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Messages - ersi

2
DnD Central / Re: Tripe about Ukraine
Re-reading my previous post in this thread, I must say I failed again in my predictions. I was not harsh enough against the West. The EU, Germany in particular, deserves to be outright condemned, far more so than Hungary, because Germany sets the policy in the EU. But let's put somebody else's opinion here for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7H0hxe_SbY

What stands in the way of doing all that's needed? One big thing is US elections. An incapacitating problem with US elections is that they are eternal, never-stopping. It's always elections season. And literally anybody can become president, as Trump has proven. You can be totally incompetent criminally convicted immoral lying bastard from outside the political establishment, you can hijack a major party, arrange a coup while in office, throw a wrench in the judicial system, and after all that you can still run again openly promising dictatorship. Amazing.
4
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Oh yes, compatibility with old corporate websites can be a thing. In my previous job the main tool had been built to work specifically (and only) with IE 5.5. In the end it hung on the thread of a later IE's compatibility mode. If they kept the tool in use even after IE's demise, they must be running it in Windows XP virtual machines in an actual IE, and keep constant guard of network settings.

While this scenario is quite real (because corporations are infinitely stupid), it cannot serve as a business model for a new/alternative webbrowser to have a compatibility layer for this. Webscraping has far more use cases and versatile potential.

5
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
What's this itch for multiple rendering engines? Does it make it more convenient to test out what your website looks like in several engines? But do all devtools in the browser work equally well with all the engines? Is there still a continuing itch to make multiple rendering engines load in a single browser?

Instead of multiple rendering engines showing the same styles, colours and font sizes, I prefer one rendering engine that helps me navigate webpages more conveniently. In old Opera there were keybinds to navigate to next HTML heading and to next HTML element and I could switch to outline view (i.e. see only headings for a moment). Currently I know only Edbrowse that makes headings supernavigable, while all console/text browsers make at least links easy to find and navigate, but they should do it with all HTML elements.

It may be time for a new webbrowsing concept. Data analysts scrape the web and they sort and filter and list the results in various ways. Webscraping should become a more common way of browsing the web, something built on curl perhaps. I can see how the eyecandy aspect of the web matters when you think of yourself as a visual publisher on the web, but the reader who primarily seeks information cares more about the ability to have own control over all aspects of formatting.
6
DnD Central / Re: Is this interesting enough?
Police minister's purse stolen at police conference
Quote from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx6xvvn25xo
Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson had her purse stolen from the hotel where she gave a speech at a conference for senior police officers on Tuesday.

Thieves struck while Dame Diana was giving a speech blaming the Conservatives for an “epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting,” at the annual Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) conference at a hotel in Kenilworth.
7
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
No, it does not unmistakably say that you get something like Vivaldi. There is a very straightforward lie on the page, "Opera Extensions that you've built aren't obsolete." Lawson's post fails to be open about that you would lose your widgets, skins and setups, access to INI config, email and IRC components. The new product still cannot do e.g tiling, from what I can glean from user questions. (Not that I am expecting anything from Chropera ever...)

It was a lie to say, "Consumers will initially notice better site compatibilty..." Instead, consumers would initially notice that they have, unwarned, started up Chrome instead of Opera and everything that defined Opera is irrecoverably lost.

I held on to old Opera as long as my main email addresses in it worked. When that email service was closed a few years ago, I finally gave up old Opera and I no longer install it on my machines.
8
DnD Central / Re: Money dumped in vast amounts for space?
Tech billionaire pulls off first private spacewalk high above Earth
Quote from: https://apnews.com/article/spacex-spacewalk-private-polaris-dawn-87d4c78853f0249baf29631bedfac749
Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring feat also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.

This spacewalk was simple and quick — the hatch was open barely a half hour...
Okay, it's tested now. Next stop is Mars, right?
9
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Confused? You who actually worked at Opera yourself and know all sorts of history down with dates?

Bruce Lawson is the public face of letting old Opera down by lying that Chropera would be just some changes under the hood that nobody would really notice. He was definitely lying because it's impossible that he is less tech-savvy than me. The fact that pretty much everybody caught on to the lie does not excuse the lie. Nor is it excusable by the fact that he got paid to lie.
10
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
The infamous Bruce Lawson, the public face of letting down old Opera, works now at Vivaldi. He published a podcast episode where he interviews Tetzchner of Vivaldi and Laurent Ach of Qwant.

