Radiant_sir_radiant @ Radiant_sir_radiant @beehaw.org

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7

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327

Joined

2 yr. ago

This may sound stupid, but what has helped me the most so far is to just stop worrying. It's still a work in progress, especially for somebody like me whose nature and job it is to worry about everything.

But economically speaking, worrying about something that I can't (sufficiently) influence is a loss.
\ For the things I can influence, I try to influence them so I don't have to worry about them anymore.

Not knowing what exactly it is that's worrying you, it's difficult to go into details, so here are some general ramblings:

Electricity prices here in Switzerland are about to painfully increase the second year in a row as well. This is a bummer, but the prices will stay the same whether I worry about them or not. What we can do we've already done - there's LED lighting everywhere, our fridge is relatively new etc. - so the only thing left to do is estimate the cost and budget accordingly.
\ Still, other than in many many other countries, electricity will be available when and where we want to use it. All we have to worry about is the price. The price increases hurt, but all things considered we still have it very good.

Other than that:

• Electric blankets are a super cozy replacement for other kinds of electric heaters and use a fraction of the power. Get one for the couch to cover yourself and/or one to put on top of your mattress. You'll never want to leave your bed or couch again.
• If you don't get a lot of sunlight, try out one of those daylight lamps (sometimes labelled 'light showers'). They may or may not work with you, but if they do, they can do wonders for your mood.
• Good music. For me it's currently Röyksopp's "Happy Up Here" on repeat.
• If there's an animal shelter nearby and you want to enrichen your mental health walks a little, talk to them about borrowing a dog once or twice a week. You get joy (and bags full of poop), the dog gets some love and entertainment, and the workers at the dog shelter get a break. Win-win-win!

Edit: spelling.

Milei is an idiot, but I can't blame Argentinians (much) for voting for him. What other choices do they have that they haven't tried several times already, each time with disastrous results.
\ It would be interesting to know how many of the votes he'll get are actually votes "for him" as opposed to "anything but the established parties".

IIUC the title is misleading. Meta will still grab any data it can, it just won't (or at least promises not to, for whatever that's worth) complement whatever it collects with additional data from other sources or share your data with its partners.

The above is sound advice. I'd like to add a generous amount of butter to the list - it adds flavour and smoothness.
\ Speaking of which, you also may want to add one small potato per pumpkin, though I wouldn't experiment with this until the potato-less soup is in a satisfactory state.

Also, try using a high-quality vegetable broth instead of salt for seasoning. Go easy on the other spices then.

TL;DR: NSA accused of doing that thing that it's been doing for decades, again.

Yeah, right? Looks like you need a car to get from your parked car to the entrance.

I came here to write something along the lines of this.

And the last couple of humans will spend an awul lot of time reassuring each other that circumstances beyond their control forced them to react like they did and there was no way they could have done anything differently.

Let's face it, while there were/are promising moments, we as a species are a failed experiment.

Whoever has told you this has obviously never encountered Russians on their holidays. Whoever's second place doesn't even come close.

Wouldn't birds* mostly be like: "Get the fsck out of my forest you mofos, unless you're female and willing, then come here and bend over!"

( * and many other animals, but mostly birds)

Those were very entertaining 92 minutes. Thank you for this wonderful suggestion.

No fruit, but I'll help myself to a drink. I know, not the cognac (just in case).

I'm a bit conflicted here. As a very happy Volvo driver I recently test-drove the (all-electric) XC40 Recharge and could have a look at the current EX30. The XC40 was very nice to drive, but both cars had a distinctly unfinished feel to it - some features felt like last-minute additions they didn't think quite through, and some advertised features such as Android Auto or 150kW fast charging didn't work at all. When asked for an estimate for full functionality, the sales person basically told me "your guess is as good as mine". Overall my 2011 V60 feels way more solid and polished and has some configuration options that newer Volvos apparently don't have at all.

With the EX30 sorta-kinda being the 'value' car of the Volvo Recharge line, I fear there's an even greater risk of disappointment for many buyers. And I wouldn't want to pay that kind of money to effectively participate in a huge beta test.

We had similar pictures in our biology books (Swiss public school), but the interesting bits were mostly covered by thick wads of hair. Maybe that's different to today's guardians of morals.

If I understand the article right, it's more of a no-click hack for any single app that the attacker cat get to display an image. Stepping out of the app's sandbox would need another exploit.
\ Still bad enough though.

Spike Jonze really should be more of a household name. He's done some seriously underrated things.

Lesbian Vampire Killers. On the surface it's a cheap horror trash flick (a quiet guy / annoying guy duo fighting lesbian vampires) brimming with penis jokes, but it's a superbly made cheap horror flick. The casting, directing and soundtrack are top-notch, the characters are mostly well-developed and credible, the story is actually quite good and the main source of laughs aren't the slapstick moments but the characters' stoic handling of increasingly absurd situations (though of course there's some slapstick as well). Plus you see boobs.
\ The movie also gracefully avoids taking itself too seriously, which is an absolute must in that genre.

