iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15h

This, and the assumption that everyone here lives in your state\province\county/ country/ continent. It's the *World* Wide Web ...

yiff.life

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

Some folk may know of Avaaz. They're running a campaign to "Stay true to Europe's commitment to justice and human rights: activate the Blocking Statute to protect the International Criminal Court from Trump's sanctions." #ICC secure.avaaz.org/en/campaigns/save_… As a […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

I bought a "new" 10" f4 Meade Schmidt Newtonian Telescope - hopefully for asteroid occultation observations. Big light bucket. First light last night. The half-moon was at prime focus, with a very jury-rigged mount, but hit clear skies. The second (earlier) […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A black & white photograph of a half-moon

A grainy close-up photograph of the cratered shadow terminator of the half moon.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

@benjamineskola @quixoticgeek Passive (aggressive) voice is preferred here: "It was decided not to".

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

@MrBerard things written and things said are different. This can be useful. One is much easier to use as evidence, the other is a mishearing , if they're even awake.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

So I presented at #PyconfZA Great people, fascinating talks, and well organised. Thanks to @kimvanwyk for the encouragement. The slides can be found here: isijingi.co.za/wp/2026/10/18/i-wrot…

isijingi.co.za

“I wrote it once, I can write it again” – PyConZA 2026

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David Penfold :verified: @davep.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026

An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a Texan, a New Englander, and a Californian), an Argentinian, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovakian, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a New Zealander, a Spaniard […]

infosec.exchange

Original post on infosec.exchange

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Danie van der Merwe @danie10.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

Free cybercrime and online scams helpline goes live in South Africa “South Africans who have been scammed, hacked, extorted or harassed online now have a free place to turn for help. The Cyber Helpline, a UK charity, has launched a 12-month pilot in South Africa with local social impact […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Michael Graaf @michaelgraaf.kolektiva.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

After Scalabrini's victory in the #ConCourt the astroturfers could hardly have left it alone. Problem is, it's in a city where they have no support. What happens when you have pogrom & nobody comes? That's what's happening right now. Far more media & human rights observers than would-be vigilantes!

Screenshot of "March & March" xenophobic astroturf outfit targeting Scalabrini HQ for an action at 15:00 this afternoon, showing premises & staff.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

I was all wound up for my first lunar occultation observation attempt - and it's raining! Sigh.

A schematic of the moon, with a thin bright sliver, and the a dotted line near the bottom edge - the predicted path of the occulted star.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

@arclight @uastronomer possibly. There are bubbles of people so insulated by their privilege that they are unaware of the existence of others' issues.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

@uastronomer this often comes from a position of unexamined privilege

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Allen but one of the bad ones, woooo @uastronomer.mastodon.monoceros.co.za.ap.brid.gy · 10/10/2026

"I will not morally compromise myself by voting and choosing a party which does not reflect my values, the lesser of two evils is still evil" I admire the purity of a position so morally superior that it literally doesn't care what degree of evil everybody around you has to suffer through […]

mastodon.monoceros.co.za

Original post on mastodon.monoceros.co.za

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Allen but one of the bad ones, woooo @uastronomer.mastodon.monoceros.co.za.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

If you want to know how my wife's job is going, she works for the sort of digital marketing agency that has a trophy cabinet for their Cannes awards, but she's still having to explain to her highly experienced and highly paid seniors that she is not going to put a QR code in the mobile platform […]

mastodon.monoceros.co.za

Original post on mastodon.monoceros.co.za

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MI (Middling Intelligence) @paulmwatson.com · 09/10/2026

photography builds an archive that eventually thinks back at you photoni.st/index.php/20...

photoni.st

Your Body Of Work Thinks Back At You – Photoni.st

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PublicNews.world Feed @publicnewsfeed.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026

South African former UN human rights chief Navi Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to South Africa's Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, the judge who headed the Rwanda genocide tribunal and last year presided over a UN commission that accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Misinformation-Superhighwayman @damienwise.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

