#rogue tech

[theoutcastrogue]

3 ways to deal with webp images on Firefox

1) Type "about:config" in the address bar, press enter, type "webp" in the search bar, go to "image.webp.enabled" (currently the 3rd and last on the list) and click the toggle button on the right to change the value from "true" to "false". This will solve most your problems, though it might affect functionality in a handful of sites. If there's an issue you can change it back at any time.

2) Find and install the add-on "Search by Image". When you right click on an image, go to Search by Image>Open Image, and it will open the source jpg or png or whatever in a new tab, where you can download it normally.

3) Right-click somewhere on the page and go to "Take Screenshot". Select the image and download as png (no other options, you can convert it later if you need to, and crop if necessary).

I use all three, depending. Fuck webp.

what the hell even is a webp image. i dont care fuck why cant you play nice and just be a png. asshole image

[theoutcastrogue]

why have APPS, approved, controlled, and squeezed by a monopoly STORE, when you can just have BOOKMARKS, approved and controlled by you, and squeezed by no one

[theoutcastrogue]

I agree, but I want to note that looking at screenshots on the internet is a terrible way to make assessments. Size matters, and background lighting matters.

The ideal and assumed way of watching a movie is on a big-ass screen in an otherwise dark theatre. At home, the screen will be smaller in absolute AND relative terms (at least you're sitting closer to it), which can't be helped. But this can: TURN OFF THE LIGHTS. If you're gonna a watch a film on your tv or computer screen, and you want to enjoy the visuals more or less as intended, kill all light sources. Don't even consider judging a film's lighting if you haven't done that (or watched it in the theatre like god intended, which is sadly expensive).

And it's outright impossible to judge a film's lighting in broad daylight from a phone, where a low-res screenshot, a few cm wide, appears on your social media feed, perhaps in a white background (say, a non-dark mode tumblr dashboard), and with a million other lights, letters, colours somewhere on the screen competing for your attention, and filling your view with so much light that your pupils can't dilate enough. There's nothing subjective about this, it's biology.

It's entirely possible that the same shot which looks like dogshit on your phone will be perfectly acceptable when seen as intended. You would be literally seeing it with different eyes.

Does that apply to the screenshots above? Almost certainly not! (Again, I am in full agreement with the OP.) But fuck disney in general, I genuinely can't be bothered with them.

OMG. Somebody said it out loud.

Disney is absolutely not the only studio doing this though.

It seems to have become standard practice across movies and series everywhere.

Anything that doesn't do it is like a breath of sunlight and fresh air inside a dank musty cave.

It's part of the 'fix it in post-production' epidemic sweeping through the studios. Fix it in post is often used as a time/money-saving measure - and is absolutely part of the same mess that the WGA is fighting against currently.

Rather than fixing things on-set - audio, lighting, something in-frame that shouldn't be, etc. (which is all handled by unionized crew) - they leave it for the CG folks (not unionized) to edit later.

(on ridiculously tight schedules that leave them scrambling, cutting corners, and working inhumane hours)

See also: that part where scripts aren't finished, because the studio won't fully staff the writers room, and won't pay to have writers on-set for day-of-filming script questions and fixes (which could resolve issues such as 'what kind of lighting do we need here?')

Anyway, all this shit we, as audiences, keep complaining about - bad lighting, bad sound, wonky visual effects, over-usage of not-great CGI, stilted acting on green-screen sets, scripts that seem not-quite-finished, costumes that look like they're cheap and flimsy, terrible hair and makeup, films and series that aren't as polished as they could be...

Plus the complaints we have about streaming services and their shenanigans...

All of that is enmeshed in the extreme capitalism that has taken over everything, including entertainment, to the point that studios are abusing their workforce and churning out material that - at best just doesn't live up to its potential - at worst, is just unwatchable shit.

