guy. He's pixelated, and looks like he's wearing a suit with a jacket and tie, and is running to the right, away from the Myst guy.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· 25d

The new UI layout in Chrome for Android really makes for a cluttered bottom of the screen, especially with button navigation enabled. This is the way the bsky.app looks on my phone in Chrome. Three separate button bars, each with its own "home" button (at least the last is a circle, not a house).

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Jun 3

Is this Droste?

A copy of a comic by Haus of Decline (alt-text copied below), but with every instance of the Loss comic recursively replaced the Haus of Decline comic.

A Loss comic with arms and legs barges into a hospital and says "help I'm seeing everyone as "Loss" The person at the desk, also a Loss comic asks "what's "Loss"?" The first Loss says "it would take too long to explain... please hel- URRK" He keels over, to which the hospital clerk shouts "OH GOD! HE'S DEAD!"

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 27

Is it just my imagination, or does the voice in Ubuntu's "Test speakers" tool sound kind of like Frieren's English dub voice?

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 22

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 21

"Everybody Loves Ramiel" poster with the cast of "Everybody Loves Raymond", but Raymond has been replaced with a angelic blue, translucent, regular octohedron.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 21

I've really been enjoying these moon phase "images" you've been posting! When I saw this one it inspired me to implement an animated clock with this style of rendering. I've posted the code here, github.com/xenomachina/..., and here's a screen recording:

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 10

I just found my copy of "Internet for Cats", which mentions this page, and has a screenshot. From the screenshot, it appears that the page was old enough that it used the (now long-gone) "<isindex>" element, which is why it mentions "your browser's search dialog".

The cover of a paperback book, "Internet for Cats", by Judy Heim, illustrated by Alan Okamoto. The subtitle is "A Guide to How You and Your Cat Can Prowl the Information Highway Together".

The cover illustration is a stylized painting of an anthropomorphic purple and red tabby cat wearing glasses and plaid vest sitting at a desk in front of a '90s looking desktop computer in a room lined with bookcases, all in front of a large window. A bluish cat is lying on top of the monitor, Pluto to the computer user's Goofy.

A photo of page 70 of the book.

The page is titled "Talk to Cat", and is somewhat yellowed.

Below the title is a black and white screenshot of NCSA Mosaic open to a webpage. The page reads:

"Talk to my cat

The time is 3:29 AM on 17 Mar 1995 here in Pittsburgh

This web document uses speech synthesis to talk to my cat. It is written in arexx and running on an amiga.
Type a sentence to say to my cat in your browser's search dialogue. The computer will say it, and, if the cat is around, it will hear it.

This is a rather abstract act.

The cat, though, is quite concrete, as you can see in this picture, by popular demand, of the cat. [most of that sentence in underlined, presumably a hyperlink]

Old things people have said to the cat are here. ["here" is underlined]

This site was mentioned in Time Magazine. Isn't it odd what one"

The text on the web page cuts off at this point. There is a text box labeled "Search index" in the bottom of the browser window.

Below the screenshot is the text from the book:

"Here is yet another example of a human with too much control over his cat's Web page. When you tap into this page at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, you are invited to "talk to the cat." What happens is that when you type something into the page, a speech synthesizer on the computer on the other end blast out your greeting, likely scaring some poor cat witless as he diligently types away at the computer's keyboard. Visit at http://queer.slip.cs.cmu.edu/cgi_bin/talktocat"

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· May 9

@merriam-webster.com ex-fiance rhymes with science?

A screenshot of Merriam-Webster's Rhymes search for the word "science". Several three syllable words are listed: appliance, compliance, defiance, reliance, alliance, and ex-fiance. A red oval has been drawn on the screenshot around the word ex-fiance.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 16

And it's back up now.

A screenshot of a Downdetector graph for "Xfinity by Comcast" showing a spike of 6,062 reports on March 16, 2026, at 9:11 a.m, with a baseline of 33.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 16

Even their outage map doesn't work.

A screenshot of xfinity.com/support/ showing nothing but the text "Loading..." and 3 orange dots.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 8

App passwords can be used to sign into bsky.app, not just third party apps. You can't create an app password while signed in with one. The UI doesn't do a great job of explaining *why* you can't, though. It highlights the name field as if that's the problem, and doesn't show any error messages.

Screenshot of the bsky.app "Add App Password" dialog.

The unique name field is filled in with the name "CreatedFromAnAppPaswordSignIn", which is highlighted in red as if it was the source of a from validation error.

The allow DMs checkbox is unchecked.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 6

Google's "people also ask" answering the important questions. (Yes, those of us who observe daylight saving time *will* be losing an hour of sleep on Sunday. 😑)

Screenshot of Google search for the query "when does daylight saving time start". The results show that it starts March 8th. Below that is a section called "people also ask", which lists a few questions including. "Do I lose an hour of sleep on Sunday?" (The screenshot has been annotated with a red circle around this question.)

