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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.

There's nothing like a big explody event to distract attention. But so soon? Does the internet speed things up that much?
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Well, Trump finally goes to Vietnam, and Mr. Cohen goes to Washington.

Do we need to ask which got the higher ratings?

"The Democratic Party of the U.S. and other opponents to the negotiations move overtly and covertly to disrupt them as supported by scepticism backed by all sorts of groundless stories and misinformation even at such a crucial moment as now,"... Trump's opponents would bear the responsibility if the summit failed to achieve results, which would leave the U.S. people exposed to "security threats"

Regardless of what you think of the man, he still won the election, and with the opposition so distracted by bullshit, he will probably win again.

Alt+F4 still works!

It's that I kinda hate the mouse. Think one of those big trackballs is better?

An election may have been stolen in North Carolina. While evidence continues to be gathered, officials are investigating whether a paid Republican campaign contractor collected mail-in ballots from likely Democratic voters and never turned them in, possibly changing the result of the election. It’s a crisis of democracy: State election officials told a hearing Monday that North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District was subject to a “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” orchestrated by a GOP operative.

Here’s my question: Where is the voter fraud crowd? You know, the folks who cry “crime” when two people named John Smith vote in the same state? Their silence in the face of seemingly serious election fraud reveals their fundamental bad faith and hucksterism.

I served with many of the celebrities of the voter fraud pack when I joined President Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. ... The documents that were released reveal the truth: Contrary to statements by the White House and Republican commission members such as vice chairman Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, the commission uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud. ... Kobach claimed the few instances of fraud were “the tip of the iceberg,” the judge, a George W. Bush appointee, concluded that “there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.” Despite this resounding defeat, Kobach continues to rely on the same discredited statistics, and voter fraud remains a top-line GOP concern.

Now that North Carolina is investigating what could be systematic election theft, you’d think people so committed to seeing fraud where it doesn’t exist would be sounding the alarm. What’s alleged in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District is not an occasional individual registering to vote when she is ineligible, but a sustained program to steal the votes of others.

Why doesn’t the ‘voter fraud’ crowd care about what happened in North Carolina?

UPDATE: North Carolina Elections Board throws out the tainted results and orders a new election!
North Carolina elections board orders new House election after ballot tampering scandal

Voters will go back to the drawing board with new primary elections in the Ninth District after the board’s vote.

In the United States, federal judges are given lifetime tenure so that they can rule according to the law without being subject to political and corporate pressures. Should Open Source development be funded the same way?

Giving developers lifetime tenure would allow them to develop public domain code for the benefit of everyone without having to worry about corporate bottom lines. This could result in more efficient development for the public. Of course, the code would be mandatorily published under public domain.

"Programmer General of the United States" has a nice ring to it doesn't it? Or perhaps "Programmer Public".

Share your thoughts on the subject.

General

This is a post / TFS text pre-processor designed specifically for use with soylent.org

There are three interrelated projects involved.

One is Python(2) CGI that must be installed upon a webserver, and is then used via the web page it generates. This can be used to prepare posts for use on, for example, soylentnews.org.

Another is a Python(2) library that can be used to create your own project of a similar nature. This library is also used in the above project.

The other is a Perl library (module) with the same general functionality as the Python(2) library that is specifically designed to work easily with the soylentnews.org TFS system.

Here is a summary of features and capabilities as of 20190216:

Instance Types:

• Full bore web page for pre-processing your own posts
• Python class suitable for implementing your own handler
• Perl class suitable for implementing your own handler
    (specifically intended for soylentnews.org)

Capabilities:

• Generates tag pairs with terminology expansions for caps / numbers / caps+numbers sequences
  • Over 1000 term expansions (as of Jan 1st, 2019)
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  • Can ignore specified terms on-the-fly
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  • Flags unknown terms that may be expandable on the web page
  • Handles pre-existing tag pairs when you want to add one-off uses
  • Handles HTML and won't try to expand within HTML tags
  • Includes test code to verify file containing expansions, generate statistics
  • Includes command line tool to check to see if term already present in expansion list
  • Python and Perl stand-alone term expansion classes
  • Ability to add editor's markup either everywhere or within blockquote regions
• Built-in macro language
  • Can list available macros (default on)
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  • Includes macros to make posting easier (you can add as many as you like):
    • blockquote {bq quoted text}
    • strikeout {strike struck text}
    • bold {b bolded text}
    • italic {i italicized text}
    • bulleted lists {ul item|...|item}
    • numbered lists {ol item|...|item}
    • links, canned and/or on-the-fly {link URL|linked text}
    • temperature display and conversion {f NN}, {c NN}
    • let me google that for you {lmgtfy search term}
    • smile (emoji) {smile}
    • shrug (character art) {shrug}
    • escapes: {vb}=|, {ls}={, {rs}=}, {sqig text}={text}
• Convenient unicode-to-unicodeEntity converter
• Provides optional Soylent-style post preview (default off)
• Handles unicode posting
• Incorporates basic self-test when run from command line
• Can use local configuration file to prevent update from repo resetting your preferences

The project can be found here on Github.

After writing some scripts around espeak, I'm working through a very large backlog of text. I have espeak reading at twice its default rate of 150 words per minute and I sometimes "read" more than 100,000 words per day.

Unfortunately, my backlog includes SoylentNews. For more than one year, I've not been following SoylentNews very closely. Indeed, I've only been skimming SoylentNews since Apr 2018. So, I plan to read articles of interest on SoylentNews from Nov 2017 to present. I also plan to summarize the more thoughtful comments and the wittiest trolling. A digest may be intermittent and may purposefully lag by one year so that it acts as a retrospective.

Would this be useful? Is there anything that I should include or exclude? For example, I find astronomy presentations to be fascinating but I find astronomy articles to be samey. Even when an astronomy article gets my attention there isn't much I can contribute by commenting. I'll also avoid regional politics. To me, US politics seems like an endless procession of people who have escaped my attention. (I think Charlie Brooker and/or Adam Curtis had a similar opinion about political news.)

Paul Manafort "intentionally" lied to special counsel Robert Mueller's office, breaking the plea agreement that made him the star cooperator in the Russia probe, a federal judge found on Wednesday.

Manafort "made multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation," including his contacts with his Russian associate during the campaign and later, Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote on Wednesday.

Manafort was convicted of various financial crimes in August, and then cut the deal to plead guilty to two charges of conspiracy and witness tampering in September.
In all, Jackson determined Manafort intentionally lied about $125,000 he received for the legal bills, about another unnamed Justice Department criminal investigation and about his interactions with his longtime Russian associate Konstantin Kilimnik while he was campaign chairman and later.

Jackson noted twice in her order that two of the topics Paul Manafort lied about, Kilimnik and payments he received for his legal bills were "material to the investigation."

Judge voids Paul Manafort plea deal, says he 'intentionally' lied to the FBI, special counsel and grand jury

Boy, they sure do lie about Russia a lot!

Probe Strikes Oil. Everybody Wants Piece