Your Friday Nightmare Fuel
3 Comments
Tags: firstperson, furries, photography, sf, teeth
Location: 37° 46' 27.07" N, 122° 24' 40.96" W
flexget
Dear Lazyweb,
Is there yet anything that sucks less than flexget, for taking an RSS feed with torrents of TV shows in it, parsing the episode numbers, and only downloading the ones that have not already been downloaded?
Because flexget really is a piece of shit.
I hate you, Milkman Python.
File "/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.9.4-py2.7-macosx-10.9-intel.egg/sqlalchemy/sql/compiler.py", line 2185, in _get_colparams
(", ".join("%s" % c for c in check))
sqlalchemy.exc.CompileError: Unconsumed column names: value
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, tv
Band Metadata
Dear Lazyweb,
I would like a service that maps a band name to their web site, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and whatnot. Does such a tool exist?
Tags: dnalounge, firstperson, lazyweb, music
DNA Lounge: Wherein it's a Tale of Two Flyers
I love that these two flyers have the exact same color scheme but it's still immediately apparent that they are... uh... coming from different places entirely.
Scenes from our dystopian cyberpunk present
How is this headline for real?Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware
To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums. [...]
A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment... arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors. [...]
And a reminder to never trust a man with a pig farm:
Deere sold farmers their tractors, but has used software to maintain control of every aspect of its use after the sale. Kluthe, for example, uses pig manure to power his tractor, which requires engine modifications that would likely violate John Deere's terms of service on newer machines.
"I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
DNA Lounge: Wherein it's ancient history time.
SF Weekly published a nice profile of "SF's most iconic music venues" -- thus establishing that DNA Lounge is not "iconic", so that's good to know. They wrote articles on Bottom of the Hill, Fillmore, Regency, Warfield, and Great American Music Hall.Snark aside, I find these historical details really interesting. That's why, years ago, I wrote up the ancient history of DNA Lounge and environs.
Do The Bay did a nice piece on Hotline, our four room indie party happening next Friday the 31st. Blondie K and subOctave have been putting a huge amount of effort into into this, so I expect it to be great! Also apparently they bought, like, a zillion telephones.
I noticed recently that the Javascript I had on the photo galleries to make swipe gestures work was failing in weird ways, so I gave up, threw away all of my code, and switched to using a package called PhotoSwipe instead. It seems to be working pretty well: let me know if you see it malfunction.
Integrating it was a bit tricky because I wanted everything to still work without Javascript, because I'm old school like that, and because I didn't want my existing URL structure to change (that's what the "U" stands for, you know). URLs matter. They tell you whether the person building the web site had a plan and a modicum of taste, or whether they just threw feces at the wall to see what stuck. In my humble but correct opinion,
Ask me what I think of
The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Tags: big brother, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, eyes, mpegs, teeth
So, You Want To Test A Nuclear Weapon?
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you have a brand new nuclear weapon.Let's not quibble for the moment over how it came to be. Perhaps you decided the Reliable Replacement Warhead program was a good idea after all and grabbed one of the designs that were put forward in the twilight of Bush/dawn of Obama and built it. Perhaps you had a brand new one whipped up and it's gonna be great! All that matters is that you have it.
But does it actually work? The computer models say it's A+, hunky dory, best nuke ever. Except now it's a physical object, not a simulation. Were the engineering tolerances right? Did we get the metallurgy down? WILL IT ACTUALLY WORK?!?! Unless you can convince the brass that it's does, they won't order this new design, much less deploy it. And you won't know unless you set it off, as a representative of a new fleet of nuclear weapons. And so begins the Choose Your Own Nuclear Adventure!
Atmospheric testing does have its benefits, namely that it's comparatively easy to do and, by jingo, people will know that you set off a nuclear device. Very showy and attention getting, great media coverage I bet. Here's a few demonstration videos. There is this one slight drawback in that Kennedy kinda, sorta signed a treaty and Congress ratified it 54 years ago that we said we wouldn't do atmospheric testing anymore. That will make some people very unhappy. But you do you.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Trommelwähler
Trommelwähler: Until now, I had not realized that there was a Drum Selector Telephone-shaped hole in my life. And people say I'm hard to shop for.
Tags: mpegs, phones, retrocomputing