Vale Margaret Hamilton. She was a Software Engineer. She was the _first_ Software Engineer because she defined the term, Software Engineering: "When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a […] [Original post on aus.social]

A B&W photo of a person standing next to a stack of printed paper as high as the top of their head. This is Margaret Hamilton, at work as a Software Engineer and the leader of a team of extremely specialised programmers who worked for NASA. The photo was taken in 1969, and it shows a physical form if her work since she joined the Apollo project in 1965 (she joined at the age of 29 by my calculation). My interpretation of the expression on her face is a mix of pride and mild amusement. She has glasses, long, straight hair, and neat office attire. Margaret Hamilton has her hands placed gently on the stack of printouts to keep it all balanced upright. The pages appear to be arranged in bundles, ranging from 8-10 centimetres thick, to 20cm thick or more. The resulting stack of printouts is physically impressive for being an unusual feat, and it represents something even more impressive: it's the printed form of the source-code she and the team she led wrote for the NASA Apollo project. Their software ran on the Apollo Guidance Computer that was that on board each Apollo command module and Apollo Lunar Module. The Apollo Guidance Computer onboard the Eagle was an essential flight instrument for Neil Armstrong when he piloted the craft to land on the surface of the moon.

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Hacker Memes @i0null.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

trying to explain to normies how it's possible to be both a complete nerd and a total luddite.

infamous meme of Charlie Day chaotically gesturing infront of a corkboard covered in papers and red string.
credits: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

From my daughter's blog: "I make tea when I don’t know what else to do with myself, so I drink a lot of tea. It isn’t perfect for quenching thirst, but is a lot better than coffee or nothing. " She might be like her father in that regard. And we might share some others... #Neurodiverse […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

@MrBerard hopefully 120 minutes is long enough to get it typed in right!

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

@uastronomer ah. I was a bit confused, since it would need a very new or old moon for them to be close. The very flexible scale can be muddling.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

@uastronomer mmm. 3 degrees is a little close, indeed. And I'm hunting Saturn at opposition between the clouds of an icomi g cold front... Maybe Wodehouse and a cup of tea are the answer!

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

@uastronomer If I am making sense of the data, you guys will get an almost graze in Pretoria: 13h50:30 -> 13h52:08, quite close to the southern edge

scicomm.xyz

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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

The global population of greater one-horned rhinos has hit a record 4,075. Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India, shelters more than 2,600 of them. Poaching, once the species’ biggest threat, has fallen 86% since 2016; India, Nepal and Indonesia all recorded zero rhino killings in 2025. That’s […]

wandering.shop

Original post on wandering.shop

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Jungle George 🌬️🍃🐉 @junglegeorge.mastodon.africa.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

[Sensitive content - history, war, genocide, starvation, graphic image] History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. This is Lizzie van Zyl. In May 1901, aged seven, she died of starvation and typhoid in the British concentration camp hospital at […] [Original post on mastodon.africa]

Black-and-white photograph of Lizzie van Zyl, an emaciated seven-year-old Boer girl, lying on a hospital bed in the British concentration camp at Bloemfontein, 1901.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

@GrahamDowns yes. I have read variously about the anger at how hijacking useful tech for useless or bad purposes, is a cost we are not counting on the current hype cycle.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

#Astrodon question: What do people use to stack videos? I have a few hundred frames of Venus and I'd like to see what I can get out of them? Thanks (& boosts welcome) #astrophotography

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

A gem from @stimpunks "This is the clincher. You have to live up to autistic standards of honesty if you are to convince us to follow a different path or to change our minds. If you aren’t willing to make sure that what you ask of us or want us to believe is reasonable, fair and true, then you […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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robinhouston @robinhouston.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

