Cool and windy. Getting warmer later. Basically nice.
Wednesday was cool to start but got to 84F in the sun. Still pretty damp, there was water in the buckets from days ago, and condensation on the concrete.
I started my day with a fresh from the tree grapefruit. Ruby red and sweet. Success at last! There are about a dozen more. There are a couple of oranges on the other tree that I’m giving a bit more time. The lemons are ready, but I leave them in place as long as I can. Broccoli is doing ok, and I might harvest some spears in a couple of days.
I spent a good part of the day going through ebay/auction stuff, moving it from bin to bin and getting some ready for the next auction. They stood me up on meeting to get my check and do my dropoff so I’ll have to reschedule. Next week I’ll have stuff in 3 of the local auctions, and it still won’t have made much of a dent.
I didn’t get much else on my list done, so that all slips into today. If I’m away from the keyboard, I’m working my list.
Interesting thought experiment, what would 2021 look like if there are aliens here? They have been here for a while, they haven’t dropped rocks on us, they are either in a lifeboat or have some business with us. What might it be? What would the confirmed announcement do to current social issues? I bet they’d get the blame for wuflu… What the heck would they want? Botanicals? Slaves? Food? Fuel? Colonization has always been about resource extraction for us, or later new markets, and cheap labor. What would prepping look like for benign aliens instead of zombies?
My suspicion is that people would lose their shirt and we’d want to stay quietly at home for a while, just like a lot of other scenarios. Couldn’t hurt to be prepped up.
Which raises another issue. If you didn’t have to worry about budget, beyond some reasonable amount (no buying Yard Moose Mountain) what would a serious prepper look like and be stacking? Vs an ‘ordinary’ prepper, or a beginning prepper? What do you start stacking when you realize that 2 weeks while waiting for FEMA and the outside aid to get there isn’t going to be enough?
What makes one serious? Is it building a “Rebuild society” library? Or stocking fish meds? A suture kit? Injectable drugs? Having a stocked root cellar? Livestock? A garden measured in fractions of an acre? Bushcraft knowledge? Foraging for food? Hunting/fishing/trapping? Butchering your own food? A pantry measured in “person-years”? More than one gun safe? Off grid power? Off grid property?
I consider myself pretty serious, but there are things in that list I don’t even have plans for. Ok that’s a lie. But there are things in that list I don’t have serious plans for 😉
Get to work. Stack something today. Even if it’s just knowledge.
nick
“I doubt the extra ballots were created in 24 hours. That was weeks or months of prep.”
The polls showed a Biden landslide so why go through all that trouble and risk?
Marking down ballot races also poses a risk in that, from US House races down, the voting patterns are well understood and any irregularities would have been spotted early on election night, raising alarms. Donna Shalala getting booted in Coral Gables wasn’t a huge surprise but Subcontinent winning our Congressional district given the current demographics would have drawn attention.
The Dems also got burned in Bush v. Gore in the initial circuit court case before Sanders Sauls — a registered Democrat — by not completely understanding the down ballot races 12 years earlier in 1988 when FL’s US Senate seat race ended up being decided by a handful of votes. Their main argument hinged on a certain order of races on the ballot, and the interns got the research wrong, blowing the case in Tallahassee. We all know what happened next.
The look on Judge Sauls’ face when the Dems arguments melted down was priceless. I watched it happen live on TV.
In my defense, Judge Sauls was much more entertaining than anything else on at the time. I’ll give him credit for being very fair … and hilarious.
Plain old SMB. Works great until you have a freaking hardware fault. Just Windows 7 Pro x64 with a 256 GB SSD and a WD 4 TB Black with 16 GB ram. I hear a beep from the server room and down it goes.
How old is the motherboard? 2007-08 is suspect for anything with power caps.
Unfortunately, Microsoft cut a deal with Intel and AMD to cut off Windows 7 on newer hardware so replacing the board would mean starting over with the OS.
I’ve noted here before that I’m not thrilled with my last WD Black that went in my primary desktop. The drive is slow, noisy, and makes a weird grinding noise on power down.
So why is this a bad thing?
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/reseller-bot-software-making-it-impossible-buy-playstation-5-online-time-holidays
Why not raise the price of the console to what the market will bear? If people are willing to pay $300 more to a reseller, why not pay it to wal*mart?
