Ceci n’est pas une rock

I’m partial to Tom Cardy’s view: Pluto isn’t a planet, but that doesn’t matter because it’s still hot shit.

I’ve wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

All the Bardcore covers by Hildegard Von Blingin are amazing.

FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that’ll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.

You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

I’m aware that pine64 sells a smart watch that they encourage flashing your own OS onto. I wonder how hard it’d be to just port the pebble code onto that hardware (a lot harder than I just made it sound, no doubt.) It could be a good way to get a pebble-like experience for people who prefer not to support this guys new company.

Theres actually a similar story with the fish. From Memory Alpha:

According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston’s presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was “immoral” and inconsistent with TNG’s core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart’s point “well taken”, stated that Livingston’s temporary removal in “Chain of Command” was thus a “sort of a bone they threw to Patrick”.

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn’t really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I’m already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it’s easy to learn and use.

I’ve also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven’t actually tried it out yet because I’m still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti’s. It’s also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I’ve been trying to solve this problem for a while. I’ve not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I’ve learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham’s law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I’ve seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:

1. Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn’t really what you asked for. It’s just a commercial smart TV box, but it’s generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
2. Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It’s got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it’s primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you’re a person who consumes content via streaming services then you’re gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
3. KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
4. Clean build of Android TV. I’m not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven’t done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
5. EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it’s easy to tinker with if you’re so-inclined.

As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it’s been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn’t for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.

I’m reminded of a quote from an old Tom Scott video. He’s visiting a modern reconstruction of a Neolithic long barrow. Tom points out that the sun lines up with the entrance on the summer solstice, then it cuts to the owner who says

I think a lot of people would assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this… would involve complex calculations, a sharp pencil, and computing power. But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.

I like the way they solved this for the global reference time standard. In English it’s called Cordinated Universal Time (CUT) but in French it’s called Temps Universel Coordonné (TUC).

Apparently, both sides wanted to use their preferred acronym globally and wouldn’t budge. The problem was only solved by eventual agreement to use UTC, which doesn’t make sense in either language, but I guess at least it’s fair that way.