Link round-up for 26 May 2024
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They move with such perfect grace and elegance.
Bad dog!
These are truly signs of the times.
Aluminum foil reflects not only light, but also cats.
Don't neglect target practice.
This is not the correct way to board the bus.
Celebrate military moggies.
Buzz off, you turkey, I need some alone time.
See a dog being wagged by its own tail, a modern milliner at work, and a demonstration of the gyroscopic effect (NSFW blog, Blogspot login required).
Here's a house that's narrow but nice (found via Miss Cellania).
Awesome skill on display here.
Read Victor Hugo's last letter to his daughter Léopoldine, who died at 19 in a boating accident.
An artist in Canada created a life-size dollhouse (found via SickoRicko).
Get the hell away from that thing, you idiots.
This is a "waterspout" on the Kama river in Russia. I can't imagine how the physics of this works.
Repeated covid vaccine boosters help build up general immunity, including against future variants.
Electrical stimulation of the spinal cord can alleviate many cases of paralysis -- but nobody really understands why.
Worst diet ever.
Measles is far more horrible and dangerous than most people today realize. Refusing the vaccine is madness.
In Mexico, howler monkeys are falling dead out of the trees due to the current extreme heat wave.
Never trust "the cloud" for storing anything important. There is no "cloud" -- it's just somebody else's computer, and that somebody can goof up or turn nasty.
Here's yet another text-messaging scam to watch out for.
Don't rely on "AI" for factual information. Especially on mushrooms.
Windows 11 records everything that appears on your computer screen. Everything.
Stop using Google and Chrome. There are better alternatives to both.
When buying a big-ticket item, do your math first and stick to it.
"Engineered stone" countertops are giving workers a horrific lung disease.
If you keep corrosive or other dangerous materials in your home, check the containers frequently.
Some major retailers are backing down on the price-gouging that has been the real driver of recent inflation.
It was that nine-year-old girl's own fault for not realizing she was being filmed in the bathroom by a pervert. Yeah, that's it.
"Your job is to teach, not to blather about yourself."
Here's some sovereign citizen lunacy in a library (for an explanation of what sovereign citizens are, see here).
Bossy, oblivious business types are especially stressful for autistic people to deal with.
Oregon schools are putting girls in danger without warning them.
After decades of decline, Detroit's population actually grew in 2023, albeit by less than a third of one percent. The state of Michigan is still declining.
This Islamist believes the Palestinian cause is losing because God is punishing them for being supported by "Queers for Palestine". From an Islamic viewpoint this is a quite logical, and certainly predictable, position.
There's strong public support for a crackdown on greedy corporations -- another potential issue for the Democrats to run on.
Salman Rushdie explains the foolishness of supporting a Palestinian state.
Right-to-disconnect laws can help stop work culture from ruining our lives, but much more is needed.
"Taking these people seriously is a grave mistake."
Massachusetts's new surtax on millionaires is a huge success. Never let anyone tell you it can't be done.
One of the most violent January 6 insurrectionists has been sentenced to twelve years in prison.
The fall of Roe has been followed by an increase in younger men getting vasectomies.
House Republicans formalize their plans for 2025: a national abortion ban and gutting Medicare, Obamacare, and Social Security.
This is the Christianity that the Christian nationalists want -- macho, swaggering, bullying, and not too good at spelling. I see nothing here to appeal to women, or to men who respect them.
It's now estimated that repairs to the trashed library at PSU will cost three-quarters of a million dollars. In a sane world, those worthless "students" who did this would be on the hook for every cent.
Alito's flags are the last straw -- Democrats need to seriously rein in the Supreme Court, and to commit to far-reaching court reform if they win the power to do so in November.
Clearly there's more work to be done in de-stigmatizing mental illness.
Today's campus Israel-haters are brainwashed fools who have long been enemies of free speech.
Trump pals around with horrifically violent street criminals.
Global warming, and the refusal to recognize it, are making life difficult in Florida.
Denying the physical differences between the sexes easily becomes a form of cruelty.
Death penalty opponents, go right ahead and argue that execution is not appropriate in cases like these. The Republicans will welcome all the voters who flee from you in disgust.
The US has taken a huge step toward ending coal mining.
Biden denounces the ICC's disgusting and outrageous threat to issue warrants for Israeli political leaders.
Republicans are opposing efforts to ban the use of "AI" to create fake political propaganda images.
After three years of legal struggle, Roz Adams is vindicated.
In Germany, anti-Semitic incidents have skyrocketed since October 7.
Pedos celebrate as Germany drastically reduces the penalties for possession and distribution of kiddie porn.
In France, violent male thugs attack women calling for the deportation of migrant rapists. Discussion here.
