tal

I personally prefer Markdown to BBCode and not having to have a ton of different different accounts, but if you want phpBB forums, they are out there. Search a Web search engine for a string that exists on the website that the forum software displays by default. "Powered by vBulletin", "Powered by phpBB", etc.

searches

https://www.findaforum.net/Home/TopForums/

And I still use social media the way many people originally imagined it: as a way to stay connected. My feeds have always been a mix of far-flung relatives, old friends, and high school band chums (because, let’s be honest, band buddies are the best buddies). Most days, I carve out a little time after work to catch up with the people who matter.

The last thing I’d want is for doing so to be...just more work. And yet, more than half of respondents agreed with the statement “Maintaining an online presence feels like work,” with about a third of those checking the “strongly agree” box. Only 16% disagreed, with the rest remaining neutral.

A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer?

I don't really care about the following-people form of social media, the Twitter family. I'm more interested in the forum sort, the Reddit family. There, I don't need to singlehandedly maintain a flow of content, because people aren't coming to see @tal@lemmy.today, but because they're coming to see what's going on in some community that I only incidentally participate in.

I mean, it's still going to have the pants beaten off it by WebM or AVIF for anything originating from a video camera.

GIF was just never intended to be a video format. I have a hard time thinking of something where it's really competitive. Maybe if you had a recorded lossless video of a small-palette video game, like, NES era or earlier, then GIF might be a solid choice. I'd still think that APNG or MNG would probably outperform it.

GIF animations really only got a boost because there was a period of time when it was all that a decent variety of Web browsers could display.

EDIT: Also, if one is using GIF...I dunno if ffmpeg does this by default, but most video formats have I-frames and then frames that depend on those. When seeking, a player will seek to the nearest prior I-frame and then decode from there.

I don't believe that GIF 89a has a formal concept of I-frames, because the format was never intended for real video. But it is possible to create frames in a GIF 89a animation with transparent areas that don't differ from the prior frame, and this achieves some of the efficiency benefits that a video format would get. I know that there have been GIF 89a conpressors that will do this. The downside is that it kills seekability, since after a seek in a player that just starts drawing from the current frame, you'll see only some of an image until the next time that a pixel in a frame is non-transparent and gets redrawn. There may not be any frames wirhout transparent areas nearby, and the player has no way to know where to look for one. But for applications where you don't care about seekability, that may help mitigate some of GIF's limitations for animations.

In all honesty, though, the right answer for video is almost always "use a newer format than GIF".

But typing stuff like: /*********************************************************/ is pretty common for me and would be annoying without auto-repeat of the respective character…

If you're coding, your code editor may have some way to input that.

Some people who frequently input something like that use a snippet system.

In emacs, hitting most keys (like "*") runs self-insert-command. That takes a numeric parameter, so one can just do something like / M-5 M-6 * / (slash, hold Alt, type 56, hit asterisk, slash) to get a slash followed by 56 asterisks followed by a slash.

I'm not really a serious vim person, but I'm sure that vim has similar functionality.

searches

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5054128/repeating-characters-in-vim-insert-mode

Looks like, in insert mode, / Control-o 56 a * Esc a /. Probably not using correct vim terminology for the keystrokes, but you get my drift.

On US English keyboards, there isn't a universal, standard way to do it at the keyboard level.

I use Linux, and bind my Menu key on my keyboard to Compose. With Compose, I can tap "Compose-backtick-e" and get "è".

Emacs has its own input methods, as do other environments.

I was looking for small systems a while back, and the situation is surprisingly disappointing there. It should be technically possible to get portable and window heat/AC units (not split-mini, as one needs a duct for ventilation) that can maintain CO₂ and humidity levels. For putting a floor on humidity, one would need a water intake, and for doing energy-efficient ventilation, one would want a counterflow heat exchanger. As far as I can tell, small all-in-one systems like this just don't exist.

You can get ERV or HRV ventilators with flex duct attachments, which do the heat exchange bit. They don't cost that much, though given that it's basically two fans and a heat exchanger, I was still kinda surprised how expensive they are. I mean, an air conditioner is a lot more complicated. I suppose that there just isn't enough demand to produce the kind of sales volume required.

looks for an example

https://www.amazon.com/Aprilaire-V22BEC-Recovery-Ventilator-Easy-Install/dp/B0CXQ8RPTR

You could drive one of those off an indoors CO₂ sensor and that'd give energy-efficient ventilation with CO₂ control.

Yeah, I had a year of school in a very elderly school building with limited ventilation. When it was raining and all the windows were shut, I remember it being really hard to stay awake and focused. Didn't learn until many years later to recognize that and that those are the symptoms of excessively high carbon dioxide levels (at the time, I thought maybe it was "low oxygen", that everyone's breathing had used up the oxygen, since I knew that fresh air would wake me up).

I've been in some office buildings with poor ventilation that do the same thing, though not as severely as that school.

IIRC, lime or something like that can be used as a carbon scrubber, but it's not something that you'd want to do constantly and everywhere. Looked this up some time back.

searches

Soda lime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda_lime

Soda lime is a mixture of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and calcium oxide (CaO). It is used in granular form within recirculating breathing environments like general anesthesia and its breathing circuit, submarines, rebreathers, and hyperbaric chambers and underwater habitats. Its purpose is to eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) from breathing gases, preventing carbon dioxide retention and, eventually, carbon dioxide poisoning.[1][2]

Probably, if you want to regulate CO₂ levels in HVAC systems, best to ventilate to the outside and then run the exchanged air through a counterflow heat exchanger to preserve indoor temperature as much as possible.

Yeah, this really shocked me too.

Basically, we knew that high carbon dioxide levels would have negative effects, but we used to think that much higher levels were required to have an impact, like 5,000 ppm or higher.

Then in recent years, some people started doing experimentation and found that mental capabilities were significantly worse at 1000 ppm.

Just sleeping with my bedroom door closed

in a not especially airtight house

I get well over that.

Also worth pointing out that pre-industrial outdoor carbon dioxide concentrations were about 280 ppm. We've brought it up to about 420 ppm now. Makes it harder to ventilate to get rid of the carbon dioxide indoors than was once the case, because there's also more of it outdoors now.

I'd imagine that goats can walk on solar panels too.

...roughly four months ahead of schedule.

One of the new memory fabs under construction.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

This has new 2x8GB 3200 DDR4 DIMMs being a bit over $200 at the moment.

A year back, it was $50, but not now.