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Opened my mail, and found "Dissenter is a Gamer Changer". Hmmm - from Gab. New member or something? Sorry, not much interested . . . scan on down through the list of emails. Slide the mouse toward the top of the page to select another tab, and I notice "Dissenter is a browser extension".

Alright, curiosity piqued.

GAB

Earlier this week we launched our new sister app, Dissenter. Dissenter is a browser extension and website that allows you to comment on any URL online and also see what others have commented. This includes Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, Tweets, YouTube videos, CNN articles, and more.

Many people are saying that Dissenter.com is a “game changer” for the internet. It empowers the voice of The People and makes surfing the web fun again. At a time when most websites have removed or heavily censored their comment sections, Dissenter brings back the wild west of internet comments.

We fundamentally believe that Dissenter is going to be revolutionary for free speech online, but don’t take our word for it:

Dave Cullen says Dissenter is “incredibly innovative and important.

Styx says “I believe Dissenter has the capability of becoming the next big thing in tech.”

The Financial Times says “There is a clear demand for this sort of freedom. Some argue the concept is therefore a billion dollar idea with the potential to completely disrupt conventional media's control of its comment real estate.”

Discover what the entire internet is talking about, literally. Visit Dissenter.com and download the Dissenter browser extension today.

Alright, didn't we do this once before? I very specifically remember an extension that permitted people to comment on a page, but those comments didn't show up on the page unless you had that extension installed and enabled. It was kinda cool, but, I dropped it for reasons - probably security related reasons.

Alright then - let's look at this reincarnated potential security disaster that will lead the NSA right straight to my front door . . . I think maybe I'll test it with Chrome, keep it away from my Fox family . . .

Youtube "tutorial" on the extension here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsdpKfe0w4

Hmmm - to comment you have to create an account. That isn't looking really great. If I wanted to leave anonymous comments, I'm kinda screwed. I usually sign my name to stuff anyway, but, I may just feel like visiting the White House to tell Donald Duck how damned STUPID he is for - oh, I don't know - appointing Ajit Pai? I can tell him nicely, and sign my name, or I can tell him rudely, and remain anonymous, except I can't do so with this extension.

Hmmm again. Can't seem to sign up and/or log in with the fork of Chromium that I installed to. I can read comments, but can't make comments, sign up, or log in. It *appears* that a Gab login credential might work to sign in - which is not good. Signing in to use the extension should be separate from any site's log in credentials.

Let me try this on another browser . . .

Ahhhhhh - Browser extension installed on Iron browser, and it works much better. I attempt to log in, it rejects my first login attempt, so I sort through some of my logins. Naturally, since I'm already suspicious that my Gab credentials will work on the extension, I try one of those credentials first. And, I'm in.

I'm presented with a popup:

Dissenter | Comment On Any URL Online. is requesting permission to access your account.

This application will be able to:

Read access to your profile and feeds
Send new posts
You can revoke this app's access later under Settings / Authorized Apps.

Nahhhh - I'm mildly impressed with Gab, and I agree with their stated purpose in life - but I don't trust them with the ability to track me around the internet any more than I trust FaceFuck. Cancel. Errr, wait. Maybe I'm being hasty. I don't USE Iron for anything. In fact, it doesn't have a single login saved. This login to Gab is the first and only login it has.

Nuts. "Authorize". See what I see, I guess.

Hmmmmm - still broken. I have "signed in" repeatedly, but still can't make a comment. Does Dissenter rely on something that my forks of browsers have ripped out of the browsers?

Ehhh, time to uninstall, and purge the browser's cache history. I've devoted more than enough time to this thing already.

At least they're using mothballs so as to keep a lid on the Body Lice.

I would not wish Scabies on my worse enemy.

It's not that I'm homeless again, but that I've been putting in such long hours that I didn't want to go all the way home to sleep.

After I post this I'll go sleep on my cold, hard office floor.

No Vermin There!