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 6

Caramel, one of my kids' cats, sometimes likes to leave a "gift" outside of people's doors: one of her cat toys. Today she left not one, but *three* toys outside of my office door. (The precision placement is all hers.) #cathursday

A carpeted room with a coffee table to one side. A cat is in the foreground, meowing at the camera. Three burrito-shaped cat toys are evenly spaced on the ground, leading up to a closed door. They all have the same orientation: parallel to the door.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 5

We forgot to take the wreath off of our front door, and last week we discovered that a bird had made a nest on it. We have since been avoiding the use of our front door so we don't risk scaring it off or damaging the nest. Today we discovered that one of the eggs has hatched.

A bird's nest wedged between the top of a wreath and a door. Three tiny eggs are visible inside the nest.

The same nest, but one of the eggs has been replaced with a baby bird. It looks like a fuzzy dinosaur.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 4

Four whole keys just for moving the cursor? How extravagant!

Close up of a Commodore 64 keyboard's cursor keys. There are two cursor keys, one for "up/down", and the other for "left/right".

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Mar 4

PSA: remove snow from your car before driving, or it could blow off and temporarily blind the drivers behind you, or worse. Every time I go to Tahoe in winter I see many Californians driving with snow still on their vehicles, but this is the craziest example I've ever seen.

A van with a a car-sized block of snow on the roof. The van is on a roadway (actually a hotel's drop-off loop) with cars in front of and behind it. The roadway is mostly clear, except some bits of snow around the van. The areas visible off the road are covered in snow, including several coniferous trees trees in the background.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Feb 24

I saw this sign (below the informational billboard) on a recent trip to Costa Rica, and thought it was interesting that the original Spanish ("no drones") is a better English translation than their posted "translation" ("don't drones").

A sign (underneath a much larger informational billboard) that says "No drones / Don't drones" and has a drawing of a drone with a "circle slash" over it.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Dec 23

A recent Android update somehow broke all of my launcher shortcuts so they forgot what their main icon was supposed to look like, and they just started showing the app's icon twice like Dr. Evil and mini-me. If you ran into this problem too, recreating the shortcuts seems to fix the problem.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Dec 18

"Are you two friends?" meme, a 2-part image:

The top part shows a woman asking "Are you two friends?".

The bottom one depicts two characters from Star Trek: Voyager, both in uniform:

Ensign Kim, labeled "cryptocurrency", responds "yes".
Tuvok, labeled "cryptography", responds "no".

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Dec 3

There was a funny glitch in the subtitles of the most recent episode of #Pluribus. When Carol says "this white powdery stuff", the word "white" is replaced by "#D1AD2C", which is the color code for the yellow used in the subtitles. A "search and replace" error, or a weird Easter egg?

A screenshot from Pluribus, with the yellow subtitle, "this #D1AD2C powdery stuff".

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Nov 2

I mean...

Snow Miser and Heat Miser, two characters from the stop-motion animated special "The Year without a Santa Claus" (1974).

Snow Miser looks like he's made out of snow and ice, while Heat Miser looks like he's made out of fire.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Sep 23

I've been programming in Python for over 25 years, and only just learned that comparison chaining is not just for relational operators, but for all comparison operators including == and is.

“Gru’s plan” meme:

1. Gru smiles: “Complex comparisons 3 > 2 > 1 False.”
2. Gru looks pleased: “Add chaining! >> 3 > 2 > 1 True.”
3. Gru smugly gestures: “is operator chains >> 1 != 1 is False False.”
4. Gru is disappointed: “False.”

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Sep 17

I wish I had screenshots of the way the clock and phone apps used to look on Android for comparison, because these Material 3 Expressive updates look terrible. The spacing and sizing of everything is so inconsistent, and where did they get this ugly font from?

Screenshot of Material 3 Expressive clock app in the "World Clock" view. The font used for the times looks like it's made out of chopped up noodles.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Aug 29

FWIW, the name on unicode.org/emoji/charts... is "oncoming fist", but it wouldn't be the first time their names don't line-up with reality. For example, 😑 is not an "expressionless face". It's the expression to end all expressions: the "I'm done" face.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Aug 16

Mildly interesting for fellow #Amiga fans: TikTok's 404 page has a "guru meditation" message.

Screenshot of 404 page reading:

404 Not FOund
Guru Meditation: [long hex number]
Goofy Deploy Page Server

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Aug 7

Lemon dressing

A doodle of an anthropomorphic lemon putting on a grey jacket.

Laurence Gonsalves@laurence· Jul 23

Setting timers on other speakers with Google Home has become completely broken in the past few weeks. When I tell our kitchen speaker to set a timer on our upstairs speaker, it tells me that the timer has been started. However, if then I check what timers are running, there are none. It just lies!