Kristi Noem's decision to purchase two luxury private jets worth $200 million has raised eyebrows and sparked concerns about her judgment as a steward of taxpayer dollars.
Fun fact: #lawns, the world's largest and most useless irrigated crop, emit massive carbon dioxide and metabolites that attract endless swarms of #mosquitoes 🦟
Let the native #wildflowers grow and avoid the curse of diseases
I'm mapping out my new front yard. There are 5 old growth black walnut trees. All the sunny parts will be bee friendly flowers. No mow is my new mantra.
Why am I not surprised that it's not only shit for the environment, but also attracts the most pervasive disease spreading species for as long as humans have categorised life by their ability to carry diseases?
Oklahoma’s social studies standards, written with the help of the right-wing group behind Project 2025, now include roughly 40 points about Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 election and COVID-19’s origins.
Oklahoma has spent years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride in America’s history. By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, Oklahoma had been there, done that.
Education and politics should be without ANY religion.
"Religion is like penis, it's ok to have one, it's ok to be proud of it, but you never take it out in public especially near children!" --whoever said that, was exactly on point (can't find who said it)
The AWS outage bricked people's $2,700 smartbeds, leaving them in a reclining position or with the heat up. People were unable to use them, basically. A GitHub repo exists that lets people operate their beds without reliance on the normal infrastructure
When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.
Anyone able to recommend a good/free open source alternative to Adobe's InDesign? It doesn't need all the functionalities. It just needs to be able to prep books for print properly.
Scribus is what I use for my books. The desktop publishing part is OK, the export for print part is full of bug and traps depending the PDF specification and color space ICC of the printer. In short, under certain printer setup, it can be heaven, and on other, it can be hell. I met both cases. I have a 'print' tag on my blog with logging my, issue, and sharing my workaround about it.
@aaribaud my main tip with it: don't trust Scribus ability to convert images on the fly at export. It says it can but will bug depending the input ICC or image format.
So feed Scribus with ready converted TIFF, in the correct CMYK/ICC of printer, and use recent PDF specification if your printer allows it for the final, because PDFx 1.x versions (some printer still use that) can't be done properly with Scribus. (A ghostscript command line I share on one of my article can fix this).
@aaribauddavidrevoy.com/article757/the-… this article is my sort of 'post-mortem' blog post with all my failure, until the success (not representative of all Scribus journey, but of the worst case scenario: worst PDF spec, worst ICC, no communication with printer possible). As said, I also published many other things with Scribus with a full success and easy path, but it might help to read how I debugged the worst case scenario. Do not hesitate to ask me for help if you struggle with it.
If you're putting together bigger books, watch out for Scribus's memory handling. If a book has too many large images, Scribus can run out of memory and freeze/crash. It seems to keep uncompressed image data in memory even when the pages are off-screen. I had to split my 276-page (B&W!) book into numerous separate files to avoid this issue.
@davidrevoy I'm curious if you ran into this issue as well; I don't remember seeing mention of it in the posts about the similarly thick P&C books.
Yes, I ran into this 'too big' PDF exported issue( a bug reported AFAIK) , and it was critical on my side because my printer had a custom form on their webpage, and the upload had a limit for the filesize... I found a way to post process it with ghostscript. It's somewhere on this blog post ( edit: part of the "test 1, big book 1" chapter, a 2,4GB PDF and 800MB upload limit 🫠) davidrevoy.com/article757/the-… .
@davidrevoy This looks like a different issue, mine was with Scribus itself being unable to keep all my pages in memory at once, so I never even got as far as the PDF export on large books xP All my exports were under 30 pages because I had to split the book up, so I never ran into PDF file size issues.
To recap the billionaire class war on working people: •$100M on Trump golf trips •$172M for jets for ICE Barbie •$230M in DOJ payments to Trump •$250M for a vanity ballroom no one asked for •$40 BILLION to Argentina while our farmers suffer •$117 BILLION in annual tax cuts to the super wealthy 1% •$170 BILLION ICE budget to round up Americans like Gestapo
Meanwhile, this is a real actual headline in 2025 America under Trump: •Trump admin warns of "insufficient funds" for food stamps
They're providing the circus (albeit a very terrifying one), the least they can do is keep providing the bread. Lessons have been learned before on this. But I guess these people only read the parts of history they like from 1929-1941 and just fantasize about the rest.
