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No, it's not Ethanol-Fueled. But it is relevant to Ethanol-Fueled.

Prosthetic penis sex attacker Gayle Newland jailed

I understand Gayle Newland’s impulse to catfish – I posed as a man online for sex

Continuation of Doctor Who freakout:

Two former Doctors clash over Jodie Whittaker casting

Bad Western cultural influence excised from China:

Justin Bieber banned from China for 'bad behaviour'

Japan's First Lady trolls God Emperor Trumpu-jiichan?

BBC, LA Times, Newsweek, and The Guardian.

How OJ Simpson paved the way for Donald Trump

Now, I'm beginning to burn in my new laptop, and am starting to set up the software on it. This process is proving not quite as trivial as I hoped it would be, the main problem being the Galago's HiDPI display. It seems that a lot of applications make assumptions about screen sizes that break stuff. The next major application that suffers from problems due to the high screen resolution is Emacs. I enabled desktop scaling in System Settings > General, and that manages to fix almost all the important apps, but it does something unexpected with Emacs. With desktop scaling on, Emacs expands to fill nearly the entire screen, saying that its window geometry is only 80x20. Attempts to set Emacs' window geometry manually to something reasonable via the -geometry command line switch, or in .emacs set-frame-size or in default-frame-alist doesn't help. Either results in a smaller Emacs window briefly appearing before the window again explodes to an irritatingly large size. This had me stumped for a while, until I realised that it had something to do with desktop scaling. Turning off desktop scaling results in a reasonably-sized window. Eventually, some judicious searches turned up this link, and I found a useful workaround by adding env GDK_SCALE= to the launcher command. Most standard apps are okay, but some others need special settings to be usable on HiDPI displays.

Pale Moon also seems to be only partially scaled. Many display elements such as scroll bars, checkboxes, etc are very small, but I can live with that for now. Gimp and Inkscape both still have very small buttons that didn't properly scale. As I install more and more apps it seems far too many of them seem to make the assumption that the display isn't going to be much more than about 1280×720. This should change with time but right now is a bit of a pain.

Parole board votes to release O.J. Simpson from prison in October

Also at BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Vice, and CNN. Wikipedia.

The OJ Simpson trials: Where are they now?

One thing to note is that despite a $33.5 million civil judgment against O.J., retirement income is protected under federal law.

Don't forget O.J.'s greatest gift to mankind. One national treasure begets another.

Today 2017-07-19 inside Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant at the primary containment vessel of the Unit 3 reactor. A marine robot with the nickname the
"little sunfish", is on a mission to study damage and find resources such as fuel that experts say has melted and mostly fallen to the bottom of a chamber. There's a picture of the robot too.

Woman In Saudi Arabia Arrested For Wearing Skirt, Crop Top In Video

5 Injured In Series Of Acid Attacks In London

The Evening Standard newspaper reports that nearly 1,500 acid attacks were reported in London in the past six years.

Hong Kong's High Court Expels Pro-Democracy Lawmakers

Man-Repelling Flamethrowers Are Being Marketed to Women in China

Although it's unclear if women in China are actually using these mini flamethrowers, they're not the most bizarre product aimed at keeping aggressive men away. That honor goes to the "anti-pervert" leggings that apparently give women's legs a hairier look and made the rounds on Chinese blogs in 2013.

That could attract a worse variety of pervert.

My inbox is full of recruiter spam... uhh... "inquiries" every single one marked Urgent, they all want an Android Graphic Debug engineer in Hillsboro, Oregon.

The only Hillsboro company that does Android Platform Development is Intel.

I expect their graphics are all fucked up.

It's quite likely they will only hire a contractor for this. Intel uses a lot of contract programmers.

Mobile phone users in Turkey got surprise voice message by Turkish President Erdogan when placing a call through Turkcell or Vodafone around midnight on the anniversary of the 15 July 2016 coup attempt.

After dialing a number, the dial tone were replaced with a voice message from Erdogan congratulating them on the national holiday of “democracy and unity” and only after Erdogan’s message did the dial tone begin.

If people had any doubt that mobile communications are unsafe. Then they got a in your face status message this midnight. Maybe people will reconsider end-to-end crypto VoIP now.

CHP MP Barış Yarkadaş wrote that it's a "extortion of freedom of communication". And MP Aykut Erdoğdu said "What is this on top of all insults? It’s such a nightmare!".

Maybe they got inspired by USA Belkin http MITM attack in 2003 ..?

(At other times Erdogan tells his son to hide the millions of Euros (2014) and that Turks should reproduce with at least five children, especially if they live in Europe.)

Thanks to an aunt of mine heading to the USA for a little while, I managed to order a System76 Galago Pro, which is a sweet piece of hardware as far as that goes, and though it was a bit dear, I think it was pretty much worth every penny. It's light (1.8 kg) and fast and the hardware feels solid. I'm now in the process of transferring all of my files from my old laptop to it. My only complaint was that it came preinstalled with Ubuntu 16.04, and it defaulted to Unity. I would have been satisfied to try it again after a few years of Linux Mint, but for one very idiotic thing: the Galago Pro has a very high resolution screen (3200 × 1800, higher resolution than even a Retina Display MacBook), and as such, all of the text is ridiculously small. 11 point text on a 13.3" screen with such a high resolution is essentially impossible to read without strain for a guy like me in his early forties. I could not find any option whatsoever to increase it beyond the accessibility option for "large fonts" which perhaps increased the size of the text by 25%. Still too small. Luckily, there was a way to install the Cinnamon desktop environment on this thing and thank goodness Cinnamon had some sensible defaults for font sizes. Now the high resolution screen really shines. The text is as clear and crisp as a well-printed book. That was the only serious complaint I had with what is otherwise an amazing piece of gear.

Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation (archive.is)

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election campaign.

Emphasis mine.

On June 2, in a discussion about whether browsers ought to support JavaScript in the first place, I wrote a comment that cited the article "Please don't use Slack for FOSS projects" by Drew DeVault that recommended IRC over Slack, Skype, Discord, and other proprietary web chat platforms. I mentioned that IRC alone is incomplete for the job without a logging bouncer to keep a log and an attachment pastebin to hold pictures, documents, and the like.

In that comment, I mentioned having read a different article about why IRC is just as bad because real-time communication discriminates against users in minority time zones, who might miss the opportunity to participate due to being asleep or at work. But I couldn't dig it up at the time. Today I happened upon it again: "Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications" by Dave Cheney recommends that projects instead use forum-like asynchronous communication, such as mailing lists and issue trackers, where each thought has its own URI and there's not as much shame in being a day behind.

It goes to show the use of trying different search engines. Google and DuckDuckGo gave different results for a query expressing the key concept that I took from Cheney's article (chat discriminates by time zone). DuckDuckGo pulled up Cheney's article first, while Google tried to second guess what I wanted: "Missing: chat discriminates"