Premium subscribers to my Bad Astronomy Newsletter can learn about the equinox today and see an *incredible* shot of a galaxy hiding amongst the interstellar fog.
badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/hap…
Happy equinox! Plus, a galaxy behind galactic fog
Spring is here, and NGC 918 gets its show stolenBad Astronomy Newsletter
@MCQN_Ltd on My Bike's Got LED, Neil Squire Society on the Willow Joystick, and the STEAMengineers' spoonbot. Join us on YouTube at 1pm EST to learn all about these rad open source projects: youtube.com/watch?v=LwPf12toLq…
Show & Tell Monthly: March 2025
Check out three newly certified open source projects and hear their stories from their creators!YouTube
Financing innovative companies is crucial for the EU’s prosperity.
We can still do better to allow our companies to find funding, even though the pool of household savings in Europe is much larger than in the US.
We’re kicking off our Savings and Investments Union, including:
➡More opportunities for citizens looking to invest
➡Financial literacy strategy
➡More integrated European financial market
➡Easier investments in equity
It is time to unlock Europe's investment potential!
MOVED to: @Linux@mastodon.au likes this.
Assassin's Creed Shadows is good, but not great. Is that enough?
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5331927/assassins-creed-shadows-ubisoft-review?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Arts & Life @arts-life-npr
reshared this
in which case:
"it can immediately scream to everyone that it's carrying someone who is spiritually dead!"
> the hearse is immediately signalling that it is carrying someone physically dead
'Shameful': #Trump official sparks outrage with 'illegal' call to 'buy #Tesla' stock
"I mean, who wouldn't invest in Elon Musk? You gotta be kidding me." #HowardLutnick
ALL OF US, Howie.. ALL OF US!
rawstory.com/howard-lutnick-26…
'Shameful': Trump official sparks outrage with 'illegal' call to 'buy Tesla' stock
A Trump administration official's call for Fox News viewers to "buy Tesla" sparked a flood of outrage on social media Wednesday night.Daniel Hampton (Raw Story)
Every now and then I have to say out loud to myself "THIS IS NOT NORMAL" & I'm thankful to know thousands more people on here are experiencing the same reality as me & can confirm.
Exhibit 1: a paper explaining how CO2 concentrations in offices are associated with significant measurable cognitive decline.
dash.harvard.edu/server/api/co…
Exhibit 2: Aranet sensors are on sale right now.
Putting these together, I would like to propose that anyone championing the mandatory-commute, return to office approach to management who isn't carrying one of these on their person at all times is engaged in professional negligence.
All meeting rooms should have one of these (or something like it) with the audible alarm set to trigger at like 1k PPM CO2. "Alarm's gone off, everyone out, the meeting's over."
(I don't take mine to the office any more but I did for a bit and it was reasonably okay. But I have a nice office and there aren't many people in it. Even if we can't open the windows, unlike some other buildings around here.)
FunHouse Radio
Novelty Records, Parodies, Weird Covers, Outsider Music, Oddities, Mashups, Comedy, Nonsense & Cringe.FunHouse Radio
Pentagon restores webpages of Black veterans, Navajo Code Talkers and others after outcry
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5334461/pentagon-black-veterans-navajo-code-talkers-website-diversity?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Politics @politics-npr
Will Elon Musk's Tesla get special treatment?
arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03/d…
DOT must not give Tesla or other automakers a free pass, advocates say
Will Elon Musk’s Tesla get special treatment?Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica)
As young male voters shift Right, can the Left compete in the 'battle for the bros'?