And who the flock is wal*mart to decide who is a “legitimate customer” and who is not? That is a REALLY BAD precedent to set. There are so many ways that can go wrong…
Musicians don’t get to chose who listens to their songs, and stores don’t get to chose who shops there. We went thru that in the 60s in Selma.
n
Aliens:
I’m betting we’re part of their amusement. We’re featured on their “Discovery” channel alongside the people who bid on abandoned planets to see what’s inside. Heck, I bet we’re a ratings hit when they have “Elon Musk Week.”
Aliens – “I want to believe”
I had prepped for evil Alien abduction in the 90s. Living in remote rural Midwest. But alien alies? What would they want? That’s been a thought experiment for a long time. Resources are more plentiful and easier to access off planet. Robots are cheaper than slaves. Biologicals, that would require common physiology which is very unlikely. One thing we do have here is consciousness and current quantum theories posit that conscious observation collapses a quantum wave form, turning potential reality into measurable reality. Perhaps consciousness is a rare and valuable resource in the cosmos?
My thinking is similar to John Wilder’s. Aliens are probably watching us similarly to us watching a group of Mountain gorillas. They probably comment on things like the 2020 election with, “It seems one of the tribes of primates is having difficulty choosing a leader.” in that whispering tone that wildlife journalists like to use. Bored kids at home on the alien planet are tuned in like we’re an episode of Meerkat Manor.
So why is this a bad thing?
Why not raise the price of the console to what the market will bear? If people are willing to pay $300 more to a reseller, why not pay it to wal*mart?
The fuss with regard to video game consoles smells like PR to me. The next generation Microsoft and Sony products are just faster versions of the low-mid tier reboxed PCs they sold as the last generation consoles, and games specifically for the hardware are non-existent.
Nintendo set the model for this unobtainium marketing after the WiiU failed and they introduced the Switch.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9037637/Crime-spikes-Portland-neighborhood-amid-autonomous-zone-protest-eviction-black-family.html
The pictures are evocative. And you can tell at a glance that the protestors are not advancing civilization, they are destroying it.
Take a few minutes to actually look at the pix. Some things I noticed-
-spike strips made from nails and 2×4 – booby traps are generally illegal in the US
-piles of nice fist sized rocks pre-positioned
-use of stretch wrap as a signboard, and as a barrier
-signs from ‘hangers on’ that ultimately dilute the message if you are about everything then you are about nothing
-laundry list of oppressors – “predatory” lenders, landlords, gentrifiers ie. developers, cops
-“Indigenous Solidarity for Black Liberation” banner? WTF?
-rental portapotty, case of TP, hand washing station
-logo’d canopies – this is not the orgs’ first rodeo
-liquor bottles
-someone brought in straw bales to cover the mud and make it less ugly and slippery
Lots of angry women.
n
No, we are being watched on their “OUENAOU&&*()#$” channel.
And in other news I have had it with the Adobe Creative Cloud. $11.00 (with tax) a month was not a lot of money and I was OK with that. What I have not liked is that Adobe changes the location of their program on each release by changing the directory name. Programs I have linked to Photoshop for editing can no longer find Photoshop.
Second is that I have some actions that I paid a lot of money for, until Google made it free (good or bad, I got shafted), will no longer work with the newer versions of Photoshop. Adobe changed something and my option was to pay another $150.00 to the company that acquired the free Google product and is now charging dearly.
Adobe changed the opening dialog interface. Some weird combination that made little sense. Especially to those long time users of the product. Even the actual user interface when editing was changed making finding some items a hunting expedition. It it’s not broke don’t fix it you idiots at Adobe.
The final straw was the last update to Photoshop. The stupid program will not open files. Has something to do with their graphics card driver. I had to roll back to a previous edition. Adobe is aware of the problem, is working on a fix, but a month later none has arrived.
Thus I will go back to may paid for version of Photoshop, CS6. It basically has everything I need for the now. So up yours Adobe. You shot yourself in the foot one too many times. When I truly find something I need I might reconsider, but not with the current state of affairs.
So up yours Adobe.
I said that some time about 1993. Haven’t seen anything to change my mind. If anything, the big A is even less relevant today.
Take a few minutes to actually look at the pix. Some things I noticed-
Really pricey jackets/coats.
Lots of angry women.
It will be all over for civilization when a pretty white coed takes a bullet. Fortunately, pretty white coeds *sans tattoos* are in short supply down the road at Portland State.
