My new Halloween read - When Things Fall Apart #IYKYK
Spotting while scooping the loop. #IYKYK
Today in the Amana Colonies
🌡️ High 61°F
☁️ Cloudy
🐖 Floyd secured
Today’s experiment #IYKYK
My favorite inventor is the person who mixed potatoes with mayonnaise and called it a salad.
Kathy Reid
boosted
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
my 90 year-old dad died last night after a very long life, a long decline, multiple hospitalisations, and the last couple of months spent in hospital & a repat facility
lots of complex feelings for me, but I’m glad he no longer needs to struggle in difficult circumstances (largely of his own creation, but still ❤️🩹)
when he was young, he travelled the world in the Merchant Navy in the loud, hot bellies of large cargo ships amongst the enormous engines with pistons several times taller than himself. he only spent a short time in each port – a tasting menu, you might say – but he felt that he had seen the entire world by the time he got married
he worked many jobs in his long career, most of them spent bending metal to his will, often shaping machines into new forms to perform tasks for which they were never originally designed. he worked long hours to provide financially for his family – which he saw as his main duty in life – but also because he loved working with machines & solving engineering problems born of metal. grease. electricity.
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer. he used tools to design & make other tools to make machines. I’m sure that some of my own interests & skills were influenced by growing up watching him execute his craft, hearing him talk about his work, & being dragged along to yet another industrial robot exhibition 😩😜
he was a life-long learner, and my own love of 🤔 – or at least facility with – computers & electronics & code (oh my!) were things he saw (and understood) and supported. in the late 1970s or very early 1980s he took a programming course (which was the spelling at the time 😜) at the local TAFE, and he took me along – a rare opportunity in that era. my first hands-on experience with code at 11 or 12 years old was in the form of mapping out & writing programmes down by hand on graph paper & then encoding them on a stack of mark sense cards with a B2 pencil to be fed into a card reader (and drawing that all-important diagonal line down the side of the stack with said pencil – #IYKYK 😆)
it wasn’t long until I had begged sufficiently & got my very first computer (that we absolutely couldn’t really afford), a #CoCo – the original #TRS80 #ColorComputer model in “battleship grey” with 16K RAM 😲, later upgraded to a whopping 64K 🤯 🤯
I still have that computer over 40 years later 😊
after he retired, he always had several ambitious plans on the boil (less charitable folks might call them “hare-brained schemes” 🙃), including a petrol-powered all-terrain tracked wheelchair for a friend who wanted to be able to travel off the beaten path under his own (metaphorical) steam. it would have ended up weighing about a tonne & absolutely would never have worked (safely), but he was determined to “help” a friend & excited to work on solving an interesting engineering challenge, once again bending metal and machinery to his purpose du jour
he was happiest noodling in his workshop, oil- & grease-stained hands deep inside a machine, wielding – or welding – a new tool of his own design. I always associated the smell of machines and ozone with his presence. until after he retired I never saw his hands unstained by years of ingrained, immovable grease
in his later years he discovered #3Dprinting and became a journeyman #maker of sorts. he was exceptionally proud (and a bit obnoxious) when he was able to “teach the professionals at #U3A a thing or two” about his new hobby. his idea of a conversation had always been (impatiently) waiting for you to take a breath so he could tell you the next thing he was interested in – usually unconnected to whatever you’d shared 💁♀️
he used a succession of smallish 3D printers to make many, many Japanese-inspired lanterns (into which he stuffed various strings of coloured flashing lights) and Chinese-inspired dragons, amazed & delighted that additive manufacturing was able to create interlocking objects right off the print bed – after having spent a lifetime creating sometimes-intricate interlocking components using tried-and-true subtractive manufacturing processes. he gave most of these prints away to others – whether they wanted them or not 😆
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer
and he was my father
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
1935-2025
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
my 90 year-old dad died last night after a very long life, a long decline, multiple hospitalisations, and the last couple of months spent in hospital & a repat facility
lots of complex feelings for me, but I’m glad he no longer needs to struggle in difficult circumstances (largely of his own creation, but still ❤️🩹)
when he was young, he travelled the world in the Merchant Navy in the loud, hot bellies of large cargo ships amongst the enormous engines with pistons several times taller than himself. he only spent a short time in each port – a tasting menu, you might say – but he felt that he had seen the entire world by the time he got married
he worked many jobs in his long career, most of them spent bending metal to his will, often shaping machines into new forms to perform tasks for which they were never originally designed. he worked long hours to provide financially for his family – which he saw as his main duty in life – but also because he loved working with machines & solving engineering problems born of metal. grease. electricity.