[mopp-art]

I made a tiny little tech priest blorbo for my gfs upcoming rogue trader ttrpg. her name is ϴ30-QT (or Theta if you're normal)

[theoutcastrogue]

My thoughts on the best strategies to preserve human knowledge and creation in perpetuity

1) don't put all your eggs in one basket

archives need to be paper and digital, public and private sector, centralised and decentralised, fully legal / by the book and rogue, in vaults and cabinets and servers and torrents

create as many redundancies as you can: make copies, and copies of the copies, and copies of the copies of the copies, ad nauseam; anyone anywhere who can make copies, should

spread the physical hubs (paper stacks or servers) geographically, in as many places as possible; you never know what kind of natural disaster or man-made horror will take out a whole building, city, region, or continent tomorrow

2) entropy is a bitch, think longterm

pick methods that are more likely to last

schedule regular copying: you gotta transfer the stuff to a new medium before the old one falls apart, so have some idea when it's expected to fall apart

3) keep converting to new formats

no format becomes obsolete instantly, there's always a transition period; use transition periods to furiously convert everything

4) indexing and searching is as important as the content itself

self-explanatory

5) eyes on the prize: the end goal is public access

if a random nobody, with no status and no money, can't access it easily, freely, and anonymously, the job is only half-done; you've built the back-end and neglected the front-end; get someone to complete it ASAP, because now it's just sitting pretty and isn't doing anything; or isn't doing enough, in any case

bonus: use. fucking. torrents.

It is truly bonkers that the bittorrent protocol is not being used for archiving. It's an ideal method for digital archiving and it should be standard procedure. If a university has stuff on a hard disk, it can put it on its server, and if it can put it on a server, it can torrent it and seed it 24/7. If the same archive is useful for another university on the other side of the planet, that one can download it and then stay in the swarm, also seeding it. If a library or city council anywhere on earth finds the archive of interest, it can do the same. The more the merrier, every download is a potential redundancy and every seeder is an actual redundancy.

If you got space to store it, you got space to share it. And of course, any private individual can at any time join the swarm. So we get excellent preservation (with multiple redundancies, spread far and wide geographically) AND public access, global and free, which is what preservation is FOR in the first place! It ain't for the heck of it, it ain't only for the eyes of the elite, it's for everyone, that's the purpose, that's the end goal. If that's not your end goal, you're doing it wrong.

[theoutcastrogue]

google cache is gone, isn't it?

Dropping this here for anyone who may not already know about it. paywallreader.com

[nasa]

Love Letters from Space

Love is in the air, and it’s out in space too! The universe is full of amazing chemistry, cosmic couples held together by gravitational attraction, and stars pulsing like beating hearts.

Celestial objects send out messages we can detect if we know how to listen for them. Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us scour the skies for all kinds of star-crossed signals.

Celestial Conversation Hearts

Communication is key for any relationship – including our relationship with space. Different telescopes are tuned to pick up different messages from across the universe, and combining them helps us learn even more. Roman is designed to see some visible light – the type of light our eyes can see, featured in the photo above from a ground-based telescope – in addition to longer wavelengths, called infrared. That will help us peer through clouds of dust and across immense stretches of space.

Other telescopes can see different types of light, and some detectors can even help us study cosmic rays, ghostly neutrinos, and ripples in space called gravitational waves.

Intergalactic Hugs

This visible and near-infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two hearts locked in a cosmic embrace. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this pair’s love burns bright. The two spiral galaxies are merging together, igniting the birth of brand new baby stars.

Stellar nurseries are often very dusty places, which can make it hard to tell what’s going on. But since Roman can peer through dust, it will help us see stars in their infancy. And Roman’s large view of space coupled with its sharp, deep imaging will help us study how galaxy mergers have evolved since the early universe.

Cosmic Chemistry

Those stars are destined to create new chemistry, forging elements and scattering them into space as they live, die, and merge together. Roman will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.

Did you know that U and I (uranium and iodine) were both made from merging neutron stars? Speaking of which…

Fatal Attraction

When two neutron stars come together in a marriage of sorts, it creates some spectacular fireworks! While they start out as stellar sweethearts, these and some other types of cosmic couples are fated for devastating breakups.

When a white dwarf – the leftover core from a Sun-like star that ran out of fuel – steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance and lead to a cataclysmic explosion. Studying these outbursts, called type Ia supernovae, led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Roman will scan the skies for these exploding stars to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.

Going Solo

Plenty of things in our galaxy are single, including hundreds of millions of stellar-mass black holes and trillions of “rogue” planets. These objects are effectively invisible – dark objects lost in the inky void of space – but Roman will see them thanks to wrinkles in space-time.

Anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time. So when an intervening object nearly aligns with a background star from our vantage point, light from the star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer object. The object acts like a natural lens, focusing and amplifying the background star’s light.

Thanks to this observational effect, which makes stars appear to temporarily pulse brighter, Roman will reveal all kinds of things we’d never be able to see otherwise.

