An Experiment

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Oct 262018
 

To all zero of my readers,

Actually writing things seems to be something I can’t muster up the will to do.

So I hacked up an rss plugin for wordpress last year to repost excepts from my tt-rss shared feed, but have left the posts it generates private. Since it’s OK if not ideal, I’m just gonna set the plugin to post publicly for now to see if it works out, and maybe as motivation to hurry up and finish tweaking the format, or writing a fresh plugin from scratch that only does what I need.

For now it will post every time I update my shared feed from tt-rss; I am leaning toward modifying it so that it collects all posts and makes a single daily entry, but I’ll see how this works first.

Nov 202024
 

Yesterday, Prusa Research officially unveiled their next printer, the Core ONE. Going over the features and capabilities of this new machine, it’s clear that Prusa has kept a close eye on the rapidly changing desktop 3D printer market and designed a machine to better position themselves within a field of increasingly capable machines from other manufacturers.
While some saw the incremental upgrades of the i3 MK4 as being too conservative, the Core ONE ticks all the boxes of what today’s consumer is looking for — namely high-speed CoreXY movement with a fully enclosed chamber — while still offering the build quality, upgradability, and support that the company has built its reputation on. Put simply it’s one of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-source-hardware-dream-quietly-dies/

 2024-11-20  No Responses »
Nov 202024
 

It took more than 20 years, but the FreeCAD computer-aided design project
has just made
its 1.0 release
.

Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in assembly module.

Well, I’m very proud to say those two issues are now solved.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/998807/

 2024-11-20  No Responses »
Nov 182024
 

LAST WEEK, police at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland arrested four students on felony vandalism charges in relation to protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The students were transferred to the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, jail, a detention facility subject to calls for closure over inhumane conditions, abuse by jail staff, and the use of solitary confinement. All four students were released from jail over the weekend. The arrests are part of the long arm of the crackdowns on campus protests that started in the spring and kept pace this fall. School officials had described the spray paint as “antisemitic.” A local news clip shows a wall spray-painted with the names of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/18/gaza-protest-campus-palestine-exception/

 2024-11-18  No Responses »
Nov 182024
 

According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, our language influences how we think and experience the world. That’s easy to imagine. Certainly our symbolism of mathematics influences how we calculate. Can you imagine doing moderately complex math with Roman numerals or without zero or negative numbers? But recently I was reminded that technological media also influences our perception of reality, and I have a Hackaday post to thank for it.
The post in question was about color TV. When I was a kid, most people had black and white TVs, although there were color sets. Even if you had a color set, many shows and movies were in black and white. Back then, many people still shot black and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/18/do-you-dream-in-color/

 2024-11-18  No Responses »
Nov 182024
 

WASHINGTON—Promising to end what he has called a “war on public health” by the federal government, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services, vowed Monday to ban all soaps that smell so good you eat a little. “Big soap companies have been poisoning and deceiving American consumers for decades with these aromatic soaps that really, really convince you a small nibble might actually taste good,” said Kennedy, who promised to declassify all hidden government data about how soap scents like blackberry sage and summer citrus can entice you to lick a corner of the bar, even though it ultimately just tastes like soap. “Insiders have been peddling the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/rfk-jr-vows-to-ban-soaps-that-smell-so-good-you-eat-a-little/

 2024-11-18  No Responses »
Nov 162024
 

At the International TeX Users Group Conference 2023 (TUG23) in Bonn, Germany, I presented a talk about using Metafont (and its extension Metapost) to develop traditional orthography Malayalam fonts, on behalf of C.V. Radhakrishnan and K.H. Hussain, who were the co-developers and authors. And I forgot to post about it afterwards — as always, life gets in between. In early 2022, CVR started toying with Metafont to create a few complicated letters of Malayalam script and he showed us a wonderful demonstration that piqued many of our interest. With the same code base, by adjusting the parameters, different variations of the glyphs can be generated, as seen in a screenshot of that demonstration: 16 variations…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/metafont-metapost-and-malayalam-font/

 2024-11-16  No Responses »
Nov 162024
 

On November 4, the Daily News (serving the New York city area) carried an op-ed by Peter Lavinia, co-chair of the New York Green Party and a political science professor. It tells readers that New York state was the only … Continue reading

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/15/new-york-daily-news-carries-op-ed-pointing-out-that-new-york-was-the-only-state-with-only-two-presidential-candidates-on-ballot/

 2024-11-16  No Responses »
Nov 152024
 

Mastercard has set its sights on transforming the online shopping experience by 2030, envisioning a checkout process where passwords and physical card numbers are no longer required. The company aims to replace traditional authentication methods with on-device biometrics for users to authenticate purchases across devices without exposing personal data online. Mastercard plans to phase out manual card entry and static passwords by 2030, using a combination of tokenization – introduced a decade ago to safeguard sensitive payment information – and biometric authentication to enable secure checkouts. Tokenization, first rolled out a decade ago to protect sensitive payment data, now plays a key role in the company’s goal to improve security and convenience in e-commerce. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202411/mastercard-says-biometrics-tokenization-only-for-online-checkout-by-2030

 2024-11-15  No Responses »
Nov 072024
 

The voters of the District of Columbia approved an initiative to use ranked choice voting in future primaries and general elections. But voters in Oregon defeated a similar measure. In Missouri, the voters approved a ballot measure put on the … Continue reading

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/05/district-of-columbia-votes-in-favor-of-ranked-choice-voting-but-oregon-defeats-it/

 2024-11-07  No Responses »
Nov 072024
 

This is tentatively welcome news. I mean, it can’t result in anything worse than the original decision the Fourth Circuit handed down in the Chatrie case, which said there’s nothing constitutionally wrong with searching every Google user’s location info in hopes of finding the suspect law enforcement is actually looking for. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The Appeals Court took the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision that created a warrant requirement for obtaining cell site location info over a long period of time and took that to mean that the location info law enforcement eventually obtained in the Chatrie case wasn’t worthy of Fourth Amendment protections.