If the better private hospital wasn’t nearby, I doubt anyone would care. Of course Daily Mail readers like their Schadenfreude, especially this time of year, so their coverage would continue regardless.
Part of the reason I went with CC was the high resolution display on my Surface Laptop. Photoshop did not scale properly and the menu items were really small print and difficult to read. There was a hack involving some sort of resource or manifest file or some other such nonsense. Adobe refused to fix the issue and instead offered the Creative Cloud.
Microsoft has now fixed that issue for programs that don’t scale properly. Under the Compatibility Tap for the program properties there is an option how to handle high resolution and it works very well.
I don’t need Creative Cloud. The standalone apps (five years old) will do just fine. Nor do I need Adobe cloud storage or their web enable cloud apps. What I have will be fine. All my reasons for using CC are gone so why bother. What happens when I get a new camera for processing in Lightroom may be an issue. As long as the camera maker has no changed the format of their RAW files I should be OK.
Yes, Adobe, I voted with my feet. While my loss as a CC user will not even be noticed, I still feel better.
Because they’ve decided it’s not their business model? Can they not decide whom they want to sell to (excluding sex, race, etc.)? The issue with these bots is the same that has gone on for years with concert tickets. I guess with no concerts going on the bots can be redirected to Playstations.
Either we are alone (or darn close) or there is life everywhere. Distance is the barrier. Maybe life is everywhere and only a select few solve the distance problem. Maybe it is unsolvable. I do think that it’s not in our best interest to meet a race of beings that have such an advanced level of science and technology.
If they have a very high price now and lower it in a few months, they will be perceived as greedy. In addition, they make a slice off of every game sold and off subscriptions to their gaming networks. So, higher console price, fewer games sold, fewer subs. It’s almost the shaver model – sell the holder cheap, make money off the blades.
ech quoted this immediately following a few comments on aliens and visitation. I find aliens to be a much more satisfying context than game consoles for the quote.
Nope a store can’t say “you can’t buy this” unless it is a regulated good, or they are wholesale or membership based and the buyer isn’t. This is covered under anti-redlining laws iirc.
If you want to sell for less, that’s ok, but you can’t complain when someone buys it, marks it up and sells it on.
As the manufacturer you can TRY to control the sales channel with enforcement methods like not honoring warranty claims. That happens in the high end watch market all the time. “Grey market” sellers often discount watches that the manf chose to sell in their market for less with less support. If I go to the Virgin Islands, I can buy a watch much cheaper than on the mainland, but in theory, the warranty is no good on the mainland.
Some other manufacturers set different prices for different markets too. Theatrical lighting dealers were used to being able to hold higher prices because there was strictly limited competition- the manf wouldn’t authorize more than one seller per market. Then the internet happened and a dealer in OR could sell to anyone (technically in violation of their dealer agreement, but not enforceable). Oregon Stage Lighting (a mom and pop garage business) sold a crapton of ETC lights at below market back in the day.
There are other sellers who sell above market because they know the customer can pay and will buy from them for reasons other than price. The education market comes to mind there…
FWIW, the cashier at the Goodwill Outlet mentioned knowing people standing in line for the PS5 in order to flip it and make a little spending cash. If that’s acceptable, why wouldn’t using a bot to order one be?
n
n
Plain old SMB. Works great until you have a freaking hardware fault. Just Windows 7 Pro x64 with a 256 GB SSD and a WD 4 TB Black with 16 GB ram. I hear a beep from the server room and down it goes.
How old is the motherboard? 2007-08 is suspect for anything with power caps.
Unfortunately, Microsoft cut a deal with Intel and AMD to cut off Windows 7 on newer hardware so replacing the board would mean starting over with the OS.
I’ve noted here before that I’m not thrilled with my last WD Black that went in my primary desktop. The drive is slow, noisy, and makes a weird grinding noise on power down.
2013 or 2015 Gigabyte UD5H ???? gaming board. I have given up on Gigabyte and moved to MSI.
Because they’ve decided it’s not their business model?
Especially when you consider that aliens might be in the service industry.
Health and Human Services issued an expansion of a program to grant immunity for certain actions taken during the covid emergency….
–looks like they knew that there could be respiratory side effects from the vaccine.
n
What about “limit one per customer”, or here possibly “limit one per customer in the month of December” with ‘customer’ defined by CC number plus shipping address? Are you saying that HEB can’t limit you to one package of TP?