Norway, Spain, and Ireland revert to Europe's thousand-year-old traditional anti-Semitism, calling for the mass murder, torture, and rape of Jews to be rewarded with statehood.
Links here on the Russian campaign of sabotage and destruction in Europe.
See video of a Ukrainian village destroyed by Russian invaders.
Israel's operation in Rafah is proceeding smoothly, with most civilians evacuated and the US administration's predictions of disaster revealed as horseshit once again.
Iranian women clandestinely celebrate the death of the theocracy's president Raisi.
In India's current national election, elderly and disabled people are getting the option of voting at home.
More links at WAHF.
My own posts this week: some truths and inspirations, and Oregon's primary.
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I've had a policy here of not including any links to paywalled sites, or to sites that require a login, on the grounds that most readers wouldn't be able to see them. However, one does miss out on some good stuff that way. So if a link requires a login, I'll include it but add a note so that people who can't or won't log in there won't waste their time. I'm still not going to link to anything paywalled.
posted by Infidel753 at 12:48 AM
12 Comments:
Is there anything Israel could do which you would state your opposition to? By and large, the protesters are not Israel haters, they hate the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians.
For months I've been posting links here which fully document that these "protests" are indeed motivated largely by Jew-hatred, and that there is no indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians going on in the Gaza strip. Israel continues to take extraordinary measures to minimize enemy civilian casualties, in contrast to Hamas's deliberately putting Palestinian civilians in harms way.
Israel certainly does things I strongly oppose -- it has a military draft, for example. But in the current conflict, it has responded with almost superhuman moderation considering how outrageously it was attacked.
Work related rumination. Let’s discuss. I heard competent pianist John Tesh, on his radio space-filler, tout a method called “pre-loading” or “front-loading” or whatall; the idea is, just before you sleep, you spend a couple hours thinking about the next day’s workload! Apparently you wake up Brimming With Ideas! And I’m all, Dude! I get home at 7 pm preloaded to gills! After a dog walk, a tallboy, and possibly a meal, I sleep and DREAM about the next day. Boy do I wake up brimming with ideas, and also anxiety! Mostly that second thing! It can take an hour to sort out which orders are real and which were just the stuff dreams are made of. It’s just a darn good thing I actually love what I do.
Measles is bad. Why wouldn't people get the vaccine for the kids? It just makes little sense.
That water spout was cool. They were close.
I cannot imagine standing that close to a volcano that's erupting.
Tim: It depends what one means by "work". The very last thing I want is to have dreams about my office job -- I'd probably be the first person in history to die of boredom in my sleep. Having to think about it outside work hours would be almost as bad. As for ideas, that job doesn't involve any ideas.
Turning to my real occupation (as opposed to money-making activity), writing, I always have plenty of ideas -- the hard part is getting them written out in a postable form. I think that's true of all writers.
Mary K: A lot of people are stupid. They just believe whatever they feel like believing and dismiss any evidence against it as a government conspiracy or whatever. Unfortunately disease germs and viruses don't respect human delusions.
I think people have gotten too used to watching spectacular sights on computer screens. They don't quite grasp how dangerous it is to get actually physically close to things like waterspouts and volcanoes -- especially since they're usually recording them on their stupid "smart"phones instead of actually looking at them.
The problem is not so much the cloud as the clouds. Everyone has one: MS, Google, Ionos... OK. That's one problem. And, yes it is a pain but more worrying is the concept which is part of a move away from users ever owning anything. In many ways it is much like the move from buying software to leasing it*.
There is a solution...
https://www.techbuyer.com/uk/hp-739333-004-midline-hard-drive-4tb-7-2k-sata-739333-004-55734?sku=739333-004-HP-REF&ppc_keyword=&utm_term=&utm_campaign=Pmax+-+Dell/HP&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=3544573508&hsa_cam=20588778127&hsa_grp=&hsa_ad=&hsa_src=x&hsa_tgt=&hsa_kw=&hsa_mt=&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw3tCyBhDBARIsAEY0XNmf4liNZn1CwpAaN0Z5ldV7SioviXf6Q_2NExm9bLaU-ktN6vvmBqYaAvcfEALw_wcB
Yes, that's a 4TB HDD (about 32 trillion 1s and 0s - a lot) for under forty quid. That's a lot cheaper than the cloud. And you can put it in either a desktop machine or an external case (they cost peanuts). Hey, get two and back-up. Kepp one handy and the other safe (even in a safe!). Data secured for under a hundred quid. Should last for years. OK, nowhere near as fast as a modern SSD PCI4.0e on an M2 slot but it's a back-up. It doesn't need to be quick.
Anyway, that's my top tip.
