A space battle with transcendental Borg Spheres.

I mean that’s what you want when it comes to nuclear weapons. Right? Either be the first to know or the last to know. I guess some people would prefer to die in the flash than live and struggle through an apocalypse.

If you’d ever been really swarmed by mosquitoes or lived in a place where they are ever present you’d not be asking this question.

• When they swarm enough they are nearly impossible to avoid.
• When their presence is constant some people just stop reacting to the bites. I only ever notice mosquito bites on places that get chaffed (like the wrists and hands, around collars and cuffs). If they bite a place you wouldn’t normally scratch and can avoid scratching the area after a bite, for some people a welt is much less likely to form.
• They don’t go after only people. Your irritation at a few bites is nothing compared to the diversity in the evolutionary arms race between mosquitoes and their prey.
• Only the mothers feed on blood. Other mosquito eat mostly plant nectar.

Beginner tutorials exist. Have you even tried looking? Linux has better documentation than anything I’ve seen in any other OS. Man pages, help files, and commented configuration files galore in just about every single Linux distro without any Internet needed, but it sounds like you never even bothered to look for them.

Sure, assholes online exist in Linux communities, but they are EVERYWHERE. We’ve got a couple right right here. That doesn’t exactly distinguish FOSS communities from any other.

Generalizations about all of FOSS based on your limited experience with a few distros is just asinine. FOSS is way more than an operating system.

Expecting a machine to hold your hand through your learning is such a weird form of entitlement and an especially weird distinction to make since no other operating system does that to the level you expect either.

Corporations pay for support services. The code is free (as in speech). No one ever claimed that the support was also (or even should be) free. Microsoft support is a joke. Apple support is mostly just a sales scheme. Linux support forums might be hostile to entitled noobs looking for a handout and a quick fix, but they are fucking heros when given a chance to help those who put in the effort to help themselves.

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This is a fun experiment, but it’s not precisely the peaks and troughs of the actual waves themselves that you’re seeing, it’s the maximums and minimums of the amplitude from those waves interfering with their reflections. You see the interference pattern, not the waves.

They shouldn’t be separate in the first place. It’s just bad design that’s prone to failure. And in this case that failure mode is VERY far from failsafe, it’s potentially deadly.

Too bad those “easily accessible manual releases” aren’t the actual door handle and are hidden so well you’d never find them if you were unfamiliar with the vehicle.

They’ve used the exact same reasoning to excuse running down actual pedestrians on crosswalks.

Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.

I find this take fascinating because, although I also like watching athletes and sports, I see the fandom and names as a huge soap opera cast. I just can’t keep up with any of it, the names, the injuries, the rivalries, the trades. It’s all just a bunch of banal meaningless drama to me that I will never have the enthusiasm to track. It’s all the same old shit from season to season with a rotating cast of hot young fools, just like General Hospital. As such I can’t talk sports with people. I can watch, but the events wash over me without the same meaning or substance. For that reason, flamboyant and over-the-top drama (like hot tempers, trash talking, and general mischief) that happens during play is actually interesting as long as it isn’t too unsportsman-like and doesn’t interfere with the game too much. The soap opera drama is boring, the sports is interesting, but the performance and affectations are spicy.

To be clear, your take is totally valid and I’m not really critical of it at all. I just have a different perspective.

VULFPECK /// Earworm

Every movie is a muppet movie waiting to happen.

“No Country for Old Men”, with the killer played by Sam the blue eagle.

“Brokeback Mountain”, with Kermit and Foxzie Bear playing the leads, no human roles.

Rowlf as the unexpected lead in “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Fistful of Dollars”, and “Fistful of Dollars”. In Lawrence of Arabia, only the other British soldiers are played by humans. In the Spaghetti Westerns, the only humans are the women.

“Smokey and the Bandit”, with Kermit as the Bandit, Rowlf as the trucker, the bride played by a real person, Miss Piggie as Smokey, and Fozzi Bear as the groom/deputy.

“The Blues Brothers”, starring Kermit and Fozzi as Elwood and Jake. All the other characters are Muppets, but the bands are played by real blues musicians.

“Brazil”: Kermit as Sam Lowry, Robert Dinero reprising his role as “human” Tuttle, Miss Piggy as Sam’s mother, and Jill Layton played by the only other human.

So you’re looking for validation, not an honest discussion. This whole thing just got more weird. You’re weird.

The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.

For running, I got a smartwatch that can store some music locally, so I don’t need to be connected to listen. Still not perfect, kind of a hassle to use, and doesn’t always work perfectly. Almost miss those tiny iPod nanos. I feel like portable dedicated music players have gone backwards in features and usability with the rise in popularity of perpetually connected Internet devices and streaming services.

Yeah, the touch screen is awful, but just try finding a decent induction range without one and without spending twice as much for the privilege. (It seems that induction ranges are the most popular for this unfortunate design trend.)There’s not really any choices out there. You can lock the screen, which is great for cleaning. Just don’t do that while you’re using the oven or range because it turns everything off and cancels the bake.

I do love everything else about my induction range though. Cold searing stuff is faster and easier to get right. I can bring a pot of water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes.

I tried Govee outdoor lights.

The app has some ridiculously invasive permissions required to operate that have absolutely nothing to do with turning a light on/off and changing the color. Goodbye privacy.

The lights were also VERY far from permanent, they lasted through a couple months of mild weather and light use. No snow, no flooding or heavy rain, no direct sun, no extreme heat, no evident physical damage. In my case it wasn’t just one light that went, it was the whole strand and the way it failed left me feeling worried that it was a fire hazard. Their outdoor lights are not well made enough to be left outdoors for long. I would not recommend Govee lights to anyone.

They let Larry Niven write some episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series, so now the K’zinti (cat people Niven originally introduced in his Ringworld stories) are canon in the Star Trek Universe. The producer (or maybe director, I don’t really remember) of those cartoons was color blind and as a result, those cat like aliens became cannonicaly purple.