I did not listen to the episode. I only thought whether it's the same Bruce Lawson. Yes, it is. Do I still hate him for letting down old Opera? Yes, I do. Maybe he deserves it less than Ben Goodger for letting down Firefox, but I'm not aware of him having done anything redeeming meanwhile, same as Ben Goodger.
11
DnD Central / Re: What's Going on in the Americas?
It requires background knowledge to parse Sam Seder's delivery. I'm okay with it, because I know American punditry and talkshowing (nowadays occasionally labelled "independent media" which it isn't) since late 90s when I started paying consistent attention to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

Anyway, for me it is interesting how Sam Seder has a personal gripe with Tim Pool (and Tim Pool with Sam Seder) around the business side of talkshowing, an intrigue torn open by the RT funding. I'm interested because I'm currently thinking how to hopefully monetise some of my bigger hobbies too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAfFTOsfjDo
12
DnD Central / Re: what's going on in france
Whoah, "Frisian was synonymous with 'merchant'; the noun indicated a function in society rather than ethnic descent." Wouldn't it be more like a case of generalised subset (or maybe you know a better term for this)?: Frisians are (tend to be) seafaring merchants, but there are more seafaring merchants than just Frisians. Of course, when they form a powerful guild called Frisian guild, and then the guild collects more members based on profession rather than ethnicity, then it gets closer to synonymy.

In Tallinn in medieval times the gang of paupers (gathered around an institution called siechenhaus) was predominantly made up of Estonians, so the words for paupers and Estonians tended to mean the same thing in medieval Tallinn, which was reinforced by e.g. the church that was propped up specifically for them to attend. However, the siechenhaus did not (strictly) discriminate based on ethnicity. There were other ethnicities in siechenhaus, but the predominant component takes priority for the sake of convenient naming. It can happen even when a particular ethnicity is not statistically very dominant in a profession, say Jews and bankers. There are points in history when Jews tended to go into big business and banking, so all people in big business and banking were called Jews by some, even though statistically Jews were a minuscule fraction of the sum total of wealthy businessmen and bankers.

What I'm saying is that identity is a multi-faceted thing. I have faith that most people of average intellect can keep several things in mind at the same time, particularly that any single word can mean more things at the same time and that any single thing can be labelled in a number of ways at the same time. For example, I am a son and a father and an uncle and a brother all at the same time. Is it too difficult to wrap one's mind around?

Frisians (the people of Frisian coast and Frisian islands) tended to be seafaring merchants historically. Their guilds were so dominant at that that the words Frisian and merchant came to be seen as interchangeable. At the same time, Frisians were all along an ethnicity (a people of a particular place and language) also. Since ethnic Frisians only ever occupied the south-eastern coast of North Sea, I don't see them claiming the whole North Sea to themselves as Frisian Sea. It makes more sense to assume the Frisian Sea was a conceptual stretch by others around the sea who saw Frisians on it way too often.

By the way, what's up with the (self-)designation of Frisians? Aren't they just Anglo-Saxons who did not reach England while those currently in England and USA did?
13
DnD Central / Re: What's Going on in the Americas?
Two RT Employees Indicted for Covertly Funding and Directing U.S. Company that Published Thousands of Videos in Furtherance of Russian Interests https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-indicted-covertly-funding-and-directing-us-company-published-thousands

The DOJ announcement does not mention the Americans who were funded by Russians, but they were a gang who took the bait of Tenet Media, including
Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern.
14
DnD Central / Re: What's Going on in the Americas?
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
And I keep trying to find you capable of humor! :)
So far, I haven't. (That's why I occasionally accuse you of being Eliza!)

What -when he was president- did Trump do that you found objectionable?
Oh, I finally get it. Your asking yet again the question that has already been answered a hundred times with plenty of examples is your kind of humour. To put it another way, when you blame me for being incapable of humour, it is a projection of what a sorry joke you are.

Hint: Trump organised the Jan 6 insurrection. He is a criminal, convicted too.

See, answered a hundred times, most recently in the very post you are responding to. Surely America's health care system is so awesome that you can go get your dyslexia cured and attention span enhanced. After Trump abolishes Obamacare, it will be even better.
16
DnD Central / Re: What's Going on in the Americas?
Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
Quote from: ersi on
Have you been at least halfway to Brazil?
Like Kamala Harris, I haven't been to Europe... :)
As per your usual, if you ever pick up any of my points, it's the weakest one. Going to Brazil to know Brazil is not going to help you in your current state. First you need to crawl out from under your rock, remove the tin foil hat and stop Alex Jones blasting in your headphones.

