palordrolap

You may need a different detergent or a detergent booster that works harder on stains. Usually they’re peroxide based, but contain other agents as well. Some come in powder form and others in sprays.

One powder I grabbed does brighten better than detergent alone and makes things smell like an honest-to-goodness laundry. (Which I’m not going to name because this already sounds like a sales pitch. It isn’t. It’s just something that was on special offer on my supermarket’s website and I added it to my virtual basket because I have a few blood-spotted items of clothing that regular washing wasn’t getting out.)

It worked wonders on some very greyed white t-shirts, but not so great on the blood spots on coloured clothing. I may need to soak them for longer or use more additive, risking the colour, which I may have been too cautious about up to the present.

The risk of being outnumbered in my own home does not appeal to me. And heck, given my many failings, I’d end up merely a living ghost in their home that was once mine. Nope. Not for me.

I never said the cameras should exist. And if there’s already been a class action lawsuit (or whatever the equivalent is for getting cameras taken down in this man’s jurisdiction) please direct me to it.

The last town I heard of that got rid of their Flock cameras did so because people started putting in Freedom of Information requests for them. The authorities didn’t like the idea of the public having access to that information at all, and they knew it wouldn’t stand up in court because the usual excuses wouldn’t work. (Namely “think of the children” and “national security”.)

The only way to win is to make them take their own cameras down and rethink their ideas otherwise they’ll just keep on replacing the broken ones, charging the public for the privilege and locking up the offenders.

And finally, if there truly was no other option, which I’m yet to be convinced of, he shouldn’t have acted alone.

Lots of my dreams are interesting for some definition of the word.

One minor thing that’s fascinating is trying to read text on signs because if I look away and look back, the sign almost always says something else. Absolutely no temporal permanence. It’s a dead giveaway that I’m in a dream.

One bigger thing that’s always stuck with me is spatial weirdness. I had a dream as a kid which may have been based on a memory of being a baby and being carried from room to room, but there were five right-angled left turns each into different rooms with about the same amount of distance before each turn. It’s easy to speculate what actually happened without violating Euclidean geometry if it was a memory-turned-dream, but it left my child self feeling fascinated and confused, because the last room should have been the first one, but it wasn’t.

In a similar vein, and more recently, I found myself in a village or small town somewhere and I came to a T junction and knew I had to turn the third direction that was neither left nor right.

Destroying the cameras doesn’t stop the city / corporate espionage either, it’s only a bump in the road to them.

You have to at least try doing it by the book. And then you put bags over the cameras or stick things over the lenses. Outright destruction only gives them a ton of ammunition to “prove” that the cameras are needed. Blocking its view is still ammo, but it’s not as much.

Did I say the blackmailer was home?

Maybe I should have said breaking the blackmailer’s windows or messing up their car. The blackmailer here is the city. “The city” is effectively alive, in that the people running it are.

I’m not trying to discredit him. I’m just suggesting there are things that might need to be tried first before going nuts and destroying property, and in absence of evidence that he’d already done that, I assumed he hadn’t, because people really like going to the destroy phase straight away.

Disagree. This is more like firebombing a blackmailer’s house.

I would have thought that the article would have mentioned it, because that would make for an interesting part to the story. It does not seem to do so.

Edit 2: The below sentence does not contain an “as” between “might” and “well”. I’m wondering if people are seeing one there and are thinking I’m saying something that I’m not, because that word completely changes the meaning of the sentence.

He has fallen into the trap of making constitutional decisions for himself and others rather than going through the proper channels and so they might well throw the book at him.

Yes, I know “the proper channels” will do their very best to ignore, deny or obfuscate as long as they can in order to avoid the question of constitutionality (or legality) of such systems, and that’s why he did it, but he might have had a slightly better defence if he’d at least tried to sue or challenge Flock’s existence and use by less destructive means before doing this.

Edit: Based on the number of downvotes, it seems like a lot of people know something I don’t. The only comment that suggests anything at all though, provides exactly the same amount of evidence that I have for my point of view than they do for theirs.

Some people forget what it was like when they were starting out. They find it difficult to remember when they learned what they know now because it feels like they’ve always known it, like it was and is second nature.

It doesn’t help if they were able, either through circumstances, zeitgeist or sheer aptitude, to pick up a topic relatively easily right back when they did first learn it.

And so it can be difficult for such people (or at the very least, some of them) to see that anyone else might, for whatever reason, be having a hard time picking up the same thing in <current year>.

Combine that with toxic personality traits and you can end up with an embittered person unloading on you for not being able to do what they consider to be a simple thing.

These people are a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of everyone relevant, but they do make a heck of a lot of noise when they’re unloading, and they often gravitate towards each other, so they seem like they make up more of a group than they really do when you finally run across them.

Note that at no point yet have I mentioned Linux. This is a human problem that affects all topics and activities.

If you want to get into the peculiarities of why it seems to be more common with technical communities, it might have something to do with the fact that people who don’t feel particularly confident dealing with other people often chose to deal with something else instead.

Computers and other mechanical things offer stimulating complexity without any of that human nonsense.

This can lead to poor interpersonal skills perpetuating themselves or festering. And so you end up with a few of the aforementioned misanthropes trying to control what they know how to control and lashing out at everything, or everyone, else.

Given the context, the four “Follow Us” links going to proprietary services does seem somewhat antithetical to .self ideals.

At the very least set up a Mastodon account somewhere in addition to those.

Mozart’s sister was supposedly his equal, but her life wasn’t allowed to take the same course.

The last time I looked this up I remember seeing a crazy theory that Vivaldi was secretly a woman passing as a man and that’s kind of stuck with me too.

I am a simple man of simple tastes (for which you may care to read “unadventurous, moneyless, provincial fool”), so it’s going to be the cheap stuff for me. Crumbly white cheese, anything akin to Wensleydale, melted on toast. All the better if you can smell the heat breaking down the butyric acid before it gets to the plate.

For untoasted bread, whatever thin pre-sliced white bread they used to sell (and may still do) at greasy spoon cafés, usually slathered in margarine, cut diagonally and served face up on a plate as a side to a delicious but incredibly unhealthy meal.

These days, however, I have to avoid dairy or else have a very bad time not long thereafter, so any sort of cheese is off the menu.

And to supplement my supply of white bread - now only for relatively healthy sandwiches - I occasionally buy a seeded wholemeal loaf, which I could probably eat as my main supply if it wasn’t twice the price of the white loaf. I’m sure real bread connoisseurs wouldn’t think it worthy of toilet paper, let alone food, but I like what I like.

DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.

It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.

What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.

What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)

I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.

The Sun’s apparent motion is 15° of longitude per hour. There are 94.3° of longitude between Vladivostok and Moscow, so you’d have to travel the distance in no less than 6 hours 17 minutes to keep up with the Sun. Assuming straight line flight not too far above the ground, that’s about 6400km (4000mi), so you’d need to be travelling around 1020km/h (about 640mph). Not quite supersonic, but you’re going to burn a lot of fuel.

The rail line that covers the distance is by no means a straight line though, so some sections with a large north or south component would need to be covered at a much, much higher rate of speed if you wanted the train to do it… and in fact the first stretch out of Vladivostok heads north-east so that part would be literally impossible to follow the Sun along unless you’re a time traveller.

You’ll find both Sunday-first and Monday-first calendars here in Britain, though I couldn’t tell you the ratio and popularity of each.

I’m usually given one as a Christmas gift and that particular make are usually Monday-first, but last year’s was Sunday-first for the first time in ages, which took me by surprise.

Also, my computer preference is Monday first wherever it can be set.

That might derive from locale settings, but I’ve carried over configs for literally decades at this point, so I couldn’t tell you for sure.

All things considered, “rosbif” is almost endearing as an insult. I’m kind of surprised that it’s still the default.

The truth* is that the French are excellent at English, but they find it beneath them to speak it.

Therefore, I suspect that “talkie-walkie” is a deliberate attempt to annoy the English. A trap you have fallen straight into (even if you’re not English).

* for some interpretation of that word

The question asks “whose”, which implies a sapient, or at least sentient, individual or group. LLMs are neither sapient nor sentient.