For the past several days, when I try to view a Favorite Stories page (any of them) sometimes it will behave normally, and sometimes the most recent updates it will show are from months ago, typically July, sometimes as far back as May. Has anyone else been seeing this, or am I just some middle-point cache's extra-special friend? Tossing my own browser cache has no effect.

Which one's better: being "sheeple" that need to wake up, or being "woke"?

Previous thread.

Since I just closed the last thread, let me repeat Labster's post from its last message:

In the last post of the last thread, Labster said: Wrote:

(09-14-2022, 07:35 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Yeah.  My nightmare scenario is someone doing something that causes the Stewards to push the TOS to full-TVT where we can't even acknowledge the existence of NSFW works.  I'm worried that even without someone doing something, they're going to inevitably creep into that territory.

Given how absolutely useless some of our alleged features are as things currently exist -- just try to use typeahead in the search prompt, or expect pop-up link suggestions while editing; you'll be waiting forever -- not to mention the random and all-too-frequent 50* errors, I agree that it's time to start shopping around for a more reliable host.

I've talked to them.  Apparently they're all freaked out by the way a former steward was dismissed by recall; even though that was a special case, no one wants to make any controversial rulings now.  They're also afraid of vote brigades.  So this is a way of forcing the vote on to everyone else before triggering the controversy, so that they can implement the moderation that was already against policy but required an (obvious) judgement call.  (I have told them that the people who are unhappy now will still be unhappy later because that's what moderation is like.)  So really, we should see this as a null policy change, but a vote to actually implement the existing policy.

I hate to admit it, but I now think my original policy was flawed because humans are cowards -- or morons, or otherwise despicable.  Is it really so hard to do the right thing when the vast majority of people support you doing the right thing?

I just saw Clerks III at my local Regal cinemas. They're having one showing every night this week as a special "Fathom Event" movie.

I saw the original Clerks over twenty years ago and appreciated the artistry even if I didn't really like the movie as a whole. I saw Clerks II in the theater and found it moderately enjoyable, if less artistically compelling. I liked Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to varying degrees. I didn't even bother seeing Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.

Having said all of that...

Clerks III is Kevin Smith's magnum opus. It is by far the best movie of his that I've seen, and quite possibly the best movie he will ever make. It is the single best movie I've seen in theaters over the past several years. There were points during this movie where I was legitimately choked up and on the verge of tears over characters known for dick jokes and gross out humor.

So if you have any interest in Kevin Smith movies in general or the Clerks franchise in particular, I hope you choose to see it on the big screen while you still can.

Here's a little story about what life is like as a programmer, without getting into anything too technical.  For those of you who understand the idiom: this is a story of yak shaving.

So, I have a little program that helps me to organize various images I find online.  Because it's a little program, I run it on a little computer/server, a Raspberry Pi. One of the things that I've noticed lately is that new kinds of image formats are popping up now, specifically AVIF and WEBP.  They're a lot smaller for the same image quality.  And because I make downscaled thumbnails of the images, if I want to support them in my program, I need to have an image library that can read the things.

I look online and see, oh great, the current version of Image Magick supports these formats.  So all I need to do is compile a new version of the library.  Except that it didn't work, and now it actually didn't even want to show JPEGs either.  So the obvious thing is that I'm missing "optional" libraries that make the thing actually work.

So I start googling around.  What are the libraries?  What are they?  Eventually I find that Image Magick calls them delegates for some reason, whatever, and I find a XML list of delegates on their website.  That list doesn't include AVIF or WEBP.  I just start installing random image libraries like libjpeg-turbo, libwebp.  Those work, hurray!

But what about AVIF?  Well, my googling did find that the GD graphics library uses libavif or libheif to support AVIF.  So let's try libheif (which incidentally also supports HEIC).  And... nada.  This is not working.

So now I'm desperate enough to start reading the code for Image Magick.  After about, oh 15-20 minutes of poking around, I find this line:

  PKG_CHECK_MODULES([HEIF],[libheif >= 1.4.0],[have_heic=yes],[have_heic=no])

And my version, freshly installed, is 1.3.2.  So I need a newer library, and the built-in software installer (apt) isn't giving it to me.

The problem is pretty obvious to me: I'm getting older versions of software, because I'm one version behind on my Raspberry Pi flavor of Debian.  All I need to do is upgrade to the new version.  How do I do that again?  It's not like a consumer computer that nags you to install Windows 11 if you want to be cool.  So more googling, and I quickly find out that you need to edit a random system file to change the sources.  Literally, you're editing two lines of a text file and replacing "buster" with "bullseye", because that's obvious I guess?

The site also recommends making a backup before doing it.  This is, as we find out later, a Good Thing.  Anyway, I'm like "sure, let's backup!"  I grab the little SD card out of the Raspberry Pi -- this is where the small little box keeps its data.  All I need is something to read memory cards in another computer, now.  It's way too small for the slot in the laptop -- maybe I have an adapter around?

