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  I want an easy way to refer to pinouts for microcontrollers and things like that, which doesn't take up physical space on my desk *or* virtual space on any of my current screens. Do I hang a clipboard off the back of one of my monitors, and stash printouts there? Do I buy another small monitor to hang from one of the big ones and use it entirely to display reference information for projects-in-progress? Do I over-engineer a super narrow drawer on the underside of my desk to stash paper in?

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  Emails with vaguely threatening auras

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  My work laptop: hi! I'm one of the most powerful computers you've ever had at your disposal, with more cores and RAM than your first decade and a half of personal computers combined. I have now launched my operating system, and then your email client, a web browser, and two different flavours of team collab software, all of which are packages chiefly needed to deal with plaintext, and I am now so out of breath that I must spin my fan up for several minutes to catch up.

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  Cupboard inspector. Every home should have one. #Cats #SiameseCat #CatsOfMastodon

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  In my search for the perfect #jaffle, I turned to Japan for help - shokupan, or milk bread, is made in square metal pans. Late last year I acquired a Tiger Crown model 2375 bread mold, which is capable of baking precise 12cm loaf-cubes of bread. This is the correct tool for homemade jaffle bread. It fits perfectly, there's zero mess in the iron, and the jaffles snap apart flawlessly. This is ISO Standard Australian white bread, and the recipe needs tweaking, but this is a milestone. #Austr...

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  #AskFedi #cars, what new hotness exists in the world of windscreen washer fluid since the last time I bought a bottle like a decade ago (which has just run out)? Any special formula to get? Anything with rain repellent or anything added in? Anything specific to avoid? Any and all suggestions and boosts welcome.

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  This guy is making a real, physical #SpaceCadetPinball table using #3DPrinting and off-the-shelf electronics. I don't think you could target a project more accurately at me if you tried, so I've been following along pretty religiously. The third instalment is out, covering how he's designed *the wormholes* to work. There's also a playtest section at the end with a partially assembled table, and there's something special about seeing it come to life: https...

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  Hey #solar power enthusiasts of #Australia and/or #Canberra, how big a system (ballpark) would you expect a household of 2 people to have? I've just been quoted $18-20k for a system with 9kW of panels and either a 9 or an 18kWh battery and that sounds like A Lot for a little townhouse. My power bill spreadsheet says I use about 18kW/day of power during winter (11-12 in summer), and that's before I add the insulation I've also been quoted on so I expect that to drop dramatically.

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  Hey. Has someone made your work life a bit easier this week? Wrote a tool you found useful, invited you along for coffee, managed an office disruption, emptied your bin, shown you a cool keyboard shortcut, caught an embarassing egg that you dropped? Take a moment today to thank them for it. Give them a reason to end their week on a high. Even a one-sentence email could absolutely make their day. Boost this so others can think to do the same.

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  Important question: does 'scone' - as in the baked treat - rhyme with 'gone' or 'cone' for you? Bonus: roughly where are you from, because I expect some stark regional differences?

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  I made a mildly irresponsible retro gaming collection purchase this week. Price anchoring is a terrible thing - when you've seen something desirable frequently go for a thousand bucks or more, suddenly seeing one going for only several hundred looks like the bargain of the century. Especially when it's something I'd resigned myself to never collecting... but apparently it was still desirable enough to me to jump on it. Anyway - I look forward to showing a rare SEGA MegaDrive here...

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  Here's a thread on how the Gravis GamePad Pro - a game controller with ten digital buttons - was made to work on the PC gameport interface, which actually only supports a total of four buttons. You've probably never actually wondered about that, but you very probably *have* wondered about where all those zeroes and ones they talk about in computing come into things, and this thread has that, too! 🧵 #retrogaming #retrocomputing #GravisGrIP #GravisGamePad

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  When did active matrix LCDs become a thing in consumer #electronics? I think I've stumbled on an unasked and unanswered question in #retrogaming history and the answer hinges on the above question. #AskFedi

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  She came out of the factory a bit wrong, but we still love her dearly. #Cats #CatsOfMastodon #SiameseCat #Caturday

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  Today I learned, and you should too: heatshrink label printers are a thing. They look like a normal laser printer except you feed them cartridges with white heatshrink tubing, they print text *directly onto the heatshrink* and then you put that on your wiring. Looks like they're maybe AU$100 for a bundle with some supplies. Not entirely impulse purchase territory, but the next time I'm tearing down and recabling a desk from scratch or some other massive wiring project, I'm getting...

