Friday Ephemera
Patriarchy detected. They were “taken by surprise.” || The circle of life. || Altered stone. || I think not. || Enthusiastic newcomers. || Wine glass of note. || Where to put the baby while you use a public toilet. || Medieval trade routes. (h/t, Brian) || Important notice of note. || He spent 3 years building a pyramid of pennies. || Periscope spectacles for the height impaired. || More liveliness in London. || Tesla vs Lovecraft is a game. || Gorilla crow. || Glories of the 1980s. || Thank goodness the clever ones are in charge. || Always respect the media. || Always trust Google. || Entirely unrelated. || One and four, obviously. (h/t, Tim) || And finally, via Dicentra, things that will be found by future archaeologists.
Can you tell me how to identify professional-class laptops?
My first thought would be to visit the Dell website: You will be asked to choose “consumer” vs “small business” vs “corporate” as I recall, and if you avoid the “consumer” link you’ll see only the better models. That might be informative. (Individuals can purchase computers at the “small business” and “corporate” links; the links mostly serve to direct customers to models they are more likely to want.)
Yankees vs Rd Sox 6-6 in the bottom of the first
Whoa.
“Linux on anything but a server or embedded firmware is a non-starter, by design.”
[Looks up from a session of Elite: Dangerous under SteamPlay. Shrugs.]
[Looks up from just having installed Office and Photoshop without a virtual machine on a dual boot laptop. Shrugs]
Any laptop with a Quadro video card is almost certainly “professional”, also likely expensive.
6-6 in the bottom of the first
Hatstand, fifteen, tumble dryer.
Sorry, I thought we were just doing random words.
Hatstand, fifteen, tumble dryer.
David, you have a natural feel for the game.
Continue banging the mash with your spotted dick. 😉
6-6 in the bottom of the first
Hatstand, fifteen, tumble dryer.
Random words or lyrics to a new Beck song.
Going back to Houston
Do the hot dog dance
banging the mash
Band name.
pst314 wrote, “Even in the middle of the city (thanks to far less nighttime lights) you could look up and see Echo satellite pass overhead.”
I remember that, too.
Thanks, Computerites!
Holy shit.
Like Caesar and King Tut, Apollo 11 will be general knowledge long after WWII, the Berlin Wall, even the American revolution, have become footnotes for ancient-history nerds
‘The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure’s helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.
‘This warrior of a dead world affected me deeply, though I could not say why or even just what emotion it was I felt. In some obscure way, I wanted to take down the picture and carry it – not into our necropolis but into one of those mountain forests of which our necropolis was (as I understood even then) an idealized but vitiated image. It should have stood among trees, the edge of its frame resting on young grass.’
-Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
Beware the feathered horror!
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/jersey-terrorised-feral-chickens-cull-complaints/?fbclid=IwAR2APZU911NEnDuFofdz_qpF4WPsA5XasUVM-4I4GTNf66KPZlv4EjSz3pc
David, now that we’re into page 2, can we have a new topic?
“The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape…”
A very moving scene in a hauntingly beautiful and terrible series of novels, set so far in the future that our time is essentially forgotten.
I miss Gene more than I can say.
David, now that we’re into page 2, can we have a new topic?
When we get to page 3, I know what the topic should be, given that this is a British blog. 🙂
So what should it be?
Holy shit.
Unsurprisingly, a great many of the responses are blaming Andy for what the Antifa punks did to him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3
Holy shit.
Among other things, we need to make it social suicide to be a supporter of Antifa, just as it is to be a supporter of the KKK or the Nazi Party.
Hatstand, fifteen, tumble dryer.
Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!
Here’s an article about Darleen’s friend who got beat up:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/
I wish him a speedy recovery and a new job where he doesn’t have to go unarmed among goons.
“Crazy baseball game going on in London right now. Yankees vs Rd Sox 6-6 in the bottom of the first.”
Seriously? I got heavily into baseball for a while when they had it on network TV over here (between 1997 and around 2007/8), and I remember the disappointment when it was announced it wouldn’t be in the 2012 Olympics; the planning for hosting it at Lord’s was pretty advanced, as I recall. But I’m really out of touch now. I vaguely follow the league standings and listen to the occasional game on the internet, but I had no idea this was happening.