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer. he used tools to design & make other tools to make machines. I’m sure that some of my own interests & skills were influenced by growing up watching him execute his craft, hearing him talk about his work, & being dragged along to yet another industrial robot exhibition 😩😜
he was a life-long learner, and my own love of 🤔 – or at least facility with – computers & electronics & code (oh my!) were things he saw (and understood) and supported. in the late 1970s or very early 1980s he took a programming course (which was the spelling at the time 😜) at the local TAFE, and he took me along – a rare opportunity in that era. my first hands-on experience with code at 11 or 12 years old was in the form of mapping out & writing programmes down by hand on graph paper & then encoding them on a stack of mark sense cards with a B2 pencil to be fed into a card reader (and drawing that all-important diagonal line down the side of the stack with said pencil – #IYKYK 😆)
it wasn’t long until I had begged sufficiently & got my very first computer (that we absolutely couldn’t really afford), a #CoCo – the original #TRS80 #ColorComputer model in “battleship grey” with 16K RAM 😲, later upgraded to a whopping 64K 🤯 🤯
I still have that computer over 40 years later 😊
after he retired, he always had several ambitious plans on the boil (less charitable folks might call them “hare-brained schemes” 🙃), including a petrol-powered all-terrain tracked wheelchair for a friend who wanted to be able to travel off the beaten path under his own (metaphorical) steam. it would have ended up weighing about a tonne & absolutely would never have worked (safely), but he was determined to “help” a friend & excited to work on solving an interesting engineering challenge, once again bending metal and machinery to his purpose du jour
he was happiest noodling in his workshop, oil- & grease-stained hands deep inside a machine, wielding – or welding – a new tool of his own design. I always associated the smell of machines and ozone with his presence. until after he retired I never saw his hands unstained by years of ingrained, immovable grease
in his later years he discovered #3Dprinting and became a journeyman #maker of sorts. he was exceptionally proud (and a bit obnoxious) when he was able to “teach the professionals at #U3A a thing or two” about his new hobby. his idea of a conversation had always been (impatiently) waiting for you to take a breath so he could tell you the next thing he was interested in – usually unconnected to whatever you’d shared 💁♀️
he used a succession of smallish 3D printers to make many, many Japanese-inspired lanterns (into which he stuffed various strings of coloured flashing lights) and Chinese-inspired dragons, amazed & delighted that additive manufacturing was able to create interlocking objects right off the print bed – after having spent a lifetime creating sometimes-intricate interlocking components using tried-and-true subtractive manufacturing processes. he gave most of these prints away to others – whether they wanted them or not 😆
he was a fitter & turner, a boiler-maker, a repairer & maintainer, a “keeper-runnerer”, a tinkerer
and he was my father
#Vale Wes Smith ❤️🩹
1935-2025
Attention Melbourne parents: SMALL FRY ROCK!
https://m.moshtix.com.au/v2/event/small-fry-rock-feat-alex-lloyd-sarah-mcleod-the-superjesus/185351
You can't fool me: this is a cyberman burka.
slims :miyagi: 🐟⁂
boosted
Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
But for example it meant we carried all of alt.binaries #iykyk in spite of some dubious content, but we could at least limit storage to a shorter time period than we kept for text groups.
radio free fedi
boosted
Less than a handful of days into Radio Free Fedi Fest 25 and I think it's fair to say the presenters and attendees are absolutely smashing it!
https://party.radiofreefedi.net and #RFFF25 for schedule and news.
Hangout, discover and support awesome independent artists. Mutually motivate and lift one another up.
Don't miss #iykyk happenings and future "memes" like:
We can all agree Chad did NOT deserve the couples skate.
Pristine Concrete is the newest fedi band super group.
Less than a handful of days into Radio Free Fedi Fest 25 and I think it's fair to say the presenters and attendees are absolutely smashing it!
https://party.radiofreefedi.net and #RFFF25 for schedule and news.
Hangout, discover and support awesome independent artists. Mutually motivate and lift one another up.
Don't miss #iykyk happenings and future "memes" like:
We can all agree Chad did NOT deserve the couples skate.
Pristine Concrete is the newest fedi band super group.