I don’t object to someone buying one to flip, either by standing in line or buying online, theoretically they have the same chance to get one (or not) that I would. What I object to is the bots buying in quantity through technical advantages.
2013 or 2015 Gigabyte UD5H ???? gaming board. I have given up on Gigabyte and moved to MSI.
I’ve always bought Asus boards with the exception of my home server which is ASRock.
The ASRock has been solid even though the reviews were mediocre-to-awful at the time. It had the right combination of features and price.
The last Gigabyte board I had was at the Death Star, purchased surplus because another generic motherboard for the “Hershey bar” slot architecture AMD chip used in my work Linux box died. The board was solid, but I only used the machine for a year before departing. They probably trashed the machine the moment I left. Management was ticked about my departure — too many questions from Death Star HQ as to why I turned in notice.
I have three MSI boards in systems. Two are identical, and were my wife’s and my production boxen, now semi retired. I did my best to keep them identical. One had an intermittent hardware problem, probably related to the BIOS and boot timing. There was a BIOS update, but it was beta forever, IMO abandonware. Since it was my system, I decided to live with it rather than risk a beta BIOS. Otherwise, pretty solid boards.
I have decided to stop building and selectively buy refurbs. So far, so good. I also bought a new Dell notebook from a MS store on a black Friday sale that turned out well. All these have good reviews from sources I trust. What’s nice is getting a set of hardware that works, and for which good drivers exist.
Sure, there are crap systems out there. I try to avoid them. I wasn’t very good at choosing components when I built my own. Have had similar luck with auto parts.
If money were no object I think a serious prepper would invest in location. That is, an acreage near a natural source of fresh water with great foraging options. Arable and tillable land for agriculture. A house designed in a way that heating and cooling aren’t reliant upon a central HVAC system. Also, a somewhat hardened structure that can be defended against random ne’er-do-wells. Perhaps at a southern latitude where winters are mild and there’s a long growing season.
I guess what makes a prepper “serious” (beyond just always having a stocked pantry in case they can’t get to a store for a few weeks) is LONG term solutions. It’s prepping for TEOTWAWKI and not just a localized natural disaster or civil uprising. It’s a library of knowledge on medicine and agricultural. It’s about realizing you’re going to have to produce your own food and having the supplies you need to do that and owning low maintenance livestock before SHTF so you have them after SHTF. I think to be that level of prepper you almost have to be rural. Otherwise, you’re just stockpiling canned goods and hoping the situation rights itself before the canned goods run out.
“Are you saying that HEB can’t limit you to one package of TP?”
–nope,as long as they limit EVERYONE to that same deal. But even that is probably questionably legal.
I suppose if you did it only for online orders and had the prohibition in your TOS, then you could get away with it, but why should you care? You shipped your number of units.
Unless there is more to it than that. Maybe the manf forces the retailer to sell it as a loss leader to generate the other ‘blade’ sales.
But even then, the console is useless without games, and so no matter what their initial budget, the buyer WILL be buying games.
I really don’t see why they should care who buys the product or how.
n
It makes the retailers and manufacturers look bad to the consumers that are getting ripped off by the resellers. Same as concert tickets.
In a voluntary transaction, how are they getting ‘ripped off’? Just don’t buy it. There isn’t any guarantee that a product will be available to you in a store at the price you prefer to pay…
The idea that the retailer will “look bad” is so alien to my way of thinking that I really can’t get my head in a place where that makes sense to me. I guess I’m broken is some way.
Concerts in the 80s almost always meant paying the scalper. Unless YOU wanted to wait in line overnight. I was happy to pay the additional cost for most shows just to avoid the hassle of trying to buy on the first day.
Of course, I still have my xbox connected to the tv, and I never even played all the games I bought for it before getting the 360. Same deal with the 360 before the One…
No interest in a new console, I’ve got other stuff to do.
n
Now you have to pay them unless you have the computer bots to get one in the 20 seconds or so they are available.
“Concerts in the 80s almost always meant paying the scalper. Unless YOU wanted to wait in line overnight. ”
Now you have to pay them unless you have the computer bots to get one in the 20 seconds or so they are available.
Lots of corporate money involved in that reseller scene. At a lot of companies, you can accept the tickets as a “token” gift long as the face value doesn’t exceed $X number of dollars.
We saw Blue Man Group when they toured the country with Venus hum in the early 2000s, and when we sat down 7th row center, I got suspicious and asked my wife, “Where did you get the tickets?”