This is my horrified face. I’m happy around 18°C (64°F). Two degrees higher and the complaining ensues.
18 degrees is a typical winter maximum in Sydney. Beautiful sunny day today, played golf in a shirt. Spring and summer are the best seasons here, typically mid-twenties and sunny. Summer is the worst season – the humidity kicks in and even the mid-thirties can be unpleasant.
Wouldn’t swap our weather for yours (or anyone’s really).
But against that, JML, you live in Sydney.
I see why your name is Rowdy!
And, speaking as a fellow Australian, Australian summer really is the pits. I’d love a bit more snow and ice this winter though. 🙂
Holy shit.
What’s interesting about Antifa’s mob assault of the journalist Andy Ngo isn’t that an organisation premised on recreational thuggery has once again indulged in recreational thuggery. That’s why it exists. What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery and to frame Mr Ngo either as the aggressor or as somehow deserving of assault by people with borderline personality disorders.
Previously in the not-at-all-sociopathic world of Antifa.
What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery and to frame Mr Ngo either as the aggressor or as somehow deserving of assault by people with borderline personality disorders.
It’s also interesting that through in a ill-considered fit of tolerance, normals have no will to functionally criminalize either this behavior or the general socio-political malignancy that powers it. Weren’t wars fought to thwart tyranny?
Not entirely unrelated.
(Correction to my 11:41: “…it’s also interesting that through an ill-considered fit of tolerance…”.)
And Jeff Goldstein observes how late it is:
https://twitter.com/proteinwisdom/status/1145340730845683712
Re Andy Ngo, here’s a good point well made:
https://twitter.com/pwafork/status/1145168593702678528
What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery and to frame Mr Ngo either as the aggressor or as somehow deserving of assault by people with borderline personality disorders.
Reading through the linked threads it’s amusing observing the dilettantes playing 20th Century Ideological Politics while living their comfortable lives. They have no idea of the true horror of those ideologies. Lives lived in the romance afforded by the rearview mirror.
…and now for something completely unexpected.
Australia FTW.
Unclear on the concept.
More random words:
So the final score in yesterday’s game was 17-13 Yankees. Today’s game (the final one in the London series) was 12-8 Yankees. To put that in perspective, the average number of runs scored per game by a single team is 4.77 the median is just a little above that at 4.81. So on average a fan can expect to see just under 10 runs scored by both teams in total. For two teams to score 30 runs and then 20 in the follow up game is quite rare.
For those English curious about baseball (over 59,000 came out for each game) you were treated to an extraordinary display of offense by two of the better teams in the game.
/baseball talk
/baseball talk
Chin piffle undercarriage.
Band name.
For those in the market for a new laptop…offered for comparison sake…I was looking as well, similarly budget oriented thanks to minimal requirements/needs. An old desktop/tower/whatevs we called them back in the Jurassic developed problems at my second home. I had been making due with bringing this crappy Lenovo back and forth with me but that was becoming impractical. I needed a simple machine mostly for internet, some email (though we mostly use iPads), word processing, and pretty much the basics that are a little to awkward to do on an iPad. There’s a recycle computer store here in Central Florida that comes in handy for simple stuff like this. Many local small business people use them as well. They take in only corporate equipment, rehab it, and sell to consumers or whomever. I picked up a (2015?) Dell Inspiron Core i3 1.7Ghz, 8GB RAM. Had them swap out the hard drive for an SDD, granted one with less storage but I really don’t need all that much relatively speaking. 90 days full warranty, though they sell longer warranties. As this machine will be out of town mostly it didn’t seem worth the bother. I’ve purchased from these guys before without an issue, but again only for secondary purposes, including that previous desktop/tower/whatever from the Jurassic that developed problems (which I may fix but don’t have time to bother with right now) after about seven years. Total, including tax and the drive swapout, was under $300. Though it does not have Office, just Libre or wth it’s called. You can of course purchase Office for whatever, but they weren’t in a position to offer a discount on that relative to what I could buy myself so I thought I’d give Libre a try and buy Office later if I need to.
BTW, whoever recommended ASUS…have you been to their site? What a beautiful yet useless PITA that is. Or at least it seemed for the five/ten minutes that I was willing to waste trying to shop on it.