Not Yet Anyway.

New CPAC stars: Black gun rights activists

For a few minutes at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, the message was more Malcolm X than William F. Buckley.

Sporting a red hoodie, his hair in cornrows, Maj Toure touted his group, Black Guns Matter. "We go where there's high violence, high crime, high gun control — high slave mentalities, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and inform urban America about their human right, as stated in the Second Amendment, to defend their life."

A besuited interviewer seated on stage next to Toure told him, "You don’t look or sound like your stereotypical Second Amendment advocate."

[...] Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, said Trump was one driver of black interest in gun rights, along with general anxiety about the state of the world. "They are seeing the uncertainty within society across the board," he said. Smith, who did not participate in CPAC, founded his group in 2015, hoping he might attract a few hundred members. Membership quickly climbed into the thousands, and it tripled in the months following Trump’s inauguration. He said the group now has about 30,000 members.

Smith said that 60 percent of his members are black women, who often feel the most vulnerable to violent crime.

For quite some time, I collected classic audio gear, ca. 1960-ish to 1980-ish. My favorite high-end units had fairly extensive front-panel controls. They had to have them, because there was no practical way to build a menu-driven system at the time.

I love the way those units work. You want to do something? You just reach out and do it. And they were, quite frankly, beautiful.

Fast forward to now. I have a fairly high end pre-pro — that's very like the receivers most people are familiar with, but a pre-pro uses external amplifiers. The range of things it can do through its menu interface is very large, and sure, I appreciate that it can do them. But the level of convenience using those menus? It is flat-out awful.

But you'd never get all that shoehorned into front panel controls, or at least, if you didn't want to take up a floor-to-ceiling rack doing it. And remotes... well, stock remotes tend to have a bunch of preprogrammed functions, and you're stuck with whatever is there, and missing whatever isn't — so back to repeated menu-surfing. Ugh. So you just can't do it.

Or... could you? What if you could get directly at the controls you want to use most often?

For me, I'm talking about volume, bass, treble, and/or EQ, input selection, speaker and mono / stereo / reverse / dolby-whatever / etc. settings, loudness, high-blend and high-blend crossover, various balance configurations (preset or variable), mute, monitor selection, active zone...

These are the sorts of things that you (or at least, I) am constantly menu-surfing to get at. You might choose the specific operations you want access to differently, but how can a manufacturer meet that kind of need for flexibility?

So I imagined a design with soft knobs and buttons, with a dedicated small display over each control. A nice large single display, too. Push a specific knob in, and you do get a menu. But the menu lets you select what that knob does. Push again to select, or push-and-hold to cancel. All the knobs are optical encoders, so capable of considerable precision. All the control displays are dot-matrix, so capable of text, bar graphs, etc.

Same for buttons. Push to use, push and hold to get a menu/submenu to choose what it does, quick push to select the function, or push and hold again to cancel.

You could even set up a knob as a "meta" control knob, where it would step through various control configurations you have already set up. All knobs but that one are EQ knobs, for instance. Then right back to everything else with one adjustment of that "meta" knob.

And of course, you could still menu surf on the main display (or a monitor, if connected) to pick and choose and set anything and everything.

But how would you know what these controls did if they were all soft?

Easy: You put a small display above every control that labels each one as to its currently selected function. And all knobs and buttons would label themselves when a "meta" set was changed, so there'd be no confusion there, either. Talk about flexibility!

Now you have a front panel that is no more crowded than the classic audio units of yore, but much, much more flexible and personally, and completely, tunable to your preferences.

I'd want one physical option per knob as well: detents, or not, programmable. Some things I want smooth, some things I want stepped, and I want to choose which functions act which way. So they would need an indent mechanism that could be disabled or enabled according to how you want the knob to act. That can be done with a knob's back wheel with spaced steel inserts and an energized, or not, coil to provide the knob detents with classic, actively programmable physical feedback. Nothing difficult or particularly expensive about it.