“Oh, Jeff [sleazy concierge medicine practice consultant’s last name] got them for me.”
“As much as I appreciate the gesture, never again, ok? That guy will get you sued like all of the other doctors he’s ‘helped’.”
Sadly, Blue Man was good and Venus Hum was awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBKI3ya-l0
Annette Strean’s voice was a force of nature back then.
If I believed in UFO’s, which I don’t (say 100:1), I would say they are probably Von Neumann probes with dementia – repetitive copy errors + cosmic ray errors. They aren’t “doing” anything, because they long ago forgot what they were supposed to be doing when programmed millions or billions of years ago.
Ohh, neat idea! Maybe that’s what DNA is. If it can fight entropy long enough maybe it’ll manage to reply somehow. Or just lather, rinse, and repeat.
In the latest Bobiverse Book (Audio so far), that is exactly what is happening to Bob clones.
Did you donate to Wikipedia this year?
“Although I don’t depend on WikiPedia to be authoritative, I do use it nearly every day, as I suspect do most or all of my readers. So I’ll encourage all of you to contribute as I just did. Even $20 will help them a lot.” – RBT on 2014-12-02.
Just like Joe Biden!
Nope. I doubt I will ever again. I don’t even use it regularly anymore.
Wikipedia six years ago was not yet totally useless on any topic which the SJWs claimed jurisdiction over. And that list grows steadily.
Are you kidding? Why should I pay for codswallop when any stable would pay me to cart it away?
Edit — Damn, Steve beat me to it! 🙂
I’m not sure I’ve ever been inclined to look up much in the way of politics or current events on Wikipedia. It’s just not what I would ever use an encyclopedia for. Similarly, I would never go into a library grab a hardcover Encyclopædia Britannica off the shelf and look up anything political or current event related. Right tool for the right job and Wikipedia is not the right tool for that job.
Now, if I’m wanting to quickly read-up about trees in the poplar family or a particular class of battleships or some chemical compound a layperson such as myself knows nothing about then I’m most apt to go to Wikipedia for that and that’s why I donate. I find it very useful for such knowledge pursuits.
Much of the problem with the left slant to ALL things in the modern online world of user contribution driven sites is that the demographic most likely to contribute overlaps a lot with the demographic most likely to lean left.
That’s probably true, but the real problem is that those who seek positions with increased privilege or increased power over others are almost universally lefties. And they work to fill other positions with their like-minded comrades and to exclude those outside the cult.
I stopped bothering to put in edits years ago, when several corrections to factual errors were reverted. IIRC, all of the reverted corrections concerned historical events and IIRC all were in the process of being “reinterpreted” and mere facts don’t matter in the face of correctness. Several of the pages I’d edited were subsequently locked, though I don’t know how closely the locking followed the reverting.
Dr. Jerry reported a similar situation. On his biography page, there was an error, so he edited the page to correct it. Only to have someone revert the edit.
There were apparently several iterations of this loop, always the same person (I think) reverting the correction. Eventually Dr. Jerry gave up. Source: Chaos Manor, although I don’t have a date. I just remember him mentioning it. Or was it Byte magazine online?
The quest for truth appears less tenacious than obsession, whether SJW or not.
G.
I believe in the likelihood of life elsewhere in the Universe. My chosen religion even has that as a truth. However I have never seen any evidence. But in the late 90s, my wife saw five floating / flying black triangles just at dusk while driving on a rural road near Oklahoma city. She was so amazed she pulled over to watch them pass overhead, one behind the other, against the wind, without a sound. She even noted that the normal evening crickets were silent. She couldn’t determine their size or altitude but her description matched reports we have seen in later years from several locations over the world. I believe she saw what she claimed. Could it have been a black project program returning to nearby Tinker AFB? Highly unlikely. The mystery continues.
Ob XKCD
G.
@Steve
@~Jim
‘xactly
And I’m a kill thief, too! And, and, and I probably sweet-talked your wife before you ever met her!
Yeah. But our location and speed of light and blah blah blah…. It was really cool in one of the StarTrek movies when the Vulcans showed up.
My bet isn’t on “cool Vulcans” showing. More like “people taste good”.
Yeah. Grumpy. The weather is doing whatever, I can’t tell, never can tell, but I almost want a pair of crutches. Stupid leg. 🙂 But I have a leg, so, Win!!!
Available on Audible only right now. Kindle Unlimited in January.
