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Am trying Antergos linux (arch install easier), due to having a 'slow' computer. I installed Arch a while ago on a different computer and found it was alright, but had issues with getting my modem (ath9k) working after every reboot.
Currently i have Kubuntu as my main OS, but am working off the Ubuntu family, as i don't like the 'freedom' direction it is taking.

Antergos seems nice so far (also tried Manjaro, but had major issues with it (although it is beta currently)(although so is Antergos....).

The speed is nice, although i have to go through setting it all up again (guake, steam, palemoon, etc) and am trying out different DE's for speed (i3wm is cool: you get a screen you can't do anything with with a mouse.. had to go to the site to find out how to make things happen (alt/enter! huh!), so will try that out at home tonight (see how it compares to Awesome).
The gui installer seems to actually work (Manjaro's gave errors all the time), but am going back to command line because it seems safer until it exits beta).

Maybe someday i'll get back into Linux From Scratch, lol. (like i'll ever have that amount of time again... maybe when i'm 80 if my son hasn't killed me by then) :)

And f*ck all people who aren't me (put that in in case Ethanol is viewing this, lol).

We've all got little made up words and phrases that we use too much that help to define our personality.

* The gerbils will feast on your/thy flesh -- Either humorous, or, less commonly, an indication that for your crimes you will be devoured by an army of undead gerbils. Like saying "you're going to fry in hell"

* Two bits short of a byte -- A few screws loose, not that bright, stupid, nuts.

* Nurble -- like derp, used to express a blank mind, no opinion, or no comment.

* Fudge ripple/Fudge ripple splatters -- shit.

* Fruity in the coconut -- Just plain nuts.

* Fucktard/fuckwit -- An extremely idiotic person.

* Stinky -- a smoke.

* Shit sandwich -- A terrible person, an intense asshole.

* As you say -- A statement of willingness to yield to another.

* Beef and beetle stew -- A lemon, defective, pointless. Originates from a childhood meal ruined by strange little red beetle things.

* Fuzzy crawler -- A larvae of the dermestid beetle, the "hide beetle". Hairy little brown caterpillars that I think are cute. I used to keep colonies as pets. See this image.

* Squeak -- A pencil or pen

* Underscare -- Underwear.

* Gorp -- A mix of peanuts, raisins, and often other nuts used as a snack. Trail mix.

* Face cheese -- Pus from acne

* Mewble -- The distorted meow a cat makes when it wants something.

* Fugly -- Ugly as fuck.

* Ear cheese -- Earwax.

* Salvation-in-a-bottle -- My OCD medication.

  * Satur-nes-day/Thurs-nes-day/etc -- An intentional mispronunciation of days of the week, pointing out the strange spelling of "Wednesday".

* Up your ass and around the corner -- You asked me where something is that I don't want you to find.

Got any of your own? It'd be fun to see.

It's been a pretty busy month and a half since the last update. Summer is finally here!

After a bit of a dry spell, I was able to line up 2 dates since the last update. The first girl was a teacher at a high school. She had curly black hair and glasses - a combination that usually drive me wild. We met for some drinks after work one day, but it didn't go very well. She was a nice girl and all, but no chemistry at all. Actually, she really, really reminded me of a girl that I grew up with that was practically a sister, so it was a little weird. No second date on that one.

The other girl is 25 or 26 (can't remember), and we met in a local park for a first date. She is currently in school taking psychology, so is pretty poor. A tiny thing - blond, maybe 5'5" and slim. We chatted as we walked though the park (she is a talker, so mostly I listened...) and then I bought her a drink and we shared some appetizers.

I saw her again last night for a second date, and she made me chicken wings and stuffed potatoes for dinner. I was in charge of a salad, and my wife makes really, really good salad dressings. My wife made me a salad kit with dressing, fresh basil, and roasted nuts to bring for the salad. It was pretty awesome to have my wife help make my date special. My wife is pretty great!

We made dinner and after ended up cuddling on the couch and watching a couple TV shows. We had a great first kiss.

After the first date, I was a little on the fence about her, but after the last date, I definitely feel there could be something there. I'm a little scared to get my hopes up too much though after how things went the last time I like someone (the last one basically ditched me...), but I really hope to see her again.

