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I just got this email:

"Your satnav has always been there to guide you, now it needs your help. There is an issue that may impact the functionality of your satnav and requires your attention before 6 April 2019.
Please take a moment to check its status and learn if it will be impacted."

It is TomTom.
Does anyone have an idea why this update is needed? I'm worried it may 'update' a forced retirement on my wife's TomTom (it is getting rather old).

Why April 6?

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

Finally I found a link to what really happens in the movie Total Recall (is it recall or did it happen?).

https://www.mandatory.com/culture/1162415-exclusive-paul-verhoeven-finally-explains-ending-total-recall

You won't like what it says.

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.

As it turns out Pine64 shipped me a pair of bad cables or so it seems, as after getting replacement cables, the drives never produced any I/O errors again, and a long SMART test passed. A minor problem is that sometimes the system comes up and Linux can't detect the drives. A reboot generally serves to fix that but I wonder why it occasionally happens.

Some annoyances are that the system images that are provided don't come with proper defaults for most settings, even such things as Unicode support in the default locale, and so forth. The fan is controlled by software, and this software isn't even installed by default (grumble) and isn't available directly by an apt-get. Information on how to set these things up seems to be scattered about so I'm going to try to gather all that up here for my own quick reference in case I need to do this yet again (rather likely actually).

A big annoyance is the lack of proper UTF-8 locales. Apparently the following commands suffice to set it up:

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales
update-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8" LANGUAGE="en_US" LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Change the locale as desired if you don't want to use en_US. Setting up the timezone is one command:

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

The fan control software is a package known as ATS (Active Thermal Service), and what that page doesn't tell you about setting it up is that the default kernel it requires isn't installed on the current ROCKPro64 system images as of this writing, and needs to be installed manually. This forum post gives instructions on what kernel to install before setting up ATS.

The user community is much smaller than RPi's and so a lot of these small but important things aren't set up to be done automatically. Next step I'm going to try to take is set up the software I'm planning to use for it. Most of the stuff like Transmission might be relatively trivial, but since those folks running the transmissionbt Ubuntu PPA didn't make ARM builds, I'm probably going to have try to roll my own .debs for Transmission 2.94. I had to manually kludge 2.94 for the Odroid box I'm using today, and don't want to do that for this new system. Most of the basics such as web service and Samba appear to be a matter of apt. The big one is going to be Kodi. The LibreElec builds available are said to be of alpha quality, and that makes it sound like getting that part going is going to be a lot of work.

How Twitter Amplified The Ugliest Awards Season Ever