11K likes, 90 comments - femalequotient on October 21, 2025: "What if the key to advancing women’s rights was teaching men how to champion them? That’s exactly what’s happening in #Senegal where husbands are being taught to reshape what partnership, …
All you LA people this is for you...and shame on the LAPD which I used to have respect for...I have watched a couple of different episodes in which it appears that you started or escalated the violence
LA Protestors are fighting for their rights against LAPD's violent crackdown. We must hold our leaders accountable and demand change. Call your local representative and ask them to remove Chief Jim McDonnell from office.
CHICAGO: Federal Judge Jeffrey Cummings has found that ICE agents violated the terms of a consent decree by detaining people without proper warrants. He ruled that as of this week ICE must wear body cams at all times and can face arrest and contempt proceedings if they conduct unlawful, warrantless arrests.
AGAIN, every judge nationwide should make this clear. ICE fascists must follow the law or they will face arrest. Period.
A childhood friend and her wife moved a couple years ago and their new home has a persimmon tree in the backyard! (I’m sooo envious). She gave me persimmon fruit spread last year. Like buttuh, as they say. 🤤
"Do we not care about them?" Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) told The Hill, adding: “Let’s not be punitive to Americans just to score political points.”
The image is a three-panel comic strip with a black and white, hand-drawn style. The characters are aliens, mostly small, round-headed figures with large eyes. The first panel shows two aliens standing near a flying saucer with a light shining from underneath, with one pointing upwards and the other looking concerned. The second panel depicts three aliens standing next to a screen, with one looking at it and the others observing. The third panel shows two aliens, with one looking skeptical while the other appears excited.
Ok, starting to get used to mornings like this, 51°, no longer shivering and saying damn its cold. Yesterday I turned the heat off before leaving for work, and haven't needed to turn it on. #today is boring, just work, the cursed zone A1C, which means an 8 to 10 hour day, definitely going to bed when I get home, nothing is getting accomplished if its not accomplished before work.
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it.
The Beginning: A Curious Experiment
It all started innocently enough.
Unpopular opinion: the silver lining in server outages is that they pull the curtain & reveal some hard truths about who is really behind some services we use... especially stuff we think are alternatives to Big Tech (spoiler: maybe they aren't).
there's also the possibility they're lying and it's writing way less than 75% but they're still relying on it and wasting a bunch of time trying to coax the LLMs to work
This image shows a screenshot of a Twitter thread with three posts from different accounts. The first post, from an account named "kandice_martellaro," features a profile picture of a person with short dark hair. The post states, “If you’re planning to watch that HBO Harry Potter series, I really hope you understand two things: 1. She pushed this reboot because the original cast have publicly supported the transgender community and she wants a ‘do-over’ that doesn’t involve them. 2. Putting money into her pocket WILL directly harm transgender folks and specifically transgender kids. She uses her wealth to block bills that would protect trans youth. It’s different than just hate speech (which is bad enough).” Below this post is a reply from an account named "jk_rowling" with a profile picture of a person, stating, “Sorry, but that was irresistible.” The final post is from an account named "tradingMaxiSL," displaying a profile picture of a person, reading, “What actor/actress instantly ruins a movie for you?” The posts each have corresponding numbers of likes, retweets, and replies indicated below them.
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:27b
*put in online request for quotes to replace our water heater* *get over a dozen emails asking me to call them*
The whole point of asking for ONLINE quotes was to get ballpark estimates WITHOUT having to talk to a half-dozen competing plumbers on the phone, people. 🤦🏻♂️
Every time I have driven a car in like 10 years my mind is boggled by how bad modern screen infotainment systems are at surfing FM radio. They pretty much universally got rid of the "scan" function. Why the fuck
If you participated in the No Kings protest and shared photos of it on any platform within Meta’s ecosystem (including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Threads, or WhatsApp) — or if you’ve spoken out against ICE, or followed or promoted individuals or groups that track ICE activity — your account has been placed in an internal user group called “2383.”
I do not know the purpose of this group, and I have not observed any direct changes to anyone’s account as a result of being in it. However, a significant number of people have been internally assigned to user group "2383". 🤔
it is extremely funny to me that a literal trillion dollars funnelled into a cloud provider results in more sev0 / sev1 outages per year than you'd get with a hosting provider run by a polycule out of an apartment block in rural Germany.
I mean *sure* but also most tiny providers rather balk at requests like "I would like to replicate 3pb of data to you tomorrow would that be ok kthx". Nobody running tiny easily movable things is in us-east-1 anymore.
although on this note I recently priced up a 100PiB rack (complete with redundant head nodes) and it wasn't as ridiculous as I was expecting. within "handful of friends deciding to set up a backup provider" distance. drive density per £ has been skyrocketing.