Band name
Or Beck album…just doing my part to get us to page 3. Y’all do want a page 3, yes?
I’m given to understand they imported many tons of special dirt to form the infield in London Stadium.
I find that odd.
I had heard about that painting in San Fran and thought it was typical SJW nitwittery, but seeing it for the first time I can see their point. What the hell is with the dead, or dead drunk, Indian?
Though I’d get rid of it just because it’s a crap painting.
Infield dirt has become something of a specialized thing.
https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-ballfield-dirt-1441191
I remember being told as a kid that it all came from Slippry Rock area of PA, but that may have just been local boosterism.
/baseball talk
Chin piffle undercarriage.
254/5, twelve overs, 5 wickets
What’s interesting is that so many left-leaning journalists have been so eager to excuse or diminish that thuggery…
When they find themselves kneeling at the edge of a ditch because they failed some ‘progressive’ purity test, will they wonder “How did this happen?”
Infield dirt has become something of a specialized thing.
True, but not quite as specialized as the mud used to rub down the baseballs for each game. There’s only one source since the late 30s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_rubbing_mud
When they find themselves kneeling at the edge of a ditch…
Unless there are ditches running through the middle of offices in Manhattan and Atlanta, that’s not likely to happen. The leftie journalists who get behind groups like ANTIFA never set foot in the field.
Infield dirt has become something of a specialized thing.
Magic dirt? 😉
Satire or prescience?
You decide.
Satire or prescience? You decide.
Given the arc of leftist rhetoric and action that I have seen in my lifetime, it seems likely that organized murder is only a matter of time.
Obituaries for the recently cancelled
However brief the return, I’m glad McSweeney’s has come back to publishing actually funny and cutting edge satire.
We are not the first generation of cancellers. The original Spectator – edited by Addison and Steele – made a habit of declaring the ‘death’ of people they found embarrassing or awful.
I read a story recently that, in one of his satirical coups, Jonathan Swift wrote an obituary for a political enemy he found particularly ignominious, and in due course gleefully saw the person he obituarised write an outraged pamphlet declaring that he was very much alive. I’m afraid I can’t remember the details, if anyone else knows and cares to share the information I’d be much obliged.
Ah! Found it!
Wow. I’m not certain someone could be more incorrect than you were with the above.
“Linux Youth”? Dwight D. Eisenhower was in office when I was born.
I’m using Firefox running on Xfce in Slackware64 14.2 to type this reply. I only boot into Windows 10 to play games and I haven’t bothered to do that in weeks. (Mainly due to finding out that some of my favorite games were designed by an absolutely rabid anti-Trumper. I deleted them all from Steam after finding that out and haven’t bothered to run Windows since.)
If all you want to do is write novels, web browsing and email, why the bleep would you pay Macbook prices to do really simple stuff?
I use a MacBook Pro, 15-inch, 2018, for work and it is, at best, OK. Since I work in a corporation that otherwise uses Windows machines for non-engineers, OSX integrates rather well with the Windows corporate world.
There’s no particular reason to need that in the private world. If you are self-publishing, there’s no real reason to use MS Word since you can use other software to create e-pub images. The only web browsers you won’t find in Linux are Edge, Safari, and MS Explorer. There are more email clients than you can shake stick at.
IMO, OSX is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, split between the OneStep and BSD worlds that the OS used to be (OneStep based) and wants to become (BSD). I think the desktop paradigm OSX uses is absolute shit and their key remapping is annoying if you’ve been used to using anything other than a Mac.
YMMV, of course.
My brother has been building and servicing business computer systems for more than 30 years (he was recently promoted to the head of his department, so yes, he knows what he’s doing), and has used Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems for various things. I asked him about putting together a Linux machine, or at least installing an additional hard drive with it on my existing computer, and he answered me with one word:
Don’t.
The longer version was that all of the specialized software I use for work is Windows-only (fwiw, the primary vendor claimed for years that they were developing a Mac version, but eventually abandoned the project because of (apparently) various roadblocks from Apple and a relatively small demand. All of their competitors are also Windows-only. Yes, I know, I can run some sort of emulator to make it/them work in Mac or Linux OS, but tech support told me straight up I would not be getting any help from them if I ever had a problem.