I don't like Kamala Harris either. I have seen a few longer speeches by her, and there was one in particular about somebody's rights, probably children's or women's rights, where she was so drousy that she was about to fall over. In that speech she had less stamina than Biden ever displayed on camera.

She looks better when doing character judgement with evidence, which is the business of prosecutors. That's her best element. I don't like prosecutors (or lawyers in general), but this is the line appropriate to counter Trump. Otherwise she is just an average state official.

All in all, this is the bare minimum what your country needs: A state official. Trump is a criminal. Harris would become a boring president, but Trump would become a more dangerous president than he was last time. Harris would do an average job leading the country (very likely not below average, given her very good team). Trump would demolish the country with incompetence, lies, and overt scorn of norms and ethics. If you care for the constitution, then you don't want Trump. But you are you, you don't care for the constitution or law and order. You worship Trump.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
What are your views on "Free Speech"?
And your view is: Trump's public incitement of insurrection through Twitter was just free speech. That Trump got banned from Twitter was a breach of the First (and Second) amendment!

Musk's breach of laws and regulations abroad have nothing to do with American free speech. God help us from adopting the American constitution and, even worse, American views about their own constitution.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
I think you believe that "regular" [American] people (people who don't work for the government...) can't discern what's going on.
About half of them can't, the Republican half. They failed to notice that the Republican party has lost it and become Trump's personality cult.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL on
In my country (at least for now...) we accept that the government is not the arbiter of truth...
So far so good. It's the same here too. But additionally, we also do not believe that any particular party or a leader of such is the arbiter truth. This is probably the difference.

On the other hand, the government and the rest of state institutions are the arbiter of official norms, of law and order.
17
DnD Central / Re: What's Going on in the Americas?
Quote from: https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-platform-moraes-shutdown-6942614705a4e85064f1d98628b49295
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X nationwide, according to the court’s website.

The broader support among justices undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade who is intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.
Oakdale, you are always wrong about everything. Always wrong. About everything. Because you are living under a rock with a tin foil hat on, Alex Jones blasting away in your headphones. Have you been at least halfway to Brazil?

Longer coverage of Musk's Brazil controversy https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-twitter-moraes-bef06c0dbbb8ed87495b1afbb0edf211

Seems like similar issues that Facebook had over in Myanmar once upon a time https://www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/
18
DnD Central / Re: what's going on in france
Only Estonians call the Baltic Sea Western (as it's literally to the west of Estonia). Finns call it Eastern (as direct translation from Swedish). Latvians and Lithuanians call it the Baltic Sea.

North Sea is North Sea for everyone. It may have had a different name for Vikings.

Edit: After some research on Wikipedia, I found that there's Nordfriisk language (Helgoland Frisian) where North Sea is called Weestsiie. But that's the only one, it seems.
19
DnD Central / Re: Today's Bad News
State elections in Germany: Thüringen, Sachsen, and Brandenburg, which are all ex-DDR.

In (former) eastern Germany, the political parties poll as follows:
1. AfD
2. CDU
3. Sahra Wagenknecht

SPD (Scholz) is a non-entity in eastern Germany. Source: https://yle.fi/a/74-20107253

On the federal level the parties balance to:
1. CDU
2. AfD (16.8%)
3. SPD (15%)
4. Grüne (11.6%)
5. Sahra Wagenknecht (7.8%)

(In the source, read CDU for Union.)

Basically, Germany can only be saved if CDU steals enough platform points from AfD and then will purposely not deliver on them https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1jl7e0769ro
22
Browsers & Technology / Re: E-readers
Easily achievable if you use all wifi and Bluetooth to their fullest, but this is not my way.

If I noticed correctly, then the default setting for the device was to stand by when idle, i.e. never shut down, and I changed this as soon as I noticed it. The bootup is as swift as Pocketbook's, so I see no problem having the device turned off completely when I do not use it.

During four days, I went to the internet and installed F-Droid, Opera Touch, Koreader, Termux, and then I configured and installed more things on Termux. An important reason I bought the device was to have it as the platform for Termux.

I inserted a microSD card (it was pretty tough to detach the slot cover, but eventually I got it done tenderly enough with the included pick dingus) and played around reading some files, browsing internet, transferring some files from a USB stick via the OTG USB-C connector, and typing. Wifi and Bluetooth were on and I did not do anything that would involve charging on the side. The battery went from 100% to 65% in those four days.

