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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.

A Forbes' contributor says that the "US Newspapers' Problems Come From Their Former Monopoly, Not The Duopoly Of Facebook And Google."

That is only a part of the problem. There are far larger ones.

First, the prices of their newspapers. The skinny little State Journal-Register costs a full dollar and has very little news you won't find in other outlets. The Illinois Times prints theirs free, making money from advertising alone, and it is superior to the incredibly poor SJ-R.

But mostly it's how abysmal their web sites are. Know why I'm not reading your ads? No, not AdBlock; it isn't installed. It's because I've read the article in less time than the incredibly bloated web page loads and far faster than the even more bloated ads load. By the time the ads finish loading, I've already closed the tab. The St Louis Post-Dispatch is abysmal with loading; a full thirty seconds, then it goes blank, and takes another full minute, and every article is like that! They, and almost every other paper, badly need a competent webmaster. Except for extremely long or graphics-laden pages, the damned thing should load in seconds. Hire someone competent, who actually knows HTML and doesn't have to resort to one of those stupid programs that take your 5k of text and turn it into a 5 meg page. Today's sites load slower on high speed internet than back in the 33k dialup days.

Then there's "click to read more" after only half a paragraph is displayed. What in the hell is wrong with those morons? They expect me to subscribe to this garbage and actually PAY for it after annoying me?? STUPIDITY!

Then there are so many stupid pages that render in a six point typeface, gray on white, on a tablet that when you zoom, the ads completely cover the text! With morons like that working for your paper you expect me to believe anything you've written? The science rags are the worst about this, but Newsweek isn't any better. Zoom the page and the stupid social media bullshit covers the text!

Look, morons, nobody goes to your stupid site because it's got a "cool" interface, they go to find out what's happening in the world, and you seem to work hardest at making that as difficult as possible. And you expect me to PAY you for that? How fucking stupid can a person be?

Then there's the quality problem. Two decades ago I rarely saw a typo and never a grammatical error, these days few articles are error-free. You idiots expect me to PAY for that unprofessional garbage?

No, the newspapers are dying from blood loss, caused by repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot. Fire the idiots and you might start making money again! Of course, if you're the publisher, that means you have to fire yourselves, because you're the most moronic at all!

In case anyone's been wondering why a hefty plurality if not an outright majority of the stories pushed over the weekend and the first couple days of the week came from yours truly, it's because I hopped on my cavalry bear, rode all over the country, and beat all the Editors except martyb (who I saved for last and only had to threaten into submission) upside the head with a double-barrel chainsaw.

Or it's because I saw there was pretty much nothing except partisan hack jobs and bloody stupid garbage that I sincerely hope the Eds never publish in the submission queue and quickly subbed everything remotely interesting that I found in my feed reader.

Believe whichever amuses you the most.

Looks like we let the story queue run completely dry last night for about 3.5 hours. Feel free to give the Eds some good-natured ribbing over it here.

I may have inadvertently tested the limits of free speech in England and Wales.

The road to Hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. And if you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to fear. Ha!

If you're going to give the morons space to be stupid, you must surely give space for everyone else to challenge, parody, question, lampoon...

You Americans are lucky that you have an explicit written Constitution.

Bake me a cake with a file in it.

The fine pieces of shit over at Rolling Stone recently interviewed Billy Joel:

Critics used to give you a hard time. But it seems like in the past few years you've become cool.
Look, man, Trump is president, so all kinds of weird shit can happen.

What do you make of that?
I'm still flabbergasted. I try to stay out of politics. I am a private citizen and I have a right to believe in my own political point of view, but I try not to get up on a soapbox and tell people how to think. I've been to shows where people start haranguing the audience about what's going on politically and I'm thinking, "You know, this isn't why I came here." As a matter of fact, one of the biggest cheers of the night comes when we do "Piano Man" and I sing, "They know that it's me that they're coming to see to forget about life for a while," and the audience lets out this huge "ahhhh" and I say, "OK, yeah, don't forget that." We're more like court jesters than court philosophers.

Normally I wouldn't even pay attention to some celebrity spouting off on politics (Because who gives a damn?) but Joel absolutely nails what a whole lot of folks are thinking on the matter. Tip of the hat to the Piano Man for keeping it classy.