My wife and I are still doing great. It's been almost a year since we opened our marriage up. I still feel that opening up has so far improved our relationship. She likes the extra confidence I have when things are working out, and picks me up when I am down when things aren't working out. I'm very thankful to have such an amazing woman in my life. I hope that when she starts looking for secondary relationships I can be as supportive to her as she has been for me.

-- Snow

I'm still using Firefox, and I have it on my (new) Android phone as well as my home Linux system.

A couple of days ago, Firefox updated itself on my phone, and now it renders pages differently, and less well, in my opinion. It may just be a coincidence. Maybe soylentews.org has changed?

Up until the upgrade, it used to render the main text area in stories and the comment threads below to fill the width of the screen automatically, and the text would wrap at the screen edges. I like this, because the (useful/interesting) text is automatically the most prominent and is given all the screen area. Also, zooming would make the text larger, and would still wrap it at the edges if the screen, so you could still read everything without scrolling left and right continually.

Now, the whole page takes the whole width of the screen, and you have to manually zoom to the text, and it doesn't wrap, because you're zooming the whole pages, borders, menus and all, not just the interesting stuff.

Have I missed something? Is there a setting in the browser?

In general in the last few years as shallow but wide screens have become the norm, we pages are generally designed to a certain fixed width. Gone are the days when you could resize your browser window and the text would reflow to fit your personal preference.

I read better in relatively narrow vertical columns. I was once told that this is most natural, and one of the reasons that traditional newspapers printed in columns. It's tiring and easy to get lost reading very long horizontal lines.

And those of us who like to use our window managers to have multiple windows tiled and overlapping on our multiple desktops do not like to have to maximise a browser window or to take up 80% of the screen just to render a fixed-width web page.

And web pages these days are all L A R G E F O N T S, W H I T E S P A C E , A N I M A T I O N S, V I D E O S A N D F L O A T I N G P O P O V E R M E N U S A N D C A N C E L B U T T O N S.

Bah!

Update: It appears that Firefox has an option to make the text larger which solves the immediate problem with rendering this site.

NASA says their New Horizons probe suffered a temporary communication breakdown on Saturday at 17:54 UTC, 10 days before it's supposed to fly past Pluto on 2015-07-14. The probe went into "safe mode" but it will still fly past Pluto at the planned distance, speed, and time. The glitch may cause the approach animations and a gap in the light curves for Nix and Hydra. The mission team is working to restore communications to normal. "Full recovery is expected to take from one to several days," NASA wrote in a status report on Saturday. "New Horizons will be temporarily unable to collect science data during that time. The latency one way is currently 4.5 hours.

The two way communication progress can be seen here at the Canberra dish. There's a thread over at New Horizons Pluto System Encounter, 28 Jun 15 that has some things to say about the issue.

Some close up pictures of the planet: dark band at the bottom is around the equator.

University of Cambridge is Recruiting for a Professor of LEGO in 2015. The selected candidate will head a new research center that focuses on children’s relationships with play in education, development and learning. They will also investigate how unrestrictive play can help improve a child’s experience of education. LEGO funds it with an 4 million GBP donation (6.2 million USD).

N.b. since this is filled to the brim with my own opinion and reactions it doesn't suit being submitted as a story, great for a journal entry though :)

Syriza (a Greek acronym of what would be something like “The Coalition of the Radical Left” in English) is the main and largest party in the current coalition government in Greece. With a name like that (and lots and lots of ideology that I'm rather allergic to XD) I wasn't enthusiastic when they won the Greek election, I thought they would be like so many others who describe themselves in the same manner (there are always exceptions though, I know that).

But my misgivings have been put to shame! Time and time again they've obviously done their best to protect and champion the interests of Greece against the so-called “austerity” dictated by the EU and other scum like the IMF. “Austerity” which only ever seems to target those who are already living sparse and austere lives. “Austerity” which shrinks the economy as those most likely to spend any money they have on essential goods get even less money to spend. “Austerity” which continues to regress any remnants of national sovereignty into iron clad bureaucracy at the beck and call of the constantly manipulating and transnational “free actors” of “global commerce” (warning shadows of the steadfastly approaching horrors of TTIP and TPP).

It also helped put me at ease when I discovered that the tiny party I would be most likely to vote for if I was Greek was part of the government coalition. That party would be the “new/alternative right” ANEL or “Independent Greeks”.