Roman is nearly ready to set its sights on so many celestial spectacles. Follow along with the mission’s build progress in this interactive virtual tour of the observatory, and check out these space-themed Valentine’s Day cards.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[stars-obsession-pit]

Following an accident, Danny wakes up in Gotham City in a DC universe. Lacking any forms of ID or possessions beyond the clothes on his back, he’s forced to commit some crimes to survive. Minor crimes, but still.

And then he gets caught.

During the court proceedings, they come to the mistaken conclusion that he’s a Meta suffering from some psychiatric issues such as Cotard’s Syndrome (a real rare condition where a person holds the delusional belief that they’re dead/don’t exist/etc).

Thus, between his “need for mental treatment” and the concerns about housing someone with his unique physical traits, he is sentenced to spend time in Arkham Asylum. He’s under pretty low security aside from the anti-Meta stuff and has more freedoms than some other inmates, but it’s still not a great experience. Even at the best of times, Arkham is hardly a nice place.

Some of his fellow residents are decently chill all things considered, but lots very much aren’t.

[bluerosefox]

Phantomish Rogues

Team Phantom get ripped from their home universe into the DCverse. With no money or real ID's in this world. Now thats a problem.

Another big problem is that Danny is badly injured and his core kinda put him into a deep cryo sleep. He needs to rest and gather ectoplasm.

Bigger problem Team Phantom have no clue how to get home because they don't know how to decode the Fenton Portal blue-prints, not even Jazz who at the time didn't pay attention to her parents portal work anymore by the time they finished it. The only one who does have an idea is Danny!

Biggest problem, they landed in a place called Gotham that seems to be overrun with actual villains and heroes? (vigilantes). And for some odd reason many of them seem to find them no matter where the Team goes to hide.

Until they can get their hands on a safe space, tech, and money, Team Phantom might have to go a bit Rogue/Villainous if they wanna keep Danny safe until he wakes up.

[theoutcastrogue]

It got fixed.

Google is actively blocking Captcha on Firefox

Firefox users have noticed that captchas - both the picture kind and the click the box kind - are not resolving on Firefox. Tests on Chromium based browsers show that it works perfectly fine on them. It is also known that Chrome will be disabling all ad-blockers in June when it moves to Manifest v3, which will greatly limit what extensions can do.

If you use Firefox, there is an extension called User-Agent Switcher and it allows you to change your browser's UA to Chrome. This will allow you to bypass reCaptcha/Captcha blocks set up by Google and make them function properly.

It could be a code snafu on Google's part - but given how predatory they have been acting lately, I'm going to guess not. Don't get locked out of your websites or feel forced to use Chrome again just to browse.

[solanj]

The Imperium warrants any sacrifice

[pierkyn]

Pasqal: the only companion who understood the assignment

AND he sings in the bath 🥺

[theoutcastrogue]

WElp, the hard disk died. Got another one, reinstalled the basics, I had a million tweaks in windows and firefox that will take me a HOT SECOND to remake, last backup was three months ago, and it could be much worse, but I did lose stuff so now I'm busy AND sad.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR STUFF.

[maggotknight]

A collection of various tech priest sketches ✨️

[chamerionwrites]

Aside from the Ghorman Massacre and the leadup to it (whew) the part of Andor S2 that most hits for me personally is Mon's extraction from the senate. Partly because it's a pretty solid tense-espionage-plot sequence and that's my jam.

But primarily because, on a spiritual level, that's a Rogue One Hallway Scene to me. Literally none of it works without a double handful of small, brave acts of resistance lining up exactly right. Mon never even takes the senate floor if Bail and that other senator aren't working the procedural rules. Nobody outside the chamber even SEES the speech if a couple of unnamed maintenance technicians aren't acing the malicious compliance game. It's possible Luthen never even sends Cassian on the mission if Lonni doesn't warn him there's a mole in the other extraction team. Cassian never gets close to Mon if her aide (on a technicality because she FIRED him like two hours ago) doesn't lead him through the building and loan Cassian his credentials. It's possible nobody gets out of the building alive if that same aide doesn't (1) put himself in the line of fire to distract the ISB agent and then (2) pick up her blaster and volunteer - in his formal civilian robes and slightly shaking voice - to stay behind and hold that gun on the guards and delay the moment they call in Mon's escape.

Something something collective resistance, something something revolution as a relay race, something something Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward...Remember this: try.