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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Small event that may only have been exciting to me.

    I’m casually into amateur astronomy and stargazing. I like to count satellites if I’m outside on summer evenings, maybe haul the telescope out if some night is particularly clear. But I really don’t get out very often. Emphasis on “casual.”

    We moved to our current house some years ago and were just enjoying the nice, big backyard for one of the first times, sitting in some folding chairs fully reclined to look straight up at the sky. Whenever we do that, which is maybe once every several years, even then it’s always too cold, too hot, too many mosquitos, etc., so this was rare and nice.

    Right above our heads, right where we were both looking, an Iridium flare swept across us. I’d heard of those satellites reflecting “flares” being particularly spectacular, and I’d thought about trying to get in the path of a predicted one someday, but I don’t think I really thought I’d ever really make the effort or have any luck if I did. Not expecting it and seeing it happen, I couldn’t decide if I was dreaming. I hopped on heavens-above.com right afterwards and, although I didn’t see that flare predicted, it confirmed an Iridium pass had coincided with the sighting, so I’m convinced.

    So, something spectacular and somewhat scarce that many people wouldn’t notice and many would either find boring or think was a UFO was something we got lucky to accidentally see together right in our backyard.






  • I hitched my horse to just what I consider the basics–zip and unzip–and that has made it easy for me. But I’ve been stuck on those.

    Extract anything:

    tar xf <archive_file>
    

    Create a tbz2 archive:

    tar cjf <archive_file.tbz2> <stuff to put in it>
    

    (And tossing in a -v is pretty universal, if that’s your thing.)

    Some day, instead of commenting on a reddit Lemmy post, I think I’ll Google how to tell it to use .xz.

    Ok, you know what? Today is finally that day. It’s just capital -J instead of lower-case -j! That’s easy enough to remember, I guess.





  • atx_aquarian@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldTikTok sues the US government over ban
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    2 months ago

    What would give them standing? They’d have to be an entity protected by the constitution to claim that protection was harmed. Is it this (Wikipedia)?

    TikTok Ltd was incorporated in the Cayman Islands and is based in both Singapore and Los Angeles. source

    I guess I’ve never thought about what makes an entity have rights here. Buckingham Palace couldn’t just open shop here and start suing our government, right?