@jonty truck full of disks has the highest bandwidth. Always has, always will. At that amount of data, you'd likely drive over at least the initial sync
Remember Kermit? Back in the 80s, it's documentation said never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon (What's that Uncle Bill?) full of magnetic tape. I think high density was 1600bpi back then.
We got the national guard type shit in Memphis now. Shit lowkey ian got a problem with that . Cutting down crime and shit well good 👍🏾 nobody gonna say it ain't. But they deadass racial profile! Example. I was walking along with my cousins. They came up in they uniforms an shit. ' where you going?' They say. 🤔 ' the fck you mean where we going ' i say. He say ' boy i asked where you going ' ' to the store here' I say. He say ' watch your mouth' and walks off! #BlackMastodon
Be careful out there. They aren't there to *fix anything*.
From a former active duty and reserve(weekend warrior) I will say this:
1. They know for a fact that they can't do shit. They are not law enforcement (not that they won't try to do something). 2. They will pick on anyone who doesn't know their rights because they are feeling themselves and get to play army. 3. Y'all did the right thing and kept it moving.
According to ClearSky, which tracks Bluesky blocking stats, the White House account is blocked by around 91,000 accounts, while being followed by only 10,000. techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/the-…
The Trump administration is taking its social media attacks on Democratic opponents to an unlikely platform, with the White House and numerous other government agencies joining Bluesky on Friday.
Besides Vance trying to become a "tik-tok star", we have the alleged "hunting stand" set up near where Trump's airplane was parked in Florida. The pictures in today's news articles are kind of fuzzy, but given the resolution, the "hunting stand" looks like a crude tree house built by 11--12 year old boys. I guess "'suspicious' hunting stand" gets the media more clicks than "'suspicious' tree house".
Republicans have become **incredibly good** at announcing some sort of anger/outrage while also having some level of deniability. Take the 2024 election for example.
Leading up to the election: "The elections are rigged!! By the democrats!!! You'll see!! Don't believe if Trump loses!"
Immediately after Trump "wins": Well, you see, everything worked out the way we thought.
Once you notice the pattern, you cannot not see it.
![The image is a three-panel comic strip with a black and white, hand-drawn style. The characters are aliens, mostly small, round-headed figures with large eyes. The first panel shows two aliens standing near a flying saucer with a light shining from underneath, with one pointing upwards and the other looking concerned. The second panel depicts three aliens standing next to a screen, with one looking at it and the others observing. The third panel shows two aliens, with one looking skeptical while the other appears excited.</p><p>The text in each panel reads as follows: “So did A.I. get out of control on your planet?” “No... A.I. made life perfect!” “Assisting oligarchs to own you.” “Hmm…” “But Google’s motto is ‘Don’t be evil’!” “See? Nothing to worry about!” “They’re being ironic.” The bottom right corner includes a small copyright notice stating “© 2023 Wiley Ink, Ltd. 10-21” along with distribution information and a website address: “wileyink[@]earthlink.net” and “GoComics.com.”](https://blog.taursnd.haus/photo/191758777968f794ba1ca32323319501-1.gif "The image is a three-panel comic strip with a black and white, hand-drawn style. The characters are aliens, mostly small, round-headed figures with large eyes. The first panel shows two aliens standing near a flying saucer with a light shining from underneath, with one pointing upwards and the other looking concerned. The second panel depicts three aliens standing next to a screen, with one looking at it and the others observing. The third panel shows two aliens, with one looking skeptical while the other appears excited.</p><p>The text in each panel reads as follows: “So did A.I. get out of control on your planet?” “No... A.I. made life perfect!” “Assisting oligarchs to own you.” “Hmm…” “But Google’s motto is ‘Don’t be evil’!” “See? Nothing to worry about!” “They’re being ironic.” The bottom right corner includes a small copyright notice stating “© 2023 Wiley Ink, Ltd. 10-21” along with distribution information and a website address: “wileyink[@]earthlink.net” and “GoComics.com.”")
Richard R Lee
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •@georgetakei
TheNovemberFella ✊🏳️🌈 🇺🇦☸️🛰️🚀
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Tâi Siáu-káu 台痟狗 ㄊㄇㄉ 🇳🇫 台灣國
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •Kierk or gaanks
in reply to George Takei 🏳️🌈🖖🏽 • • •