Grey the earthling @greytheearthling@queer.party

Our boiler developed a small leak yesterday, so we called British Gas, and they sent out an engineer who has fixed it and serviced it. Excellent!

But I've also received an email telling me that apparently I've opted into some “Rewards” bullshit. So I log into my account on the web and opt back out. They ask why, without a free text field. Tickboxes include “I'm not interested in the bright ideas” but not “I never opted into this bullshit”.

When you try to make an online payment from an HSBC bank account, they may ask you to type an email address. If you read the accompanying text carefully, it says they don't actually need an email address; they just want you to type something, so they can collect *biometric behavioural data* (typing cadence), which they send to a company called Callsign, based in Abu Dhabi. I'm astonished this is legal under the GDPR.

Food smells tasty: good ✔
Food tastes smelly: bad ✘

I've just discovered that nano has a lot of useful capabilities that are switched off by default:
* “soft” line-wrapping (for display only)
* “smart” Home key (alternating between the start of the line and the first non-whitespace character)
* auto-indent new lines
* constantly display the cursor position (line and column numbers)
* mouse support (click to move the cursor, or use the commands in the help rows)

See the bottom of the `^G` help text, or `man nanorc`

We're about to release a change to the global navigation header on bbc.co.uk that substantially changes its visual style for the first time in many years. It's going to be quite uncanny valley for a little while.

If you're considering voting for a party in order to stop another party getting in: ask yourself:

- whether this would be necessary if the election used proportional representation

- whether the party you're considering voting for supports or opposes proportional representation

- why you think they support or oppose it

Corporate needs me to find the differences between the Conservative party and the Labour party

> I just learned that the Māori word for autism is takiwatanga, ‘in [their] own time and space’. It’s such an empathic and gentle way to describe the condition I’m trying to come to terms with.

https://nitter.net/silverpebble/status/1508465129574305795

I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe malice. I can't see anything highlighted here that is factually incorrect, but even if it was: I know Rabble and arcalinea from their work pre-Blue Sky, and I find it much easier to believe that they're simply mistaken rather than deliberately fearmongering. Their task here is to compare existing solutions to each other and to a hypothetical ideal solution. Inevitably, they'll criticise the existing solutions. It's not an attack.

I'm genuinely surprised by how many people joining Mastodon from Twitter seem unfamiliar with using URLs to give the address of a web page, particularly when that web page has their new Mastodon account.

The whole *point* of the web is that every page has its own address, so you don't need to resort to “Look for ‘Grey the earthling’ on the Queer Party website!!!”

Bloody kids these days etc etc

If you want to support the https://gmgunion.com/ strike by not crossing the picket line, but you're in the habit of visiting io9, you can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/ to set up a temporary redirect while the strike continues.

Include pattern: `https://*gizmodo.com/*`
Redirect to: `https://gmgunion.com`

Doing the thing isn't what's unpleasant. The unpleasantness comes from the reluctance to do the thing — the anticipation, the resistance.

In fairness to Netflix, they make it really easy to cancel. It's 2 clicks and there's a text field to explain why.

This is an excellent explanation of why climate change is just a small symptom of a far more fundamental predicament: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629621003327