Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Singular or plural follow-up

  Yesterday I posted about the difference between how British and other English speakers use plurals for certain singular nouns. I’m used to reading a group are doing something, but most say the group is doing something.

  I started doubting that what I remembered about British English was true. Not to get all Malcom Gladwell on you, but turns out it’s even less clear cut than I thought!

• Ruben Schade ☛ Bardinet VSOP brandy

  A friend recommended this as an introductory brandy for someone who loves less-peaty Scotch and Japanese whisky. I’d never had brandy (or cognac) before, besides drizzling it into Xmas puddings.

  It’s lovely! It’s fruity and light, but has that subtly matured taste of a younger whiskey.

• Science

  • Pete Zaitcev: Suvorov vs Zubrin

    When they discussed his "engine on salt of Uranium" [NSWR — zaitcev] I wrote that the engine will not work in principle, because a reactor can only work in case of effective deceleration of neutrons, but already at the temperature of the moderator of 3000 degrees (like in KIWI), the cross-section of fission decreases 10 times, and the critical mass increases proportionally. But nobody paid attention — who am I, who is Zubrin!

• Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ Cal State University faculty are striking. What are their demands?

    A series of one-day strikes, held by the California Faculty Association, have begun across California State University campuses, pushing for a 12% salary increase and other benefits. The university chancellor’s office says the pay increase is not feasible.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ AMD Ryzen Embedded V3000 COM Express Type 7 module supports up to 64GB DDR5 memory

    ADLINK Express VR7 is a COM Express Basic size Type 7 computer-on-module powered by the eight-core AMD Ryzen Embedded V3000 processor with two 10GbE interfaces, fourteen PCIe Gen 4 lanes, and optional support for the “extreme temperature range” between -40°C and 85°C. The COM Express module supports up to 64GB dual-channel DDR5 SO-DIMM  (ECC/non-ECC) memory and targets headless embedded applications such as edge networking equipment, 5G infrastructure at the edge, video storage analytics, intelligent surveillance, industrial automation and control, and rugged edge servers.

  • Hackaday ☛ Affordable Networking For Your Classic Mac

    The Mac SE and in particular the Mac SE/30 number among the more sought-after of the classic all-in-one Apple computers, and consequently their peripherals including network cards are also hard to find and pricey. Even attempts at re-creating them can be expensive, usually because the chips used back in the day are now nearly unobtainable. But if the search is widened to other silicon it becomes possible to create substitutes, as [Richard Halkyard] is doing with a modern version of the SE Ethernet card.

  • Hackaday ☛ Retrotechtacular: The Gunsmith Of Williamsburg

    A modern firearm is likely to be mass-produced using high-precision machine tools, and with a uniformity to the extent that parts from one can be interchanged with those from another. This marks a progression of centuries of innovation, in gunsmithing, in machine tooling, and in metallurgy. In the 18th century there was little of the innovations found in a modern weapon, and a rifle would have been made entirely by hand through the work of a master gunsmith. The video below the break is a fascinating 1969 film following Wallace Gusler, the gunsmith at the museum town of Williamsburg, Virginia, as he makes an 18th-century muzzle-loading flintlock rifle from raw materials. It’s a long video, but it leaves nothing out and has a really informative commentary we’re told from the gunsmith himself.

  • Hackaday ☛ This Pogo Pin Test Fixture Keep Your SMDs From Taking Flight

    There’s no denying how useful surface mount technology is, and how enabling the ability to make really small circuits has become. It comes at a price, though; most of us probably know what it’s like for the slightest wrong move to send a part the size of a grain of sand into another dimension.

  • Hackaday ☛ Inside A Rubidium Frequency Standard

    We think of crystals as the gold standard of frequency generation. However, if you want real precision, you need something either better than a crystal or something that will correct for tiny errors — often called disciplining the oscillator. [W3AXL] picked up a rubidium reference oscillator on eBay at a low cost, and he shows us how it works in the video you can see below. He started with a GPS-disciplined oscillator he had built earlier and planned to convert it to discipline from the rubidium clock.

  • Hackaday ☛ Directional Antenna Stands Tall

    When you think of directional ham radio antennas, you probably think of a Yagi, cubical quad, or a log-periodic antenna. These antennas usually are in a horizontal configuration up on a high tower. However, it is possible to build beams with a vertical orientation and, for some lower frequencies, it is far more practical than mounting the elements on a boom. [DXCommander] shows us his 40 meter two-element vertical antenna build in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Dry Ice From Seashells, The Hard (But Cheap) Way

    [Hyperspace Pirate] wants to make his own dry ice, but he wants it to be really, really cheap. So naturally, his first stop is… the beach?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • teleSUR ☛ UK Resident Doctors Prepare New Strikes

    "It is evident that the government is still unwilling to address the real salary cuts that doctors have endured since 2008," the BMA said.