Now RT reports that the Greek government has taken it even further towards actual democracy and announced a referendum to be held for people to vote in favor or against the debt deal that is being offered to Greece. The Greek people will instruct the Greek government as is appropriate in any democracy.

Thank you Greece, thank you Syriza, and thank you ANEL, your sensibility is shining one of the few lights and perhaps one of the brightest in a rather dismally dark and depressing world, may you continue down this path ♥

That's all I really wanted to say.

TS;RM! (Too Short; Rant More!)

Yeah I need to get this off my chest.

• First:

  Although certainly a central topic those who think the US civil war /as a war/ was about the emancipation of slaves rather than a war over secession and declaration of independence are as ignorant or malicious as those who think the second world war was fought on account of rescuing jews and other holocaust victims rather than a war fought to liberate invaded countries and territory.

  The victims of both are the ones that ought to be the most offended over such examples of blatant rewriting of history aimed solely at falsely glorifying the victors and endowing them with attributes they never had. The history and even more so the history of the victims (slaves, jews, slavic people, homosexuals, the seriously ill, the debilitated, anyone who stuck their neck out etc.) is being reduced to a lie.

• Second:

  The US attempts at removal of the use of the confederate flag (which belongs to everyone living in the states that tried to break free from the US) is an example of cultural theft equal to that of the (continued) nazi appropriation and gross abuse of pan-germanic and pagan symbols like sun-wheels (like swastikas) and runes (which belongs to everyone in non-roman Europe in particular but also humanity in general).

• Third:

  Unfortunate and wasteful as it is the US and NATO is now clearly first and foremost fascist just as the Soviet Union and Warsaw pact was fascist and as the Third Reich and Axis powers were fascist and that's true no matter how offensive it might feel feels to Germans (few of them complain, denial is rare), Russians (some of them complain, denial is still somewhat common), or Usians (almost everyone will complain, denial is “truth”).

To me it is as if during the last 16 years the world has lost between 200 and 300 years of progress paid for in blood and suffering by billions of humans. But of course that's not the case: it probably wasn't widespread in the first place and “everyone” just rode on the coattails of a few of the less idiotic humans having a somewhat brief period of actual influence and power. Well that era is done and gone that's for sure :C

So I released one of the biggest updates ever for Epoch a couple days ago. As of writing I have yet to update the site documentation, but I thought I'd recap some of the new stuff.

* Basic dependency support. ObjectStartPriority=sshd+1 for example. This is the most requested feature for Epoch of all time.
* 'epoch merge' and 'epoch unmerge' commands to automatically add or delete a config Import= line from epoch.conf, which will help distro maintainers.
* Ability to change logfile location via the LogFile= config attribute.
* Ability to skip or start objects from the kernel command line via skipobj= and startobj=
* New "interactive" mode for boot which mimics old Red Hat releases' "press I for interactive startup" thing with sysvinit. All objects intended to be interactive must have ObjectOptions=INTERACTIVE set.
* Ability to ignore all kernel options passed to Epoch, useful for initramfs. Depends on existence of /.epochnokargs file.
* Added option to ignore when a MountVirtual (e.g. /proc, /sys, /dev. /dev/pts, or /dev/shm) fails to mount.
* Ability to specify the amount of time that should be considered too soon for a service to be auto-restarted.
* Fixed problems with colors and 'less' command. 'epoch help' now returns without color, and 'epoch statusnc' can be used to view status without color. I prefer color because it's easier for me to see at a glance, but now you have the choice.
* Added makefile support, which just calls ./buildepoch.sh. There is also a make clean and you can specify options to buildepoch.sh with 'make BUILDOPTS="--myoption"'.
* Epoch now compiles as C99. I was getting too happy with my nice C99 // comments.

This is probably the biggest update I've released since 1.0.0 "Sage".

Get it while it's hot.

http://universe2.us/epoch.html

Now one can have 128 GByte of RAM in a PC. Corsair offers 128 GB DDR4/2400 for 1980 US$ and Kingston is to offer 3000 MHz speeds. Kingston did the deed not with the pricey Core i7-5960X Haswell-E processor, but the cheapie Core i7-5820K CPU.

But to get ECC you need a very pricey Xeon processor. But your alpha radiation detector is included by just scanning the RAM..

Guess 64-bit address bus finally found a use case :p