My brother also stated that he fully expected he’d be fixing my computer on a near weekly basis, and since getting help from him is like pulling teeth, well…
BTW … Andy Ngo wasn’t the only person sent to the hospital by Antifa … thread.
Andy Ngo wasn’t the only person sent to the hospital by Antifa
A dedicated post.
“Linux Youth”? Dwight D. Eisenhower was in office when I was born.
Heh. I was the very tail end of Truman. For work a giant homemade desktop with a giant monitor. It can be dual booted into Windows or Linux Mint. For travelling, one straight up Linux box that runs every thing including Photoshop and Illustrator. One dual boot laptop because there is a DAW that only runs in Windows 8 or above, and I can’t be bothered to set up a virtual machine just for that, particularly because 8 and above are abominations.
I suspect the Linux fear is because to get the absolute most out of it you occasionally have to actually write a command, but, as you say, if all you ever do is write, surf, and e-mail, once you install any version, seeing as how they all come with office suites, browsers, and e-mail, you never have to touch the thing and can install it on any $200 laptop.
A dedicated post.
Damn. I was sure we could get to page three with a little Vi vs. Emacs action followed by tabs vs. spaces. Oh, well…some other time perhaps.
So to the local computer gurus, is there a site that gives the ignorant layman a step-by-step path for installing Linux on a computer? I currently have Win7 on my home computer, and apparently it’s going to become a liability soon.
Jaberwok – only hard part if you are not familiar with it is making sure your computer can boot from a USB stick (or DVD) which involves getting into the BIOS. If you are familiar and comfortable, mush on, if not, have a pal who is give you a hand.
The basic steps are: download an ISO image (basically what the OS installs from) with the version you want; make a bootable USB stick from it; boot your computer from it; follow the instructions on screen to try it, or install it if you like it. It is less painful than a clean Windows install.
Good versions for those transitioning from the OS your computer was assigned at birth are Linux Mint, Zorin OS Core, and Xubuntu.
Mint has a good step by step guide that walks you through what happens after, how to set up dual boot, and whatnot.
All the versions work the same as Mint, they just look a little different, some versions suggest using Rufus to make the bootable USB stick (easy to use) instead of Etcher. They all come with open source office suites that are very similar to MS office, they all have browsers, usually Firefox (but you can get Opera with a built in VPN), all have email clients if you don’t want to do webmail.
The beauty part is you can try any version before you install for good – I went through every Ubuntu version before I settled on Zorin and Mint.
I went through every Ubuntu version before I settled on Zorin and Mint.
When just loading some variety of Linux onto a laptop, an advantage with Kubuntu is that it has the collection of tools that are built into the KDE windowing interface.
I have a laptop that I use for my school Stuff, where the advantage with Kubuntu is that it has all those tools on hand with a handy interface to make use of, and I can have 12 visual desktops to get project work done, while also having the wireless connectivity get connected rather easily.
And yes, among the followup advantages of *nix over Mac and MS Windows is not having to pay rolling and increasingly exorbitant prices instead of just doing a download of free software. Indeed one can set up as many desktops as one needs to drop assorted things on, instead of having to be limited to the one desktop of MS Windows. Dunno if Mac does multiple desktops.
Myself, I run FreeBSD on my home systems and have those advantages given by a one coding project, monolithic installation—Linux being that kernel that Linus Torvalds runs, with the flavor of the month wrapped around the assorted infinite number of Linux distributions. Then again, FreeBSD is A) a bit more set up for remotely accessed server Stuff, and as such does first install with just a command line with all the windowing Stuff needing to be installed, and B) those home systems are all desktops, and an ongoing advantage with a desktop is a permanent hard wired, cable based connection . . . and we’re discussing what to put on a laptop, which tends to be rather more wireless based for internet access, connection to other computers.
I have put FreeBSD on the laptop, but the wireless management is not what it could be, and I’m entirely too swamped in work and school to drop everything to fix that, yet.
So for the moment I’m running Kubuntu on the laptop and going from there . . . .
Muldoon, Hal, thanks for the feedback. I’ll look over those links and maybe hit up some of the guys in my employers’ IT department.
I’m not a power user. Surfing the web and doing MSOffice stuff is about it. A few more domestic applications, but nothing too fancy. Not a gamer (unless Mah Jongg counts:-D).