  • Yahoo News ☛ One in four who had Pfizer Covid jabs experienced unintended immune response

    More than a quarter of people injected with mRNA Covid jabs suffered an unintended immune response created by a glitch in the way the vaccine was read by the body, a study has found.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Tesla whistleblower says Autopilot not ready, contradicting Elon Musk’s ‘best’ Hey Hi (AI) remark

    A former Tesla Inc. employee said in an interview with the BillBC published today that the software powering the company’s self-driving cars is not ready and should not be used on public roads.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ New educational videos about Hey Hi (AI) in media, privacy & digital exclusion. Here is what they show

      You can now watch all ten videos about artificial intelligence (AI) in the media, cybersecurity for journalists, but also about digital exclusion and the impact of digitalisation on people with disabilities.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New York Times ☛ Nigeria’s President Calls for Inquiry After Military Strike Kills at Least 85 Civilians

    Many of the victims were women and children gathered for a religious celebration. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu described the attack as a “bombing mishap.”

  • teleSUR ☛ Nigeria: 85 Civilians Killed in Military’s Airstrike Accident

    In a separate statement signed by defense spokesman Edward Buba, the Nigerian military said the drone strike was based on information about suspected terrorist activity in the area.

• Environment

  • European Commission ☛ Speech by Commissioner Simson at the COP28 Ministerial on Renewables and Energy Efficiency

    European Commission Speech Dubai, 05 Dec 2023 Your Excellencies, dear colleagues, and friends,

    Three days ago, at the World Climate Action Summit, our leaders set a clear goal for our energy transition.

  • Science Alert ☛ Real or Fake: Scientist Explains How to Choose The Most Sustainable Christmas Tree

    The dilemma is real.

• Finance

  • France24 ☛ Hollywood actors ratify new contract deal to formally end strike

    Hollywood actors overwhelmingly ratified a new, hard-fought deal with studios on Tuesday that paves the way for a rebound of an entertainment industry that had seen film and television production come to a halt during a months-long strike.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Texas GOP: We Are the (White Supremacist) Storm

    Slithering ever further down a timeworn slippery slope into fascism, Texas Republicans just took one small step for white supremacy by rejecting a resolution to ban members from consorting with anti-Semites, Nazi-sympathizers or plain ole Nazis in a state already crawling with them. Critics claimed the move - born of furor over a meeting between a big-wig GOP fundraiser and Hitler-fanboy Nick Fuentes - was "too vague" and akin to a "Marxist" decree, evidently in that it seeks to differentiate between "good" and "bad" guys.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFERL ☛ Nobel Laureate Malala Calls Out Taliban For Making 'Girlhood Illegal' In Afghanistan

    Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai decried Afghanistan's Taliban rulers in a speech on December 5 and called on the international community to make gender apartheid a crime against humanity.

  • ACLU ☛ Preserving the History of Civil Rights in New Orleans

    On the same morning that 6-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first Black student to integrate an elementary school in the South, three young girls completed the same historic act just a mile away. On November 14, 1960, Leona Tate, Gail Etienne, and Tessie Prevost were escorted by Federal Marshals past angry protestors into McDonogh 19 Elementary School in New Orleans.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • New York Times ☛ Spotify Cancels Two Acclaimed Podcasts: ‘Heavyweight’ and ‘Stolen’

    The shows will finish out their seasons on Spotify and then have the option to shop their shows somewhere else.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Cancels ‘Heavyweight’ and ‘Stolen’ Podcasts Following Massive Layoffs — Stock-Price Surge Continues

    Yesterday, Spotify stock spiked after the streaming company announced plans to lay off 17 percent of its team. Now, amid news of additional cutbacks yet, affecting two podcasts, shares have hit $200 apiece.

• Monopolies

  • Patents

    • Unified Patents ☛ Fortress IP entity Entropic Communications cable packet transmission patent monopoly found invalid in reexam

      On November 22, 2023, the Central Reexamination Unit (CRU) entered a final rejection of the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,228,910, owned by Entropic Communications, LLC, an NPE and a Fortress IP entity. The '910 patent monopoly relates to aggregating packets for transmission to a destination node and has been asserted against Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter Communications, and Dish.

      View district court litigations by Entropic Communications.

    • JUVE ☛ EPO Boards of Appeal revoke Edwards Lifesciences’ heart-valve patent [Ed: EPO once again admits to have granted fake monopolies, and there must be hundreds of thousands of fake patents (they profit from giving those)]

      The dispute concerns Edwards Lifesciences’ EP 3 583 920, which protects a prosthetic valve frame. The Examining Division of the EPO granted the patent monopoly in 2020.

    • JUVE ☛ Video: Inside the JUVE Patent team [Ed: A group of propagandists who chose spamfarming as their business model, plus taking bribes to lie for firms and lobby for illegal and unconstitutional policies, in effect associating "journalism" with crime]

      In JUVE Patent’s latest video, our editors Amy Sandys, Konstanze Richter, Laura King, Mathieu Klos and Christina Schulze explain how they came to JUVE Patent, what role they play in the team and what they have found to be important over the past five years.

  • Software Patents

    • Unified Patents ☛ Dolby VVC patent monopoly revoked in EPO [Ed: Good luck revoking those endless software patents that criminals who took over the EPO have let be granted]

      On November 30, 2023, the European Patent Office revoked all claims of EP 3675491, owned by Dolby International AB.

