Wishing a happy International Bat Appreciation Day to all who celebrate.

Even before the election was called, the Greens unveiled their plan to counter the global and domestic challenges posed by Donald Trump’s chaotic government. It’s chock full of good ideas, including many you wouldn’t normally expect: Improving the east-west energy grid to beef up national energy sovereignty; ramping up domestic artillery production; the stoppage of observing U.S-imposed intellectual property laws; and integrating more closely with the European, Australian, and Ukrainian defence industries.

Well I decided to upgrade to Debian testing last night on my desktop here, just for fun. It seems fine.

Xfce4-screensaver wasn't in bullseye so I had an old locally compiled version installed, which may have been the cause of some video problems. Replaced with the debian build.

A broken bash completion script I had removed came back and was annoying until I remembered what I'd done.

Old searx install didn't work, neither did latest searxng install script from git. Too many python errors for me, so I gave up and ran the docker container instead. That was the only frustrating part.

Skyrim runs more smoothly and amdgpu hasn't crashed yet. It had been getting bad lately, locking up during video playback sometimes (maybe once a week) in the past month or two. I think perhaps running the newest kernels with the old mesa was a bad combination.

I ran out of disk space on the EFI partition during install, but it recovered no problem.

Other than that no problems so far.

They're talking about closing the main support office for the Mauna Loa Observatory — which is "recognised as the birthplace of global carbon dioxide monitoring and maintains the world's longest record of measurements of atmospheric CO2."

Changelog once again didn't make it to nexus but it looks fairly substantial.

The carbon dioxide (CO2) spewing from human activities is not only changing Earth’s atmosphere, it’s also rapidly acidifying the planet’s oceans. In 50 years, that acidification could reduce the oceans’ ability to absorb CO2 by 10% as it takes a toll on phytoplankton

... Nevertheless, it’s still too early to conclude that the projected declines in phytoplankton will inevitably reduce CO2 uptake by the world’s oceans, Church and others caution. It’s still possible the declines could be offset by higher plankton growth rates at high latitudes and other global processes involved in carbon cycling. However, Church says, “It certainly doesn’t help.”

It seems like whenever I post things to m/random there is a long pause and then sometimes an error message.

Error 503 first byte timeout

first byte timeout

Error 54113

Details: cache-lga21954-LGA 1741291495 2045459759

Varnish cache server

This time, the whole site was unresponsive for a minute afterwards. Did anyone varnish the cache server lately?

#fedia

Are we selling your data? Who can say, really? What does "selling" even mean? We'll just need you to agree to new some terms of use to be sure we can get away with whatever it is we'll be doing. Don't worry about it!

#firefox

As expected, the long-awaited ntsync has made its way into kernel 6.14.

ntsync "driver" to handle Windows locking types enabling Wine to work much better on many workloads (i.e. games). The driver framework was in 6.13, but now it's enabled and fully working properly. Should make many SteamOS users happy. Even comes with tests!

Meanwhile, in Québec... Carney demonstrates that he can parle français, Freeland goes on Tout le monde en parle.

If 2024 was the year of "age verification" let's build on this success and make 2025 the year of height verification. We must develop a consensus about where to draw the line, so that we can finally say "you must be at least this tall to use social media."

If modded Skyrim isn't the best game you ever played, you just need to add more mods. Sometimes they combine in ways that are better than expected. Today's discoveries:

1. Walking around at a somewhat normal pace in the game most of the time thanks to "Controller Walk Run Toggle" (speed configured with Autorun) means travel takes long enough that even the relatively mild effect of cold that's the default in Sunhelm becomes significant. It's not seemingly instant like some versions of survival mode, more like you've actually been outside for enough time that it makes sense you'd be feeling the cold.

My Skyrim time scale is set so there's still enough time to travel pretty far in a day but at one point it was getting dark and I had to think for a moment about how to stay warm that night. Just then the lights at the inn came into view. It felt a lot like it does irl when you're walking in the woods, it's a little longer than expected to get home, and it's getting dark. P

Holiday Skyrim binge initiated.

It's going to be a long time before I level up enough to start Dac0da. Best of the newly added mods to make a difference in the early game so far:

Passive Mudcrabs Controller Walk Run Toggle Cast Spells As Lesser Powers

Revel in the joy of our grand tax holiday! There will be no sales tax on thousands of items, to boost your solstice spending power! Video games, so long as you don't buy them the normal way. Some beverages, depending on size and ingredients. Pencil crayons, if they're bought as part of a package that contains blue ones. What spectacular benevolence!

NPCs keep the outfit even after uninstalling SPID or mods that distributed those outfits.

Oh damn, THAT was the problem with SPID 7.2RC1? I'm okay with that. I'm not one to uninstall things and not expect problems. According to tonight's test results that's the version that successfully distributes outfits that get equipped (unlike the previous version) and doesn't crash (unlike the newer RC builds.) It's no longer available on nexus but you can find it on github.

It appears that sometime in the past few days, posts from people I've followed have stopped showing up in the feed. The latest from pluralistic @ mamot.fr for instance is not there right now. He's not blocked me, I can see it if I go to his profile. All that shows up is stuff posted to hashtags that I follow.

I guess it's a new bug?

The TL/DR is this: The allegation that David Pugliese is a Russian asset has floated around Ottawa for about a decade — often with various degrees of evidence behind it. It was in recent years that these documents, which appear to be real and which were furnished by Kyiv, were sent to Canadian intelligence agencies and were seriously investigated. While Pugliese has proved himself to be a willing customer for Russian disinformation, and while I believe he hasn’t appropriately disclosed his relationship with the Russian embassy, the idea that he is a paid agent of the Russian government is probably false.

But recent Kremlin influence operations have blurred the lines between asset and useful idiot. They invite us to, as I said repeatedly during my statement at committee, get serious.

As opposed to Bill C-63, which pushes [age verification bullshit] far into the future and behind closed doors through an opaque regulatory process, our new Conservative legislation will directly legislate [age verification bullshit] that online operators must adhere to.

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.