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5333321/as-young-male-voters-shift-right-can-the-left-compete-in-the-battle-for-the-bros?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Arts & Life @arts-life-npr
Solenne, Cleric of Torm by Talexior
Source: linktr.ee/talexior
#DnD #DungeonsAndDragons #ttrpg #character #characterart #art #digitalart #dndart
talexior | Instagram, TikTok | Linktree
• 29/Portugal • Freelance artist, will draw for food. 🍕Linktree
The image depicts a fantasy character standing in a dynamic pose. The character is wearing a detailed, ornate suit of armor primarily in shades of purple and gold, with fur accents on the shoulders. The armor is designed with intricate patterns and includes shoulder guards, a chest plate, and gauntlets. The character has green skin and white hair styled in braids. In their right hand, they hold a large, curved blade with a gold hilt, while their left hand grasps a spiked ball and chain weapon. The character also holds a white mask with blue eye designs in their left hand. The background is a gradient of dark teal, emphasizing the character's presence. The character's stance is confident, with one leg slightly forward, suggesting readiness for action. The overall composition highlights the character's strength and the detailed craftsmanship of their armor.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Ovis2-8B
🌱 Energy used: 0.230 Wh
Hey! Our latest app update for iPhone and iPad is here!
🍎 Format your Notes with Markdown & rich text
🍎 Fine-tune your Address Bar suggestions
🍎 Access past translations with Translation History
🍎 Set custom zoom levels for individual sites
🍎 7 new UI languages added
…and more. Go try it now, and check out our blog post for all the details: vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-io…
#iOS #iPadOS #iPhone #iPad #Apps #Tech #Vivaldi #Browser #Notes
Vivaldi 7.2 for iOS: More Control, More Customization, More You. | Vivaldi Browser
We’re back with another update for Vivaldi on iOS, bringing more ways to fine-tune your browsing experience and stay in control. With Vivaldi 7.2…Jon von Tetzchner (Vivaldi Technologies)
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EU Orders Apple to Open iOS Features Like Notifications to Third Parties
As part of the DMA, the EU wants Apple to let rival headphones connect to iPhones like AirPods and allow developers to build alternatives to AirDrop and AirPlay.Jibin Joseph (PCMag)
20 March 1943 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Bernhard Sanders, was born in Schalkwijk.
He arrived at #Auschwitz on 27 January 1944 in a transport of 948 Jews deported from Westerbork with his mother Johanna and father Willem. All three were probably murdered in a gas chamber.
How is it possible that many automatically (exactly every 3 hours) spammed "victims" of the holocaust (pre-camp photos in particular) are NOT FOUND in the victims database maintained by IDF soldiers who colonized former concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau?
Thoughts about why in infosec.exchange/@ErikvanStrat….
#Auschwitz #FrancescaAlbaneseIsRight #Gaza #GazaGenocide #Westbank #Lebanon #Syria #Yemen
Erik van Straten (@ErikvanStraten@infosec.exchange)
@n9uxc@mastodon.hams.social : Apparently there are two databases, and obviously there are reasons (for the maintainers) not to merge them.Infosec Exchange
New songs by Teddy Swims, Benjamin Booker and Neil Young let loose with big emotions
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5333327/new-songs-by-teddy-swims-benjamin-booker-and-neil-young-let-loose-with-big-emotions?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Music @music-npr
Finland ranked happiest country in the world as US falls to its lowest-ever position
A new global report says that people in Finland are the happiest in the world. The northern European country is leading the world in happiness for the eighth year in a row.Kirsten Grieshaber (AP News)
I am always a little wary of these ‘happiness’ indexes. I think it should be called a contentment index.
I’ve noticed, throughout my life, that
a) real happiness happens in very short bursts.
b) it’s not something done to you, but something you decide to be in the moment. (And often requires us giving ourselves permission to be happy).
c) it has very little to do with your economic circumstances and more to do with relationships with self and other.
I’ve often wondered if consumerism isn’t the single most significant enemy of happiness.
When we get brainwashed into ‘aspirational’ acquisition or identification, the thing you bought that promised to make you happy always fails you. It’s never the right one, the perfect one, enough.
If I have to identify true happiness in my life, it happens with a cup of coffee, a friend, and a little sunlight. I’m here, with you, and for now, this is perfectly enough.
French scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found
France’s research minister said the scientist was traveling to Houston for a conference when his phone was searchedRobert Mackey (The Guardian)
How a Case From 1803 Explains John Roberts’s Approach to Donald Trump | The Nation
Roberts wasn’t “rebuking” Trump when he issued his statement against impeaching judges, he was bending the knee.The Nation
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies thelibre.news/foss-infrastruct… Please boost for awareness, reach and to public shame Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Perplexity and other such AI companies.
#opensource #programming #Developers
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects' infrastructure, and it's getting worse.Niccolò Venerandi (LibreNews)
reshared this
Block AI scrapers with Anubis
I got tired with all the AI scrapers that were bullying my git server, so I made a tool to stop them for good.xeiaso.net
Yup. I spent the better part of a month building a web app firewall to keep these buggers away from my internet backwater blogs and stuff.
(For example, if your ASN is even remotely associated with Bytedance, go fish).
Then Facebook hammered my robots.txt for a while, unhappy with being given a 500 in response, somehow it thought 2000+ subsequent requests would give a different answer?
If they escalate, I swear I'm going to give them the pages they want... after using a Markov chain to mix it up with excerpts from something like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, just to pollute their index!
Use the works of authors, that are dead at least 100 years. Otherwise you might infringe copyright yourself.
Milton's "Paradise Lost" should be a good start. Mix it with Dante's "Inferno" at random should give a nice poisening.¹ Add other works at your descretion. 😀
¹ Of cours all works in the original language.
I looked at that but the use if archaic words and sentence structures might be too easy to detect. Vaguely related Wikipedia articles seem like the best option.
@nixCraft
@alan
Yes, that might be the case.
On the other hand it would be a piece of art itself. Each verse from a different author. Bonus points if it conforms to a classic form of poetry.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to program it myself.
@PiiiepsBrummm I've written the code to generate the text, but it's sufficiently compute-intensive that I'd kill my little VPS. I figure the best approach would be to pre-compute the "alternative" articles, cache them, and then send those when the AI scapers come calling.
It's on my "when I'm bored and/or devious and/or really pissed off" list, but at the moment other things have my attention.
Amazon founder has executed a sharp public reversal in his relationship with Trump.
arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/…
update: solved by setting up solr for dovecot fulltext search on the server.
i guess this is not the ideal email setup yet. i have some questions:
- why would searching through email bodies in evolution block the UI thread? (at first, for like half a minute. then it becomes an actual background task)
- why does fulltext search take so long? when i had notmuch, this was instant. i wonder if i can have the best of both worlds somehow. searching plaintext should not be a hard problem in 2025
do you connect via IMAP and control the server? if you use server side search and it is slow, dovecot can use a solr backend that makes it fast.
Evolution will use IMAP SEARCH datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/… if the server advertises it. By inspecting the connection string (after CAPABILITY) or just looking at debug output as you invoke a search with `CAMEL_DEBUG=imapx:io evolution` you can confirm it is slow server side search
RFC 3501: INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - VERSION 4rev1
The Internet Message Access Protocol, Version 4rev1 (IMAP4rev1) allows a client to access and manipulate electronic mail messages on a server.IETF Datatracker
docs are at doc.dovecot.org/main/core/plug… - there's a dovecot-solr debian package providing some of the config.
There's also fts-flatcurve based on xapian (what notmuch uses). I haven't tried, but I think it's simpler to setup
so you went with solr, glad it works! Has all the features. Can't remember if it binds by default to loopback interface. Here's a recent example that spends some afterthoughts on this and basic auth to cover all bases - notes.sagredo.eu/en/qmail-note…
I admittedly moved to the xapian implementation (on dovecot 2.3) to skip running a tomcat and it works equally well, substrings too it seems
e-mail indexing with Solr FTS Engine
notes.sagredo.eu - Linux notes - by Roberto PuzzangheraRoberto Puzzanghera (notes.sagredo.eu)
There Are Two Kinds of Credit Cards
Yet another way the poor are subsidizing the rich
Israel expands its ground offensive in Gaza as Hamas fires rockets back
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5334420/israel-gaza-hamas-rockets?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into World News @world-news-npr
"something, something... a well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny."
