Emma Humphries
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  • The Mozilla Foundation has some questions about the sale of the .org registry.

    3 December 2019
  • Sonos kills Snips voice assistant

    Ah the glories of Late Capitalism. Sonos bought the Snips project, a non-creepy, open source, voice assistant. They are shutting down the public project, and might release a non-public version in future products. Nothing like aquihires that harm people for the sake of shareholders.

    3 December 2019
  • XKCD making the case for why a static web site will handle most of your use cases.

    2 December 2019
  • E_EARSTOOBIGFORVIEWPORT

    close up of a grey and black tabby kitten with big ears

    2 December 2019
  • Judd Legum’s piece on why the emotional premise of Da Mayor’s attacks on proposals by Warren and others to make public college free is flawed is a good start to your week.

    popular.info/p/the-dem…

    2 December 2019
  • Thanksgiving

    Cynthia and I did a lot of cooking the last few days and now have had a chance to sit back and feast on the leftovers.

    We visited friends on Thanksgiving for dinner and brought mac and cheese, chipotle sweet potatoes, and oven roasted brussels sprouts.

    Today I helped Cyn rescue her old, abandoned blog and website, which we’re moving from WordPress to Jeykll.

    A close up of chipotle sweet potatoes, dusted with smoked paprika

    29 November 2019
  • Chrisjen Avasarala on The Expanse is a far-from-perfect character, portrayed as a real person in a medium where women are still written as the angel of the house or a demon from hell. And may the gods bless her lack of fucks to give.

    28 November 2019
  • An assessment of the “George Clooney pays for orbitial surveilance of a conflict zone” project: www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-ed…

    28 November 2019
  • That you, your dad, and the plane meme

    Flight attendant: Is there anyone on this flight who can review a pull request?

    Dad: That’s something you can do, right?

    Me: Dad? Why do you look like a “Force Ghost” from a re-edited Star Wars movie?

    Dad: That would be because I’m dead and this is a visitation from the afterlife. By the way, your mother says everything now makes more sense about you now that you’ve transitioned.

    Me: Thanks. I’m glad Mom gets it now.

    Dad: Hey flight attendant, this is my daughter from California, she can review that pull request!

    Me: Dad, you’re embarassing me.

    27 November 2019
  • HOWTO: Pi wont reboot after a power failure

    We had a power outage this morning, thanks, PG&E, and the Raspberry Pi that runs my IoT hub wouldn’t reboot.

    The SD cards in a PI can get corrupted in case of a power cutoff, so checking for that was the next, best, right thing.

    I put the SD card in my laptop running Ubuntu:

    /* 
    Ubuntu makes an alias for a SD card at /media/$USER/.
    You can there in the File viewer and open the file system 
    in Disks to find which dev it's mounted as.
    */
    
    sudo fsck.fat -V /dev/mmcblk0p1
    
    [sudo] password for $USER: 
    fsck.fat 4.1 (2017-01-24)
    0x41: Dirty bit is set. Fs was not properly unmounted and some data may be corrupt.
    1) Remove dirty bit
    2) No action
    ? 1
    Starting check/repair pass.
    Starting verification pass.
    Perform changes ? (y/n) y
    /dev/mmcblk0p1: 216 files, 79946/516191 clusters
    

    Run fsck.fat again to confirm the repair, then unmount the SD and try booting the PI again.

    27 November 2019
  • As a recovering economist, I can tell you that you can end up thinking like the one of the people in this comic: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sun…

    27 November 2019
  • Alexandra Erin is pure, good, and we should all protect her.

    twitter.com/Alexandra…

    26 November 2019
  • While we’re talking about Elon Musk’s ridiculous scheme to put over 10,000 spacecraft in LEO, this simulation comes to mind: nothke.itch.io/hypervelo…

    26 November 2019
  • Lydia amongst the cabling.

    Large grey and white medium haired cat sitting on railing, surrounded by cabling

    26 November 2019
  • Rural telephony needs decentralized mesh, not an incipient ablation cascade.

    25 November 2019
  • Beloved kitten child.

    A grey, striped tabby kitten straddle the arm of an uphostered chair.

    25 November 2019
  • Welcome to the working week, as they say.

    Here’s Patti Smith and 250+ people singing People Have the Power to help you get through this week.

    25 November 2019
  • Managed to nick and burn myself while making dinner tonight. I hope any kami inhabiting my new, Japanese-style chef’s knife are satisfied.

    24 November 2019
  • You can follow me from @emma@blog.magicalgirl.party in Mastodon and other Fediverse clients.

    24 November 2019
  • When I asked for white people to be passionate about Black people and water I was talking about Flint NOT these virtual tiki-torch marches against the new Ariel. — Awa Gueye

    15 July 2019
  • Massively parallel cat array

    a black and a grey and white cat rest in a chair in identical poses

    14 July 2019
  • This week in Fragility

    1980's vaporwave banner with the motto: "Your CisHet fragility is bewildering".

    The fragility of cisgender heterosexuals continues to astonish me. The week’s not even over and we’ve seen:

    • French fans of Michael Jackson suing the people who came forward with their witness to their abuse at the hands of Jackson, because this ‘sullied the image’ of Jackson
    • White women pitching a fit on social media because a Black woman has been cast as Ariel in the remake of Little Mermaid; this is probably a good time to shop for a copy of the VHS tape if you’re in the market
    • The industry association for UK ISPs declaring Mozilla an “internet villian” for their work on DNS via HTTPS (Disclaimer: I work at Mozilla, and can’t stop laughing.)
    4 July 2019
  • Roland Tanglao

    Maybe all those people who would’ve learned scripting languages on OS X are instead hacking those same scripting languages on Linux e.g. a $35 Raspberry PI and/or writing javascript/node.js apps in glitch or jsbin or jsfiddle or Android apps or IOS apps?

    28 June 2019
  • Duck typing progeny

    Two C++ programmers run into each other for the first time in many years at an event.

    After exchanging pleasantries, they ask each other about their lives in the time since they last saw one another.

    One says, “I don’t know, you do everything to raise your kid the right way, and they betray you.”

    The other braces for a comment about how the child doesn’t have the same politics, religion, or ideologies of their parents.

    “My child writes in weakly typed languages.”

    25 June 2019
  • While being mindful that the term decolonization originated with indigenous people’s movements, I’m finding that it is a useful concept for thinking about gender.

    Here’s Deb Chachra describing the term:

    The implicit driver of colonization is always that the residents are using the land ‘incorrectly’, and sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.

    And you can see that at work in gender and indigenous peoples. Western colonizers erased the gender of Two-Spirit First Nations and Native Americans, Third gender people throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, Pacific Islanders, and Finland.

    25 June 2019

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