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  "...connection issues were mostly being reported in Australia's eastern states". Is this not simply a map of #Australia's population density? #Telstra (Article here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-09/telstra-outage-still-impacting-triple-zero-calls/106895430)

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  Google having some issues in Australia maybe? Gmail and Youtube are dead in the water to me.

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  So goose is out, fish is in now?

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  Welp, that's it I guess. As of today #Reddit is requiring me to log in in order to keep using old dot Reddit dot com. That's just fucked off the last little bit of usefulness I had for that site.

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  It has been zero (0) days since I compulsively tried ticking/selecting different boxes on an online form to see what, if any, logic nonsense I can make occur

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  I think I have a cold and don't feel like cooking, and my usual Chinese restaurant isn't open on Mondays, so I'm scoping out other places for comfort food tonight and... oh. Oh dear. Oh no. The text on this "sign" is almost identical to what he wrote in the Facebook post, so clearly that was just copied and pasted into Meta AI as a prompt, but... this travesty was just so unnecessary.

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  Hi, I'm a #Samsung washing machine, and I think the solution to not being able to drain water out is to ADD MORE WATER TO THE PROBLEM

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  France: Nuclear power reactors are having to shut down because the rivers they source cooling water from are too hot (28C!), the Louvre shuts early because its climate control can't handle the afternoon heat from its patrons, and people are drowning in rivers trying desperately to cool off. I wish I was reading these things in a Michael Crichton novel, not the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/23/heatwave-france-spain-italy-europe

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  Every time scientists come along and announce they've discovered the absolute highest cuteness quotient possible in the known universe, this creature simply rolls over and proves them wrong once again. #Cats #CatsOfMastodon #SiameseCat

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  Recruiters and hiring folks of #Australia - full stops after dot points in a CV, or no?

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  #Electronics fedi, what make and model are these tactile switches? They don't match anything I'm seeing when searching for "slim round smd tactile" and the like - everything has too big a base and often the wrong colour. Is it possible they've just rolled their own mechanism to make it super tiny? They snap satisfyingly in and out but take a surprising amount of force. These are in a weirdo gamepad I want to write about this week. EDIT: solved, they&am...

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  When a website newly and suddenly demands you install an app, or create an account, or disable your ad blocker, or positively identify yourself in order to keep using it, it's telling you its charter has changed and it is no longer fit for purpose, and you should simply stop using it. The cause of this thought today is Reddit blocking its mobile site with an undismissable beg to install the app instead. It's still possible to use old dot reddit but that's frankly too muc...

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  There isn't enough space in this box to *fully* explain WTF I was actually doing here and why, but I can confirm Windows 10 absolutely does not enjoy being forced to run in 640x480 resolution.

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  Starting to properly look into an alternative to #Dropbox or #OneDrive. I'm currently paying AU$109/year ($9/month) for my home Office subscription which includes a terabyte of OD space. Dropbox is $184/year ($15/mo) for 2TB of space. I currently have about 100GB of data to house. Looks like it costs about AU$80/month to put 100GB of data on a webhost in Australia. Can anyone suggest somewhere priced in between that'd let me use NextCloud or similar? Boosts and suggestions welc...

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  Hey #Australia / #Canberra specifically, what's the go with new water heaters these days? I've just discovered my 170L gas one is over 33 years old at this point (what a champ) and I'm thinking about replacing it pre-emptively. The current one can't quite fill my bathtub before getting tepid, I like the idea of an instant system but would a modern gas one the same size be better? Do I want a heat pump unit? The ACT has another couple decades to go with gas and I don't have s...