I just got an invitation to be in Starlink Beta (satellite internet). (I live on the Olympic Peninsual near the Hood Canal bridge, WA.) Says the letter:
Interesting to try out, but not interesting enough for the $$ expenditure. I have good cable-based internet at home, so not really needed.
But I have a leg, so, Win!!!
Yup. I have a knee damaged in an auto accident. Two wise docs told me to live with it. It has actually improved over the years. I suppose if I live long enough some surgeon will want to replace it. No, not unless it gets worse. I can’t run a marathon. Oh, wait… never could. People forget what happened to the original Marathon runner. 😉
Do tell! I remember what happened to Jim Fixx, is that who you mean?
Orthopods are notorious sawbones, literally. Smart to avoid them whenever necessary.
I thought it was a motorcycle accident. Apologies if I’m mixing you up with someone else, someone who had a motorcycle accident and now isn’t getting credit for it. If that’s the word.
That’s about where I am on a number of injuries, including a knee. Things don’t work quite right, but surgery is unlikely to help and might make things worse and certainly will result in expense and inconvenience.
(OTOH I haven’t looked into it in years and probably techniques have gotten better and more likely to succeed. OTOOH I despise every aspect of the American
healthcareillness maintenance business and would just as soon see every insurer and regulator die in a fire along with 50% of the doctors, nurses, and so on. Oh, and every sanctimonious asshole who’s told me it’s my duty to get medical insurance because it helps keep down the premiums for other people should die in a fire twice, if that can be arranged.)~jim, the original Marathon runner ran back to town to bring news of the victory and then died as soon as he delivered his message. Or so the story goes.
Note that he’d just been in battle all day and most likely didn’t have people handing him cups of electrolyte water as he ran. I’m pretty sure that modern marathon runners have an easier and less risky time of it.
I had one leg broken at the hip and the other leg’s knee puffed up quite huge. To the point that my drugged addled self expected the skin to burst. Knee never bothers me. Damn, I like Demerol.
Anyway. Docs said 50/50 to keep the leg. I still have my leg. I’m happy for that.
Stupid thing still goes on “fu#k you” rants once in a while. And I limp and bitch and keep on going.
🙂
added: I suppose if leg rants didn’t make me want to almost puke, I’d be cool. Oh. Going to the dentist is interesting. He’s like “that doesn’t hurt” and I’m like “what?”.
Oh, that Marathon runner!
Jim Fixx wrote a hugely popular book on running back in the late 70s/early 80s. A few years later he was out running and… Yep! Keeled over.
I never tried to edit, but I have heard similar stories from people who have. I’ve also heard about editing wars. I think there are more jerks out there than authoritative writers, and the person who “owns” the page will reflexively revert any edits that were not first proposed and vetted on the discussion page. Of course they may not accept them then, anyway, so it might be more effort for the same lack of effect. Maybe someone will fork Wikipedia with a better edit managing model.
Jim Fixx inherited a heart condition and died of a heart attack at age 52. His father Calvin had two heart attacks, the second being fatal at age 43.
two things to note:
1) before Jim took up running he was 20kg overweight and smoked two packs a day
2) his heart attack was caused by clogged arteries, a condition that could not be easily diagnosed at the time
The Complete Book of Running was a monster. I’ve never seen a first printing, but I do have a Taiwanese pirate edition in my collection.
One of the neat bits of folklore is that the cover photo was originally intended to be something else, but the photo of his legs was substituted due to some glitch.
Zerohedge has gone thru a redesign, and figured out a way to get an annoying “Subscribe Now” whole page popup to get past uBlock Origin. Bah.
n
Past time for someone to design a browser plug-in and supporting ecosystem.
Plugin automatically checks the Hall of Shame file and gives you a warning if you are about to visit a website that has significantly degraded the user experience with incessantly shrieking marketing.
Hall of Shame file is custom generated for each user by daily polling of a list of user designated websites that have posted an HoS list.
Business model: Free to users that allow the plug-in to report blocked attempts. Sliding fees for website owners that want to know how many times they have been blocked.
OK, back from some other stuff.
As Paul said, he not I, was the one who had the motorcycle accident. All my motorcycle incidents have been deliberate. 🙂
As for the original Marathon runner, here is an interesting story:
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a20836761/the-real-pheidippides-story/
Remember, some of this is legend, and the accuracy is shrouded in the mists of time. Bet you didn’t know that Greeks ran much greater distances. I didn’t, but discovered it looking up the reference. It seems that the runner from Marathon to Athens DID die, but read the story for details.