So I think the battery life will be days with wifi and Bluetooth open every day for hours and no shutdown, but with my average usage habits it can easily survive over a week. An important point: I have other e-readers and e-ink devices, so Boox Palma is not my main driver.

I have not yet logged in to Google Play/Store. I might at some point in order to install Dropbox. This may affect battery life too.
23
Browsers & Technology / Re: E-readers
 ersi bought a white Boox Palma



I had one earlier Android e-reader for a while. I think it was Onyx Boox T68. It had the same 6.8" screen as Kobo H2O, but the interface made all the difference: There was no easy way to exit/revert to the home/main page despite the elaborate five-way hardware button, so I gifted it away.

Boox Palma is massively better in terms of convenient user interface navigation. Also the hardware specs are such that swipes are genuinely snappy and the touchscreen mostly reacts as expected, ranking up there with an average smartphone, which is frankly awesome. It doesn't have phone features though.

There's a microSD card slot, exceedingly rare to have these days (this was a weighty factor for me). No 3.5mm headphone jack though (probably okay, as I haven't noticed myself using headphones on an e-reader). USB-C connector and three somewhat configurable hardware buttons along the edges.

Google Play is pre-installed, but entirely optional. There's no forced account creation of any kind upon first startup. No compulsory connecting to the internet ever. Thus very (privacy-)friendly first setup.

What to say about the screen? Maybe not the best reading experience upright, but certainly a decent experience sideways on Logitech K480 keyboard, which is how I intend to spend most of my time with it.

My main plan for the device is to have a convenient portable Termux+Emacs setup on eink. But I installed Koreader also. Koreader has a decent out-of-the box experience on Boox Palma, except it fails to connect with the device's frontlight. The appropriate gestures on Koreader produce messages like "Frontlight enabled" and "Frontlight disabled", but the actual effect is nil. (This I discovered in the first ten minutes of trying.)

Current state of my eink collection in the order of intensity of usage:
- Pocketbook Inkpad 3
- Kobo Mini 5"
- Onyx Boox Mira 13.3" monitor
- Onyx Boox Palma
- Kobo H2O
- Pocketbook Inkpad 4
24
DnD Central / Re: what's going on in france
According to Tim Traveller, Paris Olympics 1900 sucked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2RiyuCFARI

Paris Olympics 2024 had its weird moments too. American fundies and hyper-Catholics mistook the Dionysian scene in the opening ceremony for Christ's Last Supper and deemed it blasphemous, even though Olympic games were never meant to promote Christian values at all.

On the other hand, the event pictogrammes were painfully noticeably missing the silhouettes of the generic athlete.



Rumours have it that this was an attempt to avoid offending the participants by "mis"-gendering them, even though many of the events are divided into women's and men's sports with no intersection allowed and the point of the logos is to identify the events adequately as they are. As with Eurovision arrangers, it has not yet dawned on the arrangers of Olympics that wokeness is trending down nowadays. The French used to be trend-setting, but they are falling behind the curve a bit.

And the water of Seine is still yuck after a €1B cleansing effort https://www.francetvinfo.fr/les-jeux-olympiques/paris-2024/baignade-dans-la-seine-pourquoi-est-ce-si-complique-de-connaitre-la-qualite-de-l-eau_6714588.html
25
DnD Central / Re: Everything Trump…
Trump's own private jet got a bit glitchy, so he switched to Epstein's old plane. Well, naturally, of course he had that as a backup!

Quote from: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article290986070.html
Trump, enroute on his own private plane to a campaign event in Bozeman, Montana last week, unexpectedly landed in Billings because of mechanical problems, a campaign spokeswoman said. He and part of his staff then flew on a small charter to Bozeman for a rally Friday night. The next day, he switched to another larger Gulfstream with a serial number that matches a plane once owned by Epstein, his former neighbor in Palm Beach, the campaign confirmed.

“The campaign had no awareness that the charter plane had been owned by Mr. Epstein,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the charter was commissioned by a vendor that has often been used by the campaign. “We heard about the former owner through the media.”

Miami Herald has verified that Trump's current plane is Epstein's former jet.

As another backup plan, Trump said in his Musk interview broadcast by Twitter (also glitchy) that if Kamala Harris wins (which would be unfair to him and to democracy) he would flee to Venezuela https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-suggests-hell-flee-to-venezuela-if-harris-wins-the-election