Art project. Counter Productive

A random button in a park with a countdown timer.

Instructions:

- Press the button to reset the 24-hour countdown timer.

- If the timer ever reaches zero, the project ends and the project will be removed.

- To keep the project alive — press the button

Its been running for 56 days with 820 button presses.

Write up: https://blog.abluestar.com/projects/2025-counterproductive/

Stats page https://blog.abluestar.com/other/counterproductive.html

You should make them input the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42

Those are cursed!

Are you ready to find out?! :D

Is it dead? According to the stats there’s a 25 hour gap :( great idea btw!

Maybe the project is a commentary on a post-truth world masquerading as a button.

Can you have it do something good for the park when it's been running for x days? Or would that make it mundane (productive) and de-art it.

How is that « counter productive »? That’s amazing!

This is cool!

I have two conferences booked and paid for in the US this year. (I'm Canadian)

I am canceling the one in April.

The other is harder for me to cancel, as its my industry main conference for the year. It will hurt me professionally, and fanatically not to go.

But stories like this, White woman with good paper work, and regular traveler to the USA (similar to myself), No criminal record, No apparent reason, no ability to call a lawyer, getting detained for weeks, is making me very nervous.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/canadian-det...

My company is considering starting our own local conference, outside the US, as an alternative. A expensive and distracting exercise that I would prefer not to have to do.

I am not worried about gun violence in the US at the moment.

I am worried about arbitrary detention without representation or recourse.

I was trying to figure what she did wrong and there's not much information but I think incomplete paperwork was mentioned - maybe she didn't declare something she was supposed to? It still seems an over the top reaction though.

As a exercise I created my own password manager in response to the license issues with BitWarden last week.

Its rough, but functional, an exercise not a real product, never expected to be a real product. https://github.com/funvill/FancyGorillaPasswordManager

The tech is easy. Website, Browser extension, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS apps done in less then a day.

Gaining trust is hard, who is going to trust a random guy on the internet.

I been using 'Advanced Rest Client' (ARC) https://install.advancedrestclient.com/

No accounts required, offline, open source, A little bloated using electron but its multiplatform and a desktop client.

Dell shipped a monitor to my billing address (office) instead of the shipping address (home). Because of COVID there was no one at my office but it was picked up by "GUARD". Never found the monitor.

DELL wanted me to do an insurance claim with the shipper. The shipper wanted me to do the insurance claim with DELL. Took two months to figure out. In the meantime, I just went to a brick-and-mortar place and bought a monitor.

In the end DELL credited me the money for the missing monitor and would not provide a cash refund. I ended up selling the DELL credits to the next person who had an equally horrible experience with them.

Don't buy DELL

This reminded me of usesthis.com too

A union at one of the bigger tech startups is bound to happen sooner or later. As much as the management wants to keep it from happening.

Travel advertises for Saudi Arabia https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/saudi-arabia

I think I will pass

People are allowed to have their own communities. If a persons comments, only to get a enrage and entice a negative response then they are a troll. They should be shown the door https://xkcd.com/1357/

be careful POE can be anything up to 48 volts. Unless you control the input voltage. I suggest using a DC-DC converter with a larger input voltage.

Regular PoE can in some cases get as high as 56 volts... Some PD equipment is overspec'd to deal with regulation issues on PSEs.

It is passive POE, you need to supply your own input as it won't work with a POE switch or anything like that.

There are some switches that supply passive PoE, such as many of Ubiquiti's products.

Sure, but you have to explicitly enable it. When would you not have control over the input?