I was never a very good runner, and can’t imagine running the distances mentioned in the article.
Past time for someone to design a browser plug-in and supporting ecosystem.
Or, just use the Brave browser. It isn’t perfect, but I like it. I have also read that there are some competing browsers that might be a little better. Just ignore the Brave Rewards scheme. I have been using it for about a year, and like it. I had a meltdown with FireFox a couple years ago, and switched to Chromium on Mint Linux. I liked it, but it (unlike Chrome) didn’t support additional ad blockers. I DO like the Chromium code base, and how it handles some web sites. I am no expert, but have tried quite a few browsers. Now experimenting with MS Edge, the new one supposedly based on Chromium. Haven’t had time to learn much about it, but it seems OK; quick on a slow connection.
One thing I like about Brave is that I rarely get the “Please turn off your ad blocker to see this site” message. That was part of my meltdown with FF.
New Edge is based on Chromium and has been the fastest Chromium based browser for a while. MS did a lot of work when they moved away from the original Edge and they have provided a lot of code back to Chromium. I used the original Edge because it was the fastest at the time and started using it after many, many years of Firefox until they really went downhill.
I later started using Vivaldi at the same time as ChrEdge, that is also Chromium based. Vivaldi gives me a lot of fiddling tools. Apart from layout versatility (like search bar at the bottom -like in a terminal- 🙂 ), the thing I like most is Notes. I visit about 5 sites every day and I have a notes page in which I have the links of the last article I read for each site. With my memory never being good, this alone saves me a lot of time or having to have a different tool to register things and referring to that.
You guys are slipping up. Maybe it was the aliens??
No one busted me on the date? NO ONE HAAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHH !!!
I didn’t see it until I started to write tomorrow’s…
n
Vivaldi. Thanks Marcelo. That is one I have been wanting to try. Maybe over Christmas.
Browsers have always puzzled me. Something we use all the time, but most come up short. Why? Probably because web sites are increasingly complex. Not like the early days of the web.
With Vivaldi I also use the one and only add-on I have ever used with a browser: Dark Reader. It converts all(?) web pages that do not offer a Dark Mode from white to black.
I love this site because of the people that post but am not very fond of the background colour. Not a complaint, just my preference.
You guys are slipping up. Maybe it was the aliens??
No one busted me on the date? NO ONE HAAHAHHHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHH !!!
I didn’t see it until I started to write tomorrow’s…
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Sorry dude. Tough week and I am on road today. I drove down to Victoria, TX and went to see the latest Ridley Scott movie with Dad.
“The Last Vermeer” is quite good and very unexpected. It is a WWII movie about art and paintings.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_last_vermeer
Dad went to bed at 11 while Mom and I continued watching her show. Then I helped Mom to her wheelchair and to the toilet and to bed. Too much reality there.
I filled up my truck when I got to Port Lavaca. First fillup since Thanksgiving. 31 gallons at 19 mpg. I am really amazed at the gas mileage the 2019 F-150 4×4 gets because, I drive it like I stole it.
I was just reading about the shortage of AMD processors. Apparently, just like the PS5, large quantities were purchased by “scalper bots”.
I would really like to see the manufacturers let this happen – wait until the peak of ownership by scalpers – and then flood the market, leaving the scalpers high and dry. Really, they serve no useful purpose in the market, except to take advantage of the naive.
On a vaguely related topic: Did y’all read that one will soon be able to trade water futures as a commodity? Specifically, water in the Southwest, especially California. I mean, what could go wrong, allowing people to speculate with the water supply? The end result will be traders scraping a margin off the top, increasing prices for everyone else, and delivering zero actual benefits to the market.
I’d love to see commodity trading go back to the old rules, where you had to be prepared to take physical delivery of whatever you traded. Better have a big swimming pool handy.
There’s more? Gotta get that for Christmas reading. What an absolutely wonderful series!
Currently, I am re-reading some of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. Comfort food, as it were.
FWIW, I switched from Brave to Vivaldi. I got tired of the Brave messages asking me to participate in their weird funding scheme. Vivaldi with uBlock and Ghostery (and NoScript, if you can tolerate the number of websites it breaks).
Ghostery is getting annoying, though. With every update, it wants to show more of it’s own crap.