*Recently my contract with Corel (for their graphics suite) was up. They wanted GBP319 for another year - automated renewal. I told them "No". I got an email the next day and they were quoting GBP249. They were counting on me automatically rolling over the contract so when I didn't they magically dropped the price. I mean yeah, it's tax deductible and all but still... Anyway. I mooched around. Downloaded a trial of Corel 2021 for free and bought a key online for GBP4.73. Totally legit. Slight nark. The price of keys bought from the likes of Gamers outlet e. al. is very volatile. By the time Paypal had processed my GBP4.73 the price had dropped to GBP4.71. I was cheated out of tuppence. I shall weather that storm. Note. There is sod all difference between the 2024 and 2021 versions.
Infidel,
I believe youu on Israel. It is not just out of the goodness of the IDF's heart. Two things. There is no tactical point in using a $50m plane to drop a $20,000 smart bomb on a primary school. Secondly the IDF don't want to kill the kiddies because Hamas are World Class Shroud Wavers. Every dead Palestinian baby is a victory for their twisted mentality. They are deliberately putting the women and children in harm's way. They want the casualties.
NickM: That's a substantial problem, and I've posted links on it a few times -- buyers increasingly don't own what they buy, not when a book on your Kindle can just be deleted off it even though you paid for it, for example. That's why I always buy real physical books, printed on paper. They can't come into my place and grab it back off the shelf. Same with music and movies. If all you have is a right to a digital file somewhere, they can take that away at any time, even if you paid for it. They can't do that with a physical CD or DVD.
Tip: In most cases, if a URL has a question mark in it, that question mark and everything after it is "junk DNA" that can be deleted. You can link to the same site with just this:
https://www.techbuyer.com/uk/hp-739333-004-midline-hard-drive-4tb-7-2k-sata-739333-004-55734
A hard drive with that much storage is something I might actually want at some point. My old computer works just fine, but with the amount of stuff I keep saving to it, I'm eventually going to overrun its 400GB storage capacity. As for back-ups, I do back-ups on flash drives and keep them in a locked safe, but that means a lot of flash drives. Two hard drives at £38 each would only be about $100, which sounds like a pretty reasonable solution. But if one of them is permanently attached to the computer as additional storage, can the computer access it as quickly as its own internal memory?
Israel, like most modern civilized countries, does operate with a sense of moral constraint about how wars should be conducted; Hamas, like most barbarians, has none. That seems like Israel's only plausible motive for the extreme lengths it goes to to minimize civilian casualties. It's certainly not for the sake of public relations. It's been clear for decades that the Jew-haters of whatever stripe will condemn Israel and accuse it of genocide and so forth no matter what it does -- so from that point of view, why bother to exercise restraint? Jews will never win the favor of Nazis. Their own moral values are what restrains them.
I didn't know that about the query sign in URLs I ought to have known that so thanks for the info.
400GB is quite a lot. I mean it isn't in terms of what is on sale now but it is certainly a lot of data. What takes space is things like videos so YMMV. OK. Depends what you mean by "permanently attached". If it is installed in a desktop on a SATA connection it shouldn't be an issue at all. OK, speeds vary with the tech and PCI4.0e on an M2 slot is the current state of the art but for back-up that's like having a 150mph car to do the shopping. If it is external and via USB then it will be slower though that will vary with the USB version. USB 3/3.1 is a lot faster than 1 or 2. These are (or should be!) colour coded. USB 1.0 is white, 2 is black, 3.0 is blue, 3.1 is teal or yellow. Yellow means it's always powered. My new gaming dektop has two yellow ports on the front. This means I can charge my phone without turning the machine on - obviously it has to be plugged in. For back-up I'd go with 3+ which should be pretty automatic if you're buying a new drive. If not then whilst it'll be slower It shouldn't matter that much if you're doing incremental back-ups. Yeah, the initial one might take some time but all these things are relative. It can be a pain when you're at, say, a client's place but at home you can always just make a sandwich or something.
What isn't safe as a back-up is CDs/DVDs. Home burnt ones degrade quickly. Also you'd need a stack of 'em. The jury is still out on flash RAM of all forms for long-term storage. That includes SD cards, pen-drives and even SSD HDs.
One last point. The drive, the machine port and the cable for USB storage all matter. Basically it'll go at the lowest rate of the three.
I haven't had any problems with flash drives so far, but it's worth considering. I'd only really lose data if the flash drive and the computer died at the same time, though, which seems unlikely.
I do have a few home-made DVDs, though I don't use them for back-ups. I'll have to see about backing them up, I suppose.
Thanks for the shout-out, I appreciate it. I had no idea cats had that strong of an aversion to aluminum foil.
Thanks for the posts! I wonder if the foil thing is a problem for far-right-wing cat owners (if the cats are repelled by their tinfoil hats).
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