2021 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Treat your neighbors to a little politeness.
(snip)
Stone (the shooter–ed,) indicated to police that he believed the handgun was not loaded at the time that he was manipulating it.
Geeking Out 0
Listening to the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, Clouds of Witness, from the Old Time Radio Theater, with the QMMP media player using the Winamp Catubi_3000 skin, on Ubuntu MATE with the Fluxbox window manager. The wallpaper is from my collection. (One of the things I like about QMMP is that I can use my collection of Winamp skins with it.)
The Rule of Lawless, Nuremberg Dept. 0
The Trumpettes’ “I was just following orders” defense doesn’t look like it’s going to fly.
Afterthought:
We are a society of stupid.
A Day’s Work for an Hour’s Pay 0
Sam and his crew dismantle the Republican double-talk on the minimum wage.
Drinking the KQQl-Aid 0
Jason Blazakis warns that Q believers are behaving like cultists, and, like cultists, when a prophecy does not come true, their faith is unshaken. Rather than question their idol, they double-down on it. A snippet:
Like the Heaven’s Gate cult, the QAnon community brandishes religious imagery and repurposes theories to fit new truths. Q’s theory about an impending storm where global elites are vanquished is a recurring end-times scenario in many religions, including Christianity. The predicted storm is still coming, they now say, when Trump retakes power March 4.
Public Servants 0
One of the most venal efforts of the previous federal administrator was attempting to turn public servants into his private minions.
All the News that Fits, Q Who? Dept. 0
David dissects Tucker Carlson’s gaslighting about QAnon (Warning: Short ad at the end).
It’s All about the Algorithm 0
The Bangor Daily News has a fascinating article how algorithms, which websites (particularly “social” media) use to promote “engagement” (that is, suck us in and keep us there), can go wrong. Here’s one example that the author gives:
Happily, Amazon’s researchers caught the problem and, when they found they couldn’t fix it, scrapped the algorithm. But how many such situations have gone unnoticed and uncorrected? No one knows.
I commend it to your attention.
Geeking Out 0
My old Zareason laptop started showing signs of age a couple of weeks ago. In particular, the display was going dark unpredictably (not blank–just dark). I’ve had it so long that I don’t remember how long I’ve had it. As my old mechanic in New Jersey used to say, it doesn’t owe me a dime. (Unfortunately, Zareason is no more; it has joined the ranks of businesses that have fallen victim to the pandemic, which is a damned shame, as Zareason was a pleasure to do business with; indeed, I’m typing this post on a Zareason desktop.)
So I spent today configuring my new laptop from ThinkPenguin, which arrived yesterday right on schedule.
I ordered it with Debian, which has long been one of my favorite Linux distros. ThinkPenguin installed Debian with the default desktop environment of Gnome. As I loathe Gnome with the fire of a thousand suns (Gnome spells “simplify” d-u-m-b-d-o-w-n), I installed KDE Plasma (in Linux world, multiple desktop environments can coexist quite nicely on the same machine) and started tweaking Plasma.
So far it’s working like a champ
It’s almost where I want it, and I’ll have it all tuned up in a day or two. The top things left on my list are to configure the hosts* file, install and configure GKrellM, and set up a cron job to updatedb every night.
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*Yeah, I know the link is to a Windows-centric site, but a Windows HOSTS file and a Linux hosts file work the same way, because they both must comply with internet standards. I’ve been using the MVPS hosts file for two decades in my campaign against pop-up windows, and it works quite nicely, thank you very much.