We're so screwed.
Via Elie Mystal:
"It may sound like #JohnRoberts was saying that #Trump should litigate his disagreements with Judge #Boasberg in the normal way, but what he’s really saying is that Trump should feel free to ignore lower court orders until #SCOTUS has a chance to weigh in. ...
Roberts is trying to maintain the appearance of power in the face of a president who has shown no inclination to respect it"
thenation.com/article/politics…
How a Case From 1803 Explains John Roberts’s Approach to Donald Trump | The Nation
Roberts wasn’t “rebuking” Trump when he issued his statement against impeaching judges, he was bending the knee.The Nation
Paul Cantrell reshared this.
Today we’re launching a new sub-site for our Justice and Accountability work! You can learn about how, with Global Legal Action Network, we've built mechanisms for open source research to enhance legal accountability processes, particularly in cases of atrocity crimes.
Find out more about what the Unit has been up to since its inception in 2018 and read through our methodology at j-and-a.bellingcat.com/
Justice and Accountability Unit
We work with affected communities to pursue innovative legal actions across borders to challenge states and other powerful actors involved in human rights violations and systemic injustice.Justice and Accountability Unit
If you're using eBay, they updated their Terms of Services, and you're now auto-opted-in to have your data used to train AI. To opt out, use this link: accountsettings.ebay.com/ai-pr…
Dark pattern: if you're already logged in, you can navigate to the AI preferences page, and it shows you the toggle to opt out. If you click it, you're challenged to log in (okay, changing major account settings is a good excuse for this).
However ... after logging in, your setting hasn't changed - it hasn't actually reacted to your action to opt out. You have to toggle it again.
"AI" is a scam.
Do you feel you can exercise your right to free speech? NPR wants to hear from you
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/g-s1-54640/trump-free-speech-democracy?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Politics @politics-npr
Santa Fe clinic says Gene Hackman’s wife called them the day after police say she died
The county sheriff’s office have confirmed that Betsy Arakawa made the phone call on 12 February disproving their initial belief that she had died a day earlier
theguardian.com/film/2025/mar/…
#news #celebrity #genehackman #death #mystery
I just fell into an Etsy keycap rabbit hole and there's some wild stuff in there. What do we think is going on here?
it is not, but it’s apparently complicated. Dentists sell them!
cdhp.org/are-human-teeth-valua…
Are Human Teeth Valuable? Exploring the Worth of Your Pearly Whites
Are human teeth valuable? This is a question that may come to mind when considering the importance of dental health. Teeth play a crucial role in our daily lives, from allowing us to speak andCDHP Dental Health Project
mhoye reshared this.
The candies eaten by #BonkWavers are, of course, Vimto Bonk Bons.
#BonkWave #NotBonkWave #Candy #Sweets #Food #BonkBons #NotBonkBons #Vimto #BonBons #BonkBonk #Pink #Purple #PinkFood
Heisenberg Mah
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Cosmic Librarian
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Fatsquatch
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •AndyGER
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Loafer
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •TheFwGuy 🇪🇺🇮🇹🇺🇸🖖
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •So no, it wasn't so stupid.
tod
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Inaction Figure
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •That’s an interesting question. I would suppose the Romans at the time had the same sort of confusion and disbelief we have now.
Also, the term “Orange Julius” is inspired!
Stephen Chanasyk
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Penumbra
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Drpapperlapapp
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •0xd34db33f
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Deacon Bleux
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •oscarfalcon
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •MugsysRapSheet 🔩🐑🐘
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Is Matt aware Caesar made his horse a senator?
So, the answer is "Yes".
My camera shoots fascists
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Jim Rootham
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Video Game Workers Launch Industry-Wide Union with CWA
[group:title]🐜
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •