Part of the free-market attitude though is that you should be allowed to buy policy, so in that regard it’s consistent, you just have to account for corruption in the cost of doing business.

El Dorado county in California, just north of Placerville, on a hill above the banks of the South fork of the American River.

It had a long worm-like tail. If it was smaller I would have thought mouse, but the leading theories are squirrel or mole.

If people are ok with that then I guess it will stand, but it’s insane and anti-consumer in my book. A product costs what it costs, based on supply and demand, and if you can’t afford it you don’t buy it. This flimsy premise of “It lowers the bar to entry so users can upgrade later without having to replace!” will never come to fruition, and it’s too slippery of a slope to “put in a quarter to turn on your A/C”.

That is insane. If it costs the same to make, then lower range isn’t a reasonable area to pitch a lower cost vehicle. Wanting to lower the cost is fine. Putting in cheaper/smaller components to get there is fine. If you are using the same components and just software locking them to nickle and dime the users later, that’s anti-consumer and should not be tolerated. I can’t believe how people look at micro-transactions in games and think “wouldn’t this be cool with IRL stuff?”

Universities have huge endowments and investment portfolios. These are generally broad and in support of keeping the financial backing of the school stable; this is extremely prevalent in the large older universities like Harvard or Columbia (but almost all universities have one in some form or another). They support both students and ongoing academic research.

While many of these portfolios consist of wider funds, many have specific investments in specific companies and industries. That means that the university is invested in, and taking benefit from, areas of industry. The main request is to divest the investment portfolios from companies owned by or supporting entities connected with Israel’s war on Gaza. In some cases this may be possible (move a ton of stock from a defense contractor making weapons sold to Israel to an energy company) and in some cases it may not (they’re invested in a wide market fund that itself invests in specific funds, but you can’t easily cherry-pick which stocks are actually in it). It’s also possible that there are research grants funded through companies who the students want to apply negative pressure to; cancelling a grant sends a message to the company, but also leaves entire teams and time-dependent science without funding, potentially ending it outright unless alternate funding can be found. There also may be contracts involved for specific research and engagements, and breaking a contract is more complicated than just ripping it up (especially if there are early termination policies outlined).

Realistically, the best students can hope for is a commitment to investigate and divest where possible, which is frustrating but also makes sense. I’ve worked in higher education for 20 years and have seen this on a smaller scale around defense contractors during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The endowment is a slow moving leviathan, but I think it’s a good place for the students to apply pressure.

Well, and Rogue One

Big picture, I really think Star Wars animation is peaking. The wide cinematic shots of ships crossing in front of the camera have really captured OT vibes. I think this was a good closure to this story, while leaving a lot of space for spinoff stories. Echo, as the focus of an anthology series about different rebel groups, could be great (I’m thinking “Tales of the Rebels”). I think Rex is getting over-saturated and I’m ok with just knowing he was off doing things.

Potential opportunities for spinoffs/appearances:

• Omega developing more force sensitivity and using it to “train” some of the kids they rescued. Not so far as Jedi, but closer to Chirrut. If it focused on connecting with animals, that’d be great too.
• Echo doing quests with pockets of the rebellion.
• The bad batch popping up as side characters in missions with a focus on them working with old clones and helping them have a life after being a soldier.
• Ventress. She has to have some sort of light/dark vigilante role.

My setup is a bit extreme, but here are my guardrails:

1. All users have the same UID’s on every system. I’m 1000, wife is 1001, son is 1002, daughter is 1003. All these exist on all systems. Our primary group is “family” (gid 10000). Our files are all owned by user:family. This matters because we let them have access to the share of things like home movies and pictures, and I have a TrueNAS with an NFS mount that their user folders rsync to nightly for backup. If you wanna get crazy, you can put in a whole LDAP/freeIPA setup, but that’s a lot (and I did all that as a learning experience).
2. They don’t have the account passwords. I have their password, and if they want to use it, the wife or I have to type the password. When we want them off, superkey+L to lock the computer, and if they reboot it comes to a login screen.
3. If you really go this route, and go the whole LDAP thing, you can also tie that into apps like Jellyfin. I have a huge library of movies and shows, but there’s a folder called “KidMedia” and I literally manually symlink things to that folder if I want them to have access. I set up the phones/tablet with their own jellyfin accounts, and when they log in they only see their media. I also NFS mount that share, so for the same reason, they can watch stuff on VLC from the computer with access control. We also do that with nextcloud, so we can use nextcloud talk to chat internally. The tablets/phones have built in android controls, so the idea is once they’re on their device, they’re free within the ecosystem I set up and they don’t enter credentials other than device unlock.

I built my kids potato computers from the time they were 3-5, which was during covid. They need computer skills nowadays, and it put them at an advantage for covid school. We got them on java Minecraft which was huge for reading, typing, and some basic math skills (they figured out multiplication for crafting things like doors). I made a chart which had icons of things they want, with the word next to it, so they could search and type in creative.

We used Ubuntu Mate. It’s simple, stable, and familiar. They do NOT have sudo on these boxes. As we’ve advanced, they now have firefox (behind a pihole which upstreams to opendns’ family protect), gimp (with a wacom tablet!), inkscape, calculators, tenacity, libre office, and they’re starting to get into some cad to make things to 3d print. You have to come to terms with doing a LOT of patient hand holding, but it has paid off dividends.

Cable has to come back and fix this, there’s no way he just popped in for a cameo.

To be clear, this is a subset of the lunchables brand specifically manufactured and sent to schools for lunches, which has a higher sodium content than the retail variety you can buy. They don’t want to ban all lunchables

Huge bummer that they’re all 5+ years old. We’ve been moving to libreelec with Disney+, Jellycon, Netflix, Youtube, and amazon prime plugins. It’s not the same, but it’s workable. If Amazon keeps MatterCast open and open source implementations get made, that’s where I’m focusing my attention. A raspberry pi with libreelec that can be a casting target feels, to me, like the holy grail:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/9/24030324/amazon-matter-casting-echo-show-fire-tv-prime-video

No joke can you share those results? I’m holding out for matter cast

We tried to host it ourselves to save cost, and it’s a beast but it mostly works. It certainly lags behind in features and uses a lot of resources, but when you compare with the cost it’s certainly passable.

I have submitted feedback multiple times only to click submit and find out I’m no longer logged in. That website is unnecessarily painful.

Lego parts are incredibly precise, and the manufacturing tolerances have been consistent for decades. It’s nearly impossible to replicate that precision on any modern printers.

That being said, different parts are more tolerant of wiggle room. Grabbing a stud is hard, grabbing a 2x4 is not. If you were going to print a minifig head, trying to replicate the neck barrel is gonna be tough, but making a larger hole with 2-3 ridges which taper to grip might be easier. If you plan what you’re doing and are realistic about what you can print, it’s definitely not out of the question.

Lego is ABS if I’m correct.

The headline does not do justice…like this is tied to the cult that the former prime minister of Japan was assassinated over.

Neo Launcher, available in the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo, has been my solid go-to for replacing Nova.

https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Launcher

I prefer a ton of icons/folders/widgets on my home screen, and it supports that dense layout.

He is allowed to state his personal opinions despite being the leadership of one of the most populous state. I appreciate that opinion.