What I find interesting, then, is what advantage the trilobites may have gained by using a basic mineral for the lenses vs. organic chitin. Chitin must have a transparent form in order to function for the eyes in modern creatures? Hmm.

I read in one paper that trilobites may have actually formed some kind of dual-layer in their lenses to compensate for the double-refraction property of calcite.

Ah! So the same as the rest of their hard parts, I suppose. I suspected as much, but couldn’t seem to find any paper that explicitly stated this.

Thank you!

In regards to use of calcite vs. chitin: doing a quick search: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/earth-sciences/facilities/collections-and-museums/treasury-of-trilobites/index.html

Were trilobites also unique in using calcite in addition to chitin in their exoskeleton? Do any extant arthropods use calcite in any significant way?

Can confirm 4. (Bluetooth) issues, and they aren’t specific to Mint, I’m on Devuan linux and experience these random disconnects a lot. Very annoying.

Re: Wayland – It’s unpopular to say in many places online but I agree, it’s still beta and I’m dismayed to see KDE has announced they’re hiding X functionality by default now. I try Wayland about once a year, and there’s always something like random desktop crashes (the WHOLE desktop/session) or other annoyances that make me go back to X-based sessions. Sorry Wayland people, you and the desktop manager folks need to figure things out and stop saying it’s each other’s job to handle this or that aspect of the UI/locking/keymaps/whatever.

Still love Linux but I also feel it’s gotten a bit worse as compared to a decade ago.

The more general vuln is CVE-2023-45853 apparently, in zlib through version 1.3

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-45853#status

is this general to any Linux distro using zlib or just Ubuntu?

Ah, I can try that then, thank you!

OK… so what’s the best way to select a different keymap in Wayland? Searching around I see mentions of setting a keymap in config.h and recompiling a compositor… or ‘modifying the system XKB database in /usr/share/X11/xkb’ … or this tool https://github.com/xremap/xremap (have not tried it myself).

I need not just to tweak one or two keys, but to set a entire alt keymap (us,apl). and it has to be changeable on the fly, not statically, via AltGr or other user-defineable key.

I’d like to try KDE again, but last time I tried with wayland the keymap stuff seemed wonky to me.

Don’t be Anatoli Bugorski!

… or the guy involved in the Hanoi Incident.

Yes, I know they are update services; fair point you make, that those not technically-minded should probably leave them on.

However I personally do not appreciate OS updates, no matter their purported criticality, being installed without my express permission. I am aware of Group policies, but Win11 Home does not officially support them (though one can install gpedit.msc manually; however according to sources I researched, not all policies set will even be honoured by the Home edition).

I did consider scheduling it, just hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

If could, I would wipe Win11 and use native Linux but this laptop is too new and support is poor on it; it’s gone as soon as practical :)

When I have to boot into Win11, I run this right after as a shortcut from my desktop (right-click and Run As Administrator):

net stop usosvc
sc config usosvc start=disabled
net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled

… be sure to set your Wifi points as metered to block Update as well.

Note that anytime you go into certain Settings / Control Panel pages, Win11 silently re-enables the above services! Crazy. (Someone should really write a patch for that…)

Sad anyone has to put up with this BS but, we do what we gotta do.

I think the only thing that would redeem the Democratic party at this point is for every House and Senate member over the age of 50 to step aside and run byelections for younger replacements.

Just a random stupid idea that will never ever happen of course… but they might as well just burn things and start over right now, so they have 4 years to re-align. Obviously the US citizenry does not believe in them as they are, so why not.

Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)

No idea! I have wondered that myself. In fact why doesn’t he do it now, he’s the ultimate lame duck prez, there’d be no consequences for him so he absolutely should a few days after the election – if he truly could (I don’t know enough about the details about how he could so do).

If your question is not just rhetorical, I totally agree, 100%.

In fact I wish he’d declare he’s dissolving SCOTUS completely, plus a few levels of courts below and appointing non-partisan judges across the board to clean house and reset the decades of theocratic-proto-fascists that appear to have infiltrated the system at all levels. He could, after all, do anything right? The SCOTUS ruled this summer that Presidents have ‘absolute immunity’, so why not? It would be the ultimate F*ck You to their corruption and would be a historically beautiful way to bow out.

EDIT: Oh look, I’m not the first to think of it

I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.

W.T.F.

The US needs to clean house, expand the SCOTUS to put these corrupt judges firmly in the minority so they’re ineffective for the rest of their miserable life-long-unelected-terms, if it can’t outright impeach them!

Aaah! Begone hellspawn!

~~~~      O
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Oh I know little to nothing about turntables, so you’re probably right :-)

Someone showed me a record turntable with what must have been a centrifugal governor! What an ingenious device. (I got the impression from him this was unusual for a turntable, at least…)

At what point can this menace be slapped with Barratry and barred from filing nuisance lawsuits? sheesh.

That’s what I ended up doing. A dumb monitor is just fine, as long as you don’t need a huuuge screen. The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

Hmm, more yummy mushrooms in autumn here, so that wins for me.