  • Copyrights

    • Techdirt ☛ Google Caves In Canada: Agrees To Pay $100m News Bribe To Avoid Direct Link Tax

      It seems that every other day or so we get another story of big tech companies tossing principles out the window and caving to ridiculous government demands. The latest is Google, yet again, which has cut a deal with the Canadian government to bribe news orgs with $100 million to pay them off to avoid a more specific link tax. It’s the worst kind of corruption.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — UGHLOTF Wordo: SINEW

  • Self-nuts roasting on an open mire

  • Drilling down

  • Christmas

    Christmas is right around the corner and I for one am really excited! I love this time of the year and spend time with my friends and family, i'm really in a holly jolly mood right now. The only thing I don't like is the weather, everyday looks so gray and ugly so I hope they change that sometime soon...

• Technology and Free Software

  • On the Shoulders of Giants

    The work we do suggests the form of what can be built on top of it. If we are careful, a larger whole can be extrapolated from the simple pieces we present.

    This is a relatively simple tessellation compared with previous ones I have done, with the twist of it being animated. A looping animation can be thought of as a tessellation of its own kind, making this work 3 dimensional.

    On the technical side the work is bulit on SVG and (what I hope to be) well supported CSS animations which should take advantage of the GPU when present.

    I hope to mint this at some point soon, but my preferred marketplace has nuked my account and previous collections on it, so I might have to find another. If that falls through I can just mint myself and accept offers off-chain. I'll keep this page updated, for any interested.

  • Dystopia et Documentation

    They'll probably end up moving some of the docs yet again when the next great thing comes along. Obviously what documentation needs is a nice Cloud-Integrated ECMAScript Application (CIEA) to make it even more difficult, expensive, and dangerous (DED) to access.

  • Make a StealthBox with Devuan and Libre Computer Renegade

    Finally I was able to complete this gemlog series. 🎇

    For this idea rather than doing a big endless gemlog I preferred split it into several gemlog that can be read also as indivul log, as a matter of fact some of them were already published!

  • OpenBSD in a CI environment with sourcehut

    If you ever required continuous integration pipelines to do some actions in an OpenBSD environment, you certainly figured that most Git "forge" didn't provide OpenBSD as a host environment for the CI.

    It turns out that sourcehut is offering many environments, and OpenBSD is one among them, but you can also find Guix, NixOS, NetBSD, FreeBSD or even 9front!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The success of the QA format

      I think the Emacs Wiki was great or is great especially for that usecase which Alex’ defense admits the most concern: randos searching the web and stumbling on a half-working, probably-deprecated elisp snippet that they manage to cobble together into something that works for them. If the purpose of the Emacs Wiki was to save people from a trip to IRC or a mailing list, then it has had many wins in that regard over the years.

      Further down in the text, he isn’t too happy about the culture on Stack Exchange, and there is some merit to that. Just like on Wikipedia, you can run into some rando småpåve who thinks they’re the king of the world and tries to put you in your place while they’re the one who’s being all wrong about something.

    • Back to the, smol, web

      And there are two reasons for it. First, Adële's smol website and the links therein have got me inspired. There's a plethora of indy, light-bloat sites with interesting content and resources to reach them: a true alternative web. And given that, neither gemini nor gopher nor any other protocol I know is meant to replace the web, I think it's important to fight the Big Bad Web in its own turf.

      Secondly, there's an opportunity to show what a corner of the web can be. More accessible, more friendly to people, better designed, faster and even easier to manage. And that in a humble, unpretentious way, a celebration of “good enough”, a sane haven. This is, in part, with a style taken from gemini, as it should be pretty evident in my site. Well, I hope.

    • Your momma don't grep and your daddy don't pipe and cURL

      It seems our nature is to graze on cheap promises, the very first of a very long chain being our seeming individuality. It makes sense so mythical a beast would graze on more of the same.

    • RE: The end of Good Enough

      I wish you were wrong. Not only because Gemini is good enough, (lagom?) and so are many of the things we like. Not only because the world's rejection of “good enough” rejects us gemininauts too, and the more serious issues you refer in your article.

  • Programming

    • On C popularity vs python, size of stdlib, package managers in langs

      I have a friend who is a ridiculously advanced programmer and he half-jokingly said that in C, there's an implicit slogan that 'You want a function? write it yourself!'. This is very much in the spirit of 'C', there's very little in the standard library and that's by design (when compared with other languages).

    • Tabs in Emacs code

      Somewhen down the line, my tab-width accidentally got set to 2.

      That meant that indent-region in Lisp code inserted a ton of extra tabs.

      And when I pasted that code into other formats, like Markdown, it’d look weird so I’d run untabify on it.

      I didn’t know what was going on but when I finally got around to finding the issue and fixing it, I was really surprised.

      I set the tab-width back to the default (which is 8) and reverted the lisp buffers. They suddenly looked massively borked. Even though I had run indent-region on them earlier!