From the manufacturer's perspective, each knob and button assembly would be an identical unit. Just those two kinds of things. So mass producible and easily integrated with a front panel and motherboard. Or perhaps they could just plug into each other, so various designs could use more or less of them, and they could talk to each other and the host CPU over that bus. That would be very nice from a design and manufacturing POV.

Man, I could really go for a unit like that.

First ~6 minutes is the action, the rest is the extended version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fax-kXMCbtA (NSFW language)

It was lit.

Want to watch a weird ass good show? Umbrella Academy is as weird as it gets, but pretty good!

Kids with special abilities (powers) grow up.
  Fight scenes are done to songs like 'Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows'.

And the one main character is one kid from a pre-teen comedy my son watches, Ricky, Nicky, Dicky and Dawn.
The other kids from that show must be just SHITTING themselves.
One (they weren't given real names), Tom Hopper (Black Sails), is a guy with some gorilla DNA.
Two, can control knives he throws
Three, can control people's minds by saying I Heard A Rumour
Four, a drug addict who communicates with the dead
Five, can jump through space and time

They discover they need to stop the apocalypse...

while hunted by two time travel assassins...

Weird. ass. show.
Can't wait for next season!
(Netflix)

Culture Shock for French in Quebec: ‘We Smoke Cigarettes, They Smoke Pot’

Some Montrealers call them “FFF’s” — French from France.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFF

"Good compost is a wonderful thing!
-- Efren Lizardo Ibarreta

"What do you want to be when you grow up? A fireman? An astronaut?"

I was but four years old.

"I want to be a farmer."

While puzzled, Mom was pleased as we come from farmers. I expect most people day.

"Why so?"

"Everyone has to eat. I could charge as much as I want. I'll be rich!"

Dad was quite pleased and so purchased some gardening tools and seed. This was in 1968 yet I remember as if it was yesterday that very first carrot he harvested for me.

It was good.

Fast forward to today. Being winter I am preparing for the coming Spring by composting food scraps.

Having established that collecting them in a small bag works well, I tried a large bag - a full-sized paper grocery sack.

That works well too; the fruit flies are very pleased with their new digs.

Kraft Charges Reveal a Sordid World Thriving in Florida

The 77-year-old Kraft proclaims his innocence in a broader investigation that ensnared two other prominent financiers, including John Havens, Citigroup Inc.’s former president. John Childs, a buyout pioneer, was also charged in a related prostitution investigation. The police say in total 26 encounters are captured on video in the Orchids.

The case has peeled back one of the most unsavory aspects of this stretch of Florida -- where a playground of the wealthy filled with golf courses and beaches meets with what authorities say may be a human trafficking ring spanning from China to the U.S. There are multi-million dollar mansions as well as the massage tables that police say women slept on when not engaged by customers.

[...] Jupiter is home to countless celebrities and sports stars, as well as the Trump National Golf Club, where the president golfed with Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus earlier this month. Thirty minutes to the south, in the area around near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, there are $10 million homes tucked behind carefully groomed hedges and the valet lines teem with Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces.

Reimer: Prostitution charges against Robert Kraft are degrading and beneath him

Robert Kraft, one of the most powerful and recognizable men in the country’s preeminent entertainment industry, visited a seedy day spa in a Florida strip mall twice last month and illegally solicited prostitutes, law enforcement officials say. Even worse, police say Kraft’s alleged acts are captured on videotape.

TMZ staffer Evan Rosenblum told “Dale & Keefe” Friday he thinks it is “almost a certainty” the videos get released. Florida does have one of the most transparent open records laws in the U.S., which mandates any records received by a public agency, such as state law enforcement, be made available for examination, unless the state legislature rules otherwise.

For anti-human trafficking crusader Ivanka Trump, Robert Kraft could make things awkward

If you're a billionaire, don't be stingy. Just buy a live-in sex slave.