I start moving stuff around until I finally found the memory card adapter.  And it is comically the wrong size.  Did I say memory card adapter?  I meant I found a memory *stick* adapter.  The digital camera I bought is ancient now.  So I need one of those adapter thingies for micro SD to SD card, and honestly, I should just buy another memory card so I have more space anyway.  I spend about 20 minutes researching what the numbers on the outside of the memory cards actually mean so I can get a good one for the use case.  Ordering only takes a couple minutes on Amazon, and should be here in the morning.

But I start looking around for how to actually back it up.  There are command line ways to make backups (dd is kinda scary), but someone made a really nice looking software that makes it easy to load on the SD card, so I want to use that.  The website helpfully tells me that my operating system on the Mac is too old to run the software, too.  You may be starting to see a pattern with me.  (That pattern is to not mess with things that are working.)

Now, what I need to do next is to back up the Mac before a major version upgrade.  Or, well, 3 major versions, which I really needed to do anyway because of security updates.  Most of my work is inherently backed up, so I'm not good about automatic backups -- if I pushed it to another computer (with git) or put it on the wiki, there's a copy.  So for full backups, I like having a backup that's offline most of the time, because no ransomware is going to delete a hard drive that's not plugged in.

So I plug in... which drive is it again?  I start rummaging through drawers, and dig up five different external hard drives before I find the one that's doing backups.  (Yes, I am a bad sysadmin.)  Finally, I plug it in; backup goes smoothly.  And then I immediately run the software update program.

And then I wait.  And I take the dog for a walk.  Huh, seems stalled.  I make dinner, and eat it.  Bon appetit.  I come back and it's still stalled at exactly the same place.  After two and a half hours, and a bit more googling, I'm done with waiting.  I flip the power off.  The screen goes black.  Power it up again, and it starts up, loads a progress bar that stops in the exact same spot.  Ugh.  What now.

After a moment, the computer restarts itself, the progress bar loads up, and starts progressing itself. In one more minute, I have a login screen.  The moral of the story: to fix electronics, simply turn them off and on again.  But I'm sure glad I had that 2 minute old backup!

After clicking past the setup screens, now it's the old process of making sure what used to work on the old OS works on the new one.  Reinstall dev tools, update developer software with homebrew.  It's not too bad, just time consuming.  Some apps are now broken in the new OS, but such is the cost of progress.

Meanwhile, I now have a pile of cords and hard drives all around the room that need dusted and put away.  Why am I doing this again?  Oh right, images.  The room is a now a total mess because I wanted to resize some newfangled image files.  Hopefully my SD micro card will come tomorrow and everything will work fine... but you never know.

This particular example the craft of programming I hope is pretty accessible because there are a lot of physical objects and things that casual computer users end up doing as well.  And yet I needed to know four different languages to get there and manage two different operating systems.  Most of the time you don't get so many physical objects, it's just figuring out how to get software to talk to other software and users.  So yeah, it's a fun hobby!

old thread is old

Is there anything out there that runs on Windows 10 and converts PDF to Excel locally?

Adobe Reader sends the file to an Adobe server, which is not "locally".

Asking for a family member.

Bob,

I thought to recommend this podcast as a source of research for this step. The hosts analyze the characters based on their actions in the books. Considering all the headcanons running around this could serve as a check for their characterizations at the point you are in the story.

https://www.realweirdsisters.com/

link

Hey Dood / The Prinnies

Hey dood, don't make us work
Or fight too hard, or, or explo-o-ode
Just give us a fresh sardine every day
Per week's okay... per month? Aw, dood.

Hey dood, don't pick us up
We're made out of knives, bombs, and leather
If you throw us you know we will explode
and blast shrapnel at least two squares, dood

We cook and clean for tiny pay, but dood, someday
We'll pay off the debt that's on our shoulders
And then we know that sometime soon
a crimson moon
will let us reincarnate, no more your soldiers

Hey dood, yeah we were bad
in life but now we're repentant sinners
Lord Valvatorez put discipline in our hearts
Fear of him's a start at acting better

So wave and dance and do a spin, hey dood, we win
How many more levels did we gain now?
Whatever, it's still not enough, 'cause dood, Baal's tough
even with some fire support from Pringer

Hey dood, this song's not bad
It's an anthem for all us prinnies
Remember, there's human souls in our hide
before you decide to throw us
Prinnies prinnies prinnies prinnies prinnies prinnies, oh!

Na na na nananana, nannana, hey dood...
Na na na nananana, nannana, hey dood...
(Dood, dood, dood dood dood dood!)
Na na na nananana, nannana, hey dood...
Na na na nananana, nannana, hey dood...
(fade out)

If Trump is correct and he won the 2020 election, why is he planning to run in 2024? There's a Constitutional limit to two terms for any given President, isn't there?