[W]e find that the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained two…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/fourth-circuit-appeals-court-announces-its-going-to-rethink-its-geofence-warrant-decision/

 2024-11-07  No Responses »
Nov 072024
 

Maryland now has four qualified parties, one fewer than before the election. The Green Party and the No Labels Party continue to be qualified, but the Libertarian Party went off the ballot for failing to poll 1% for President.
The Green Party and the No Labels Party each petitioned in 2024, and when a party petitions in Maryland, it gets the next two elections. The Green Party polled over 1% of the vote for president this year anyway, so it qualified two ways. But when a party polls 1% for President or Governor, it only gets one more election, so the Green Party’s accomplishment of getting over 1% for Jill Stein didn’t actually make a difference.
Under Maryland…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/06/qualified-parties-in-maryland-for-2026-are-democratic-republican-green-and-no-labels/

 2024-11-07  No Responses »
Nov 062024
 

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.
That’s when you start considering your options. Do you take the slightly shorter line manned by yet another interchangeable teen who is only working a register because the manager scrambled help to the front — one who would otherwise just be at the back of the store milking…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/facial-recognition-firm-announces-way-to-punish-retail-workers-shoppers-for-forming-relationships/

 2024-11-06  No Responses »
Nov 062024
 

It’s been nearly four years since the Arecibo Telescope collapsed, an event the world got to witness in unprecedented detail thanks to strategically positioned drones. They captured breathtaking video of one of the support cables pulling from its socket as well as the spectacularly destructive results of 900 tons of scientific instruments crashing into the 300-meter primary reflector. But exactly why did those cable sockets fail?
A new report aims to answer that question, and in the process raises some interesting questions of its own. The proximate causes of the collapse have been known for a while, including the most obvious and visible one, the failure of the zinc “spelter sockets” that were cast around the splayed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/zinc-creep-and-electroplasticity-why-arecibo-collapsed/

 2024-11-06  No Responses »
Nov 052024
 

This year, Georgia and Ohio ballots have presidential candidates on them, for whom votes will not be counted. This has never happened before in any state in the United States. In Georgia, after the ballots were printed, the State Supreme Court said the petitions for Claudia De la Cruz and Cornel West were invalid. In Ohio, after the ballots were printed, the Secretary of State said Jill Stein had accidentally withdrawn. So, in both states, voters will see names on the ballot but if they vote for those names, their vote won’t be counted.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/04/2024-is-first-presidential-election-in-history-in-which-ballot-listed-candidates-cant-have-votes-tallied/

 2024-11-05  No Responses »
Nov 052024
 

Despite rebranding a federal program that surveils the social media activities of immigrants and foreign visitors to a more benign name, the government agreed to spend more than $100 million to continue monitoring people’s online activities, records disclosed to EFF show.
Thousands of pages of government procurement records and related correspondence show that the Department of Homeland Security and its component Immigrations and Customs Enforcement largely continued an effort, originally called extreme vetting, to try to determine whether immigrants posed any threat by monitoring their social media and internet presence. The only real change appeared to be rebranding the program to be known as the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative.
The government disclosed the records to EFF after we…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/eff-lawsuit-discloses-documents-detailing-governments-social-media-surveillance

 2024-11-05  No Responses »
Nov 052024
 

Far from a “grassroots” operation, the “Uncommitted” trap was controlled and financed from the beginning by party operatives seeking to divert mass anger over the genocide in Gaza back into the Democratic Party.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/05/eyid-n05.html

 2024-11-05  No Responses »
Nov 052024
 

DOYLESTOWN, PA—Expressing concern about his inability to control his own body, local Neuralink brain-implant patient Emmett Shultz told reporters Tuesday that he was unable to stop his right hand from casting a vote for former President Donald Trump. “As soon as I entered the voting booth, my hand lurched forward and marked the box for Trump,” said Shultz, explaining that every time he attempted to select Vice President Kamala Harris instead, his hand went entirely limp and he was stricken with intense, overwhelming nausea. “Eventually I swatted at my right hand with the voter information packet, and I even tried stabbing it with a ballpoint pen. That seemed to subdue it for a while, but when…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/neuralink-patient-unable-to-stop-hand-from-voting-for-trump/

 2024-11-05  No Responses »
Nov 032024
 

Since WFDF changed their ultimate rules web site
to be less-than-ideal (in the name of putting everything into WordPress…),
I made my own, at urules.org. It was a fun
journey; I’ve never fiddled with PWAs
before, and I was a bit surprised how low-level it all was. I assumed that
since my page is just a bunch of HTML files and ~100 lines of JS, I could
just bundle that up—but no, that is something they expect a framework to do
for you. The only primitive you get is seemingly that you can fire up your own
background service worker (JS running in its own, locked-down context)
and that gets to peek at every HTTP request done and possibly intercept it.
So you can use…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-11-03-11-48_ultimate_rules_as_a_service.html

 2024-11-03  No Responses »
Nov 022024
 

Today’s links

Bluesky and enshittification: No one is the enshittifier of their own story.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

Hoisted from the comments: Smart stuff from readers.

This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014

Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.

Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Colophon: All the rest.

Bluesky and enshittification (permalink)
I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

 2024-11-02  No Responses »