In the early 1980’s, GYGAX had been generating about $1 million per year in income. [Redacted] advised that GYGAX spent his money frivolously. GYGAX was involved in an unpleasant divorce and [Redacted] further advised that GYGAX was a drug abuser. GYGAX is approximately 55 years of age and is currently [redacted]. He lives on Madison Street in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and may be contacted at (414) xxx-xxxx. GYGAX maintains a mailing address as follows: P. O. Box 388, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. [Redacted] considers GYGAX to be eccentric and frightening. He is known to carry a weapon and was proud of his record of personally answering any letter coming from a prison. GYGAX set up a holding company in Liberia to avoid paying taxes. He is known to be a member of the Libertarian Party.

Oh dear.

"I assured Trump on multiple occassions that we weren't investigating him, but he fired me to stop me investigating him." - near quote.

FFS - you can't have it both ways, man. You did enjoy a nice credibility rating. Today, you blew yourself out of the water. Sure, the partisans on both sides are going to work this to death. But, credibility you do not have. A statement like that doesn't come from a lawman, it comes from someone trying to play politics.

The thing is, I have little idea what Comey's politics are. It has often been suggested that Comey might be under duress from the Clinton clan. Haven't made my own mind up on that. Some things suggest that might be true, but then, Comey released statements that undermined Clinton's campaign.

Maybe Comey is actually working for Russia?

This guy is a mess, that's for damned sure.

"I assured Trump on multiple occassions that we weren't investigating him, but he fired me to stop me investigating him."

I somehow managed to get the PIC programming method described here to work, and now I have incorporated a PIC16F1455 into my random number generator circuit. I added a header to enable programming of the PIC from within the main circuit, and the setup looks like this. Schematic here. Now I need to figure out how to write the firmware for that PIC so that it will look like some kind of USB device when I plug it into a PC, and it can feed all of that random bit data coming in through RC3 (Pin 7) over the USB interface. Github project here. Looks like this is going to be a much more complicated business than designing and building the circuit in the first place!

I found a few resources on the USB programming aspects here, here, here, here, and here. I would like to avoid using the XC8 compiler or any of Microchip's proprietary libraries as far as possible, and build the project entirely using SDCC and Free Software libraries only.

I stumbled over this story, and thought some Soylentils might appreciate it.

It’s not easy living in today’s world if you are one who is attempting to live up to other people’s expectations. It’s an unhealthy way to go through life. For too many young women around the world, the imperfections they find can be damaging to them, especially when others are so willing to point them out.

Tthere is at least one Brazilian model who refuses to go along with the hype, and has instead, turned her ‘imperfection’ into a prized part of herself.

The 24 year old model, Mariana Mendes, knows all about imperfections, as she’s reminded of it every day in the mirror. Born with a black hued birthmark that covers a large portion of her face, the mark is medically termed congenital melanocytic nevus, and for most of her life, she was told that it was ugly.

But Mendes doesn’t see it that way. She is well aware the the mark is there, and she knows that many view her as different…Yet she instead believes that the mark makes her unique.

At the age of 5, because her Mother feared that Mendes would be bullied throughout her life, she underwent multiple surgeries to attempt to lessen the color of her birthmark. Yet, after enduring a year of medical procedures, Mendes decided she wanted to stop any treatment.

“My mom was worried. She didn’t want me to suffer any bullying, but I don’t remember ever having any problems in school. When I was 6, she asked me if I wanted to continue with the birthmark removal procedures that I did in Sao Paulo. I told her no.”
It was the very same birthmark on her face the pushed her to embrace it. She wasn’t going to let a mark define her, and instead sought to be an example to people everywhere to accept themselves, and find their self-confidence as she has.

“I feel more beautiful and totally different from other people because I have a nevus. Having a nevus that is as large as mine is not common, so of course there are many people who stare and who don’t like it, but I don’t care.”Mendes often will come across people that mistakenly assume that her mark is makeup. “A lot of people ask me about my birthmark, sometimes they think it’s makeup or a tattoo but I don’t mind and explain it to them.” Even though she is not without the average instigators in life – you know, those people whose only pursuits seem to be making others as miserable – Mendes has learned to just brush them off:
“I’m proud of having a nevus, it’s a part of who I am and how I learned to like myself…I find living with a facial nevus very easy because I like it a lot and I want others to feel as confident as I do about their nevi.”

All of us have our own imperfections that are totally out of our control. Embrace them, or lean to deal with them. Learning to live with the things you have no control over can be a refreshing, and liberating way to live one’s life.

Click the link, to see some photos of her. It took a moment for my eyes to decide that the blemish is hers, and not an artifact of a crap camera or photoshopping. But, she's quite pretty!

http://joeforamerica.com/2017/05/girl-born-black-face-mark-called-ugly-not-anymore/

Video of a photoshoot here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR7w_Vhv95E