On a side note, if you've already seen it and liked it, you might want to add Tucker & Dale vs Evil to your list. It's a movie about two creepy hillbillies and teenagers dying gruesome deaths in the woods, but the deaths are all accidental. Tucker and Dale really just want to fix their cabin and drink beer and have no idea what's going on with all those dead teenagers suddenly showing up on their property.

Congratulations on the grant! I can understand the pressure you feel now, but don't forget that getting the grant in the first place is itself quite an achievement. If nothing else, take a moment to be proud of yourself for that.
\ It also means that you at the very least have a rather good idea of what you want to do with that money, and what more could one ask for at the start of a new project?

I'm still recovering from a nasty case of Covid that has hit me on the first day of our intercontinental holiday trip, because of course it has. I wish for a week off work where I don't get sick within two days - it would be the first time this year. But we've finally hired a replacement for some of my more time-consuming tasks and once she's finished training she'll take a lot of work off me, so things are (probably) looking up!

Despite the vaccination and booster Covid has hit me hard, not to mention the bacteria coming along for the ride. I'm in week three and finally feeling better, but my sense of smell is still mostly gone, and I sincerely hope to get it back soon. A coworker has lost most of her sense of smell and taste some two years ago and the loss seems to be permanent, though she infected herself on purpose to get a certificate without the vaccination, so not much sympathy from me.

As soon as I'm confident that my replacement can do a good job, SWMBO and me are planning some kind of sabbatical to recover from the stress of the last few years. Work, the kids and tons of drama in the extended family have taken their toll on both of us (see "getting sick at the start of every holiday" above). We've also been married for more than a year now and still haven't gotten around to planning our honeymoon. Some real us time is sorely needed.

SWMBO has also informed me this week that she doesn't really want to live in the house that we've bought last november, though it was her who first saw it and told me that she really wanted to buy it. Apparently she really likes the plot of land (it is a nice and quiet place with a huge garden and a quite spectacular view), but she's come to realize that she doesn't like the house itself at all. It lacks a room for herself with a view of the mountains, the kitchen is too dark and small and the dark brown beams in the living room are depressing.
\ I'm not yet sure what to make of this. We were planning some remodeling anyways, but adding new rooms on the outside, extending a brand-new kitchen into the room where the office is now and either lowering the ceiling or moving some beams around the roof and repainting everything is an order of magnitude bigger than what we originally had planned.
\ We're going to have to let this settle and make a wish list to present to an architect who really thrives on difficult challenges.

I've had more unused time this and last week than usual due to a persistent case of Covid, so I've played Return to Monkey Island again. It's so much lovelier than I remembered - it took a few "just average good" games inbetween to notice just what a piece of art this game is. There's a billion of details you hardly notice: the pattern of the frame around the main menu changes every time, there's so much going on even in the most obscure and distant corners of the background that adds nothing to the story but a lot to the atmosphere, and characters constantly hint at non-canon things that happened earlier in the game based on the player's choices.

It's also a bittersweet game for two reasons:

• It keeps confronting Guybrush (the protagonist) with the consequences of his actions on his quest to find The Secret - he destroys an ancient tree and makes the woodland critters cry, a museum is shut down because of him, a friend is abducted and his shop is destroyed, a kingdom falls into chaos etc., all just because he wants to find The Secret for the principle of the thing.
• It does a very good job of likening the changes in the game - new pirate leaders doing things differently than the old ones, practitioners of that new-fangled Dark Magic putting the Voodoo Lady out of business etc. - to changes in the real world, where the glory days of the Monkey Island series in particular and point-and-click adventures in general are all but over.

Still, for old farts like me who grew up with anything Lucasfilm from Maniac Mansion to Full Throttle, the game feels a bit like coming home - and as far as point-and-click adventures go, they don't come much more brilliant than this one.

To find a matching connector you'd normally measure the distance between the pins, at least within the same family of connectors. In this case there are so many similar yet subtly different connectors though, I'm not sure you'll find the correct one. At any rate, soldering would probably be easiest (even if it's just aoldering the wires together).

There may be another approach though. With this type of connector, the pins are normally crimped onto the wire and then stuck inside the plastic case. You could buy a few connectors that look like they might fit, remove the pins (use a small tool such as a 0.5mm screwdriver) and try inserting the pins into the case of the original connector in the correct order.

Edit: the thick black wire (original) and the grey one (USB-C connector) should be the same.

At first glance it should "probably work".
\ The colours seem to follow the USB standard - red=+5V, black=GND, green=Data+ and white=Data-.\ Not sure why there are two black wires, maybe one's for the shielding.
\ To be on the safe side I'd still disconnect the cable and measure from the plug on the photo to the USB plug on the other end.