June 13th, 2017

* I read about Twitter's lovely new "shadow banning" feature. Essentially it's
  this new automated mechanic that blocks Twitter accounts from being seen by
  others, without telling anyone. You can imagine the trouble this would cause
  when somebody's following someone else, and they aren't getting notifications
  for the mentions written by a person they're following..! There's a whole lot
  of other gook related to the issue; this thread was informative:
  https://twitter.com/Aichmomanic/status/874160155960647681

* I worked on my English course. I'm done The Old Man and the Sea; now I'm
  learning about writing a biography. It's not going to be an /auto/biography
  (that is, I won't be the subject); I'm not sure whether that'll make it
  easier or not. The assignment lets you pick whoever you want. (In fact,
  that's essentially the entire current assignment - pick somebody!)
  I picked AntVenom, because, unlike most other YouTubers, his life on the
  YouTube website has been somewhat tumultuous. (To be fair, the assignment
  didn't ask for a YouTuber specifically; but AntVenom works well since his
  life has been somewhat more interesting than the usual (or is it conceptual?)
  rainbows and sunshine filled career.)

* I worked on my Khan Academy algebra. I'm not sure how much progress I
  actually made - it looks like I mostly did things I'd already practiced
  before - but hey. It's good to keep the mind fresh by revisting old things.

* I experimented with my Raspberry Pi; this time I configured it to not use
  the somewhat bloated desktop environment, in favor of a simple console-only
  display. I'm not sure if that's actually improved much performance-wise,
  but intuitively it should, and at least I don't have to worry about there
  being some gigantic UI sitting around not being used when I'm only SSHing
  into the device!

  (I also tried out tmux; it's as slightly confusing as it's always been. I
  tried the Lynx browser, but it seems to be missing some basic browser
  features on the surface, such as scrolling by a single line rather than by a
  whole page; and naturally it doesn't work perfectly with every site. On
  another note, I figured out how to get my stupid gray ethernet cable out of
  whatever device it's plugged into - you only need to push down on its grip
  part and pull out! That should have been obvious from the start. Oh well; at
  least I know now.)

* I read about the C Seed 262-inch TV. It's quite the large TV..!
  Too bad the only pictures of it didn't compare it to, you know, an ordinary-
  sized room. It's not as easy to get a sense of how huge it is when your only
  reference is a few couches and a table.

* I took a look at some old Scratch projects that I favorited on my original
  Scratch account. Hm, did I say something about keeping the mind fresh by
  revisiting old things..?

* I made a tiny music visualizer in Scratch:
  https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/165923925/

* I got a bit of an idea on using microphones and speakers to communicate
  between a DS and a Raspberry Pi. The basic concept is that the DS has a
  built-in microphone, which we can use to send data to the DS, and an
  auxiliary output cable slot, which we can use to get data from the DS. Then
  we can make the DS and some other device (like the Raspberry Pi) talk to
  each other! (Too bad it's not wireless. It seems like it should be possible
  to dos something like this wirelessly, since the DS does have some sort of
  Wi-Fi support, but it doesn't seem to really be standard. Apparently it
  requires some Nintendo service to be online, which hasn't been since 2015..?)

* I considered printing all of Piers Anthony's newsletter. I'd love to have it
  all as a book; it'll take a ton of work, if I do decide to do that, though!
  (In theory it'd be best to just automate the process, but then you run into
  issues such as - what if there's a table embedded? What if there's something
  that simply NEEDS human notice to be dealt with well? So doing it by hand is
  kind of required. It also seems like there's just a bit of merit to going
  through all of his posts by hand; though I'll mostly be copy-pasting. Or who
  knows. Maybe I'll go and type it all out manually. Wait, no, that's a
  terrible idea - each of his posts are several thousands of words long, and
  he's written well over a hundred and fifty posts! Yikes.)