Jon Dubovsky @jond@mastodon.social

General request: if you post pictures, please please include alt text describing the image so that everyone, regardless of visual ability, can enjoy your toot.

Please consider asking others to do this. Optionally, reconsider boosting toots if they don't have alt text.

We all have an opportunity to help shape the culture of this place and I'd love, love, love if it were "oh, everyone posts alt text with their images because that's just what you do."

Did you know that you don't need to use link shorteners (bit.ly, etc.) on Mastodon? All links, no matter how long, only count for 23 characters against your 500 limit!

(And since link shorteners are bad for user experience and break the web, there's almost no good reason to use 'em! 😄)

Please consider writing your hashtags in upper camelcase so screen readers have a chance at figuring them out.

#whyistayonmastodon sounds like an giant undecipherable mess of sounds.

#WhyIStayOnMastodon reads out "Why I Stay On Mastodon" 😄

(Reason #44 I stay here: my previous requests like this have been generally well-received, proving that most people are awesome.)

Opened up some code from an open-source medical equipment project:

First file I open: 3 explainer comments in the whole file. Hey, there's a divide-by-zero. There's a buffer overflow because that's not how snprintf's return value works. Etc. :[

I work in a safety-critical systems and stuff like this makes me despair. I don't blame the programmers or look down on them, but, for @#$%'s sake, get some expert help.

We all make mistakes. Shape your process with that belief in mind!

Have a picture of my first dog, Otter. He was a Good Dog.

We got April's first metric century in on Sunday on a roll to Paint Bank: the 3rd annual Heathen Ride for us.

Perfect company, gorgeous weather, the bison calves were out (though in too-distant-from-the-road fields), and the early flowers like coltsfoot were everywhere.

Have a picture of some extremely chunky bison with amazing hair. They could've been in a shampoo commercial.

Okay, apparently I'm going to have to wait another month (for vaccination) before I can pick up a bigger (say, group 29) battery for the double conversion UPS setup I'm building here... because apparently every battery place within in 50 mile radius is filled with yahoos sans masks, jawing about COVID-19 conspiracies.

Holy shit, dudes, just put on a mask and keep a lid on it. I don't need to hear your thoughts on gun control and mind control.

Found way down in a *vendor-supplied* Cortex-M0 header:

/* Configuration of the Cortex-M3 Processor and Core Peripherals */
#define __NVIC_PRIO_BITS 3 /*!< Number of Bits used for Priority Levels */

M0 has twoooooo bits for interrupt priority. It's not important to set up your int priorities, right?

This is even more fun because the priority registers are *left-aligned*, so their attempted writes to those registers truncates 1 to 0, 3 to 1, etc.

Spring hasn't *quite* sprung yet, but the grass has started to riz!