For my birthday, my brother-in-law gave me a 4992-digit hex number that, when used as a seed for Python’s random number generator, makes it so that printing a sequence of “random” ASCII characters actually prints a birthday greeting. I find it rather amazing that this is possible! This is the […]

mathstodon.xyz

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Pope Innocent III,who died in 1216, spoke of a certain kind of older man, who is "easily provoked", "will believe anything and question nothing", is "stingy and greedy" and "praises the good old days and hates the present." Reform UK's voter base has been knocking around for a very long time.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

@nev I have used pcloud for few years. There EU data centre ticks your boxes, I think

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Oliver Schafeld @oliver-schafeld.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

» #Starlink has many downsides. The megaconstellation interferes with #astronomy, pollutes the #atmosphere with metallic re-entry debris, and has pushed Low Earth Orbit to the brink of the #Kessler Syndrome. On the other hand, it makes a terrific barometer. « […]

mastodon.online

Original post on mastodon.online

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MI (Middling Intelligence) @paulmwatson.com · 24/09/2026

Great sports photo of that Marco Jansen catch 🙀 Using all his wingspan, he is 6'8". #rsavaus www.cricinfo.com/series/austr...

A super photo of a South African cricket player, Marco Jansen, reaching out to catch a white cricket ball by the finger tips

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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

My latest @newscientist.com cartoon. many more here: www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/

Image: A graph with lots of red dots clustered together in a curve. The are all looking upwards at a single red dot wearing sunglasses.

Caption: Mike was an outlier and would probably be excluded from the study, but all the other data points secretly thought he was really cool.

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I'm curious: does anyone use a Sony A7s for asteroid occultation observations? I managed to get 9th magnitude stars on a hazy half-moonlit night with a 240mm f6.3 lens at 25 fps, (ISO 51200) which I think should be usable? The image below is beta and kappa […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A screengrab of a video of stars. Mostly black.

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Jürgen Hubert @juergen-hubert.mementomori.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I find it _interesting_ that most modern portrayals of fairy tales involve kings, knights, princesses and so forth - the privileged aristocratic classes on top of the social pyramid. Even if the protagonist of such a tale is poor, they are still secretly from privileged parents, and their story […]

mementomori.social

Original post on mementomori.social

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Michael Graaf @michaelgraaf.kolektiva.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Birth of a wiki. Early days. Though orthographically far from Afrikaans, it's not as far phonetically. First written in Arabic script decades before the Regte Afrikaners got tired of Nederlands.

Partial screenshot reading: "An initiative of the University of the Western Cape
Kaaps Wiki
Bivodi Kaaps in Syt Afrieka én védi
A free, open knowledge base about Kaaps: its words and grammar, its history,
and the people and communities who speak it. Anyone can read it, and anyone
who knows Kaaps can help write it."
Buttons read:
"Browse all pages" and "Start contributing"

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

@root sound engineers approve of bins, certainly for longer cables. Double sided velcro is the thing for keeping individual cables neat. Get a width appropriate to the cables

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Grant_H @grant-h.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

@GrahamDowns Average, and common are not the same as normal. But his point stands. Not sure if that doesn't need a CW for death? It will freak out some of the wrong people, I suspect.

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Graham Downs @grahamdowns.mastodon.africa.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

"Maybe… there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends — maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's […]

mastodon.africa

Original post on mastodon.africa

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Kit Bashir @unixbigot.aus.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

"On your knees; hands behind your head!" "You haven't even bought me dinner" *Thwack* "shut up, convict. Where's the grow room?" "" "Speak!" "You told me to shut up" "Oh a wiseass. We'll find it—our Agents profiled your electricity use and heat emissions. We /know/ you've got a grow lab […]

aus.social

Original post on aus.social

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Alberto Cottica @alberto-cottica.mastodon.green.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

Today is #carfreesunday in Brussels. Largest pedestrian area in Europe, for one day a year. Everyone's out on their bikes, roller skates, or just running or walking. But the most impressive part are the children. So many! Children of all ages, on tiny bikes, steps, skates, skateboards... You […]

mastodon.green

Original post on mastodon.green

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