To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

It seems as if he can do it up until election day. The hitch is that Vance has to step down, but I can’t imagine that he’d resist if, behind closed doors, Trump told him to beat it.

I am not an expert on presidential election rules, though, so if you have a different source saying that he can’t, I’d appreciate a link. And, no, “9 News” is not an ultimate source of truth, but I didn’t find anything that said otherwise.

F-Droid

Most of the apps I have and use are installed via Droidify. The ones that aren’t are company apps, like banking or airline. I could just used the web sites for those; they’re only conveniences.

My phone isn’t rooted, and I didn’t read the article so I don’t know how this will affect me. If push comes to shove, I’ll simply bite the bullet and get a phone I can install Linux on next time, regardless of how polished for daily driving it is.

The Energy Star program had been around for around 15 years at that point

And, for computers, was almost exclusively limited to monitors. In 2009, the Energy Star specification was version 4.0, released in 2006. In that specification, the EPA’s objective was to get 40% of the computers on the market to have power management capabilities 2010 – 40% by the year after Bitcoin was introduced. Intel’s 2009 TCO-driven upgrade cycle document mentions power management, but power use isn’t included in any of the TCO metrics.

All of the focus on low-power processing units in 2009 was for mobile devices and DSPs. Computer-oriented energy savings at the time was focused on processes, e.g. manually powering down computers or use of suspension and hibernation - there was very little CPU clock scaling available for desktop computers – you turned them off to save power. DVFS didn’t become widely available – or effective – until 2006, and a study published in 2009 (again, the same year Bitcoin was introduced) found that “only 20% of initiatives had measurable targets.”

So, yes: technically, there were people thinking about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t a common consumer consideration, and the tools for power management were crude: your desktop was on and consuming power – always the same amount of power – or it was off. And people did power down their computers to save energy. But, like I said, if your desktop was on, it was consuming the same amount of energy whether you were running a miner or weren’t. There was a motto at the time bandied about by SETI@home, that your computer was using energy anyway, so you might as well do science with the spare CPU cycles. That was the mindset of most people who had computers at the time.

Ah. STV isn’t particularly complex to understand, either at voting or calculation time. It’s a decent choice for multi-winner elections, which it sounds like the Portland election is.

I’m designing off the top of my head, but I think you could do it with a DHT, or even just steal some distributed ledger algorithm from a blockchain. Or, you develop a distributed skip tree – but you’re right, any sort of distributed query is going to have a possibly unacceptable latency. So you might – like Bitcoin – distributed the index itself to participants (which could be large), but federate the indexing operation s.t. rather than a dozen different search engine crawlers hitting each web site, you’d have one or two crawlers per site feeding the shared index.

Distributed search engines have existed for over a decade. Several solutions for distributed Lucene clusters exist (SOLR, katta, ElasticSearch, O2) and while they’re mostly designed to be run in a LAN where the latencies between nodes is small, I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine a fairly low-latency distributed, replicated index where the nodes have a small subset of peer nodes which, together, encompass the entire index. No instance has the same set of peer nodes, but the combined index is eventually consistent.

Again, I’m thinking more about federating and distributing the index-building, to reduce web sites being hammered by search engines which constitute 80% of their traffic. Federating and distributing the query mechanism is a harder problem, but there’s a lot of existing R&D in this area, and technologies that could be borrowed from other domains (the aforementioned DHT and distributed ledger algorithms).

let me know if you have questions.

I have all the questions. I’m peripherally aware of ESP32; my experience with it, and its capabilities, is severely limited, and IME interface changes require recompiling and re-flashing things. Many of my questions stem from that ignorance.

1. Integration support. I assume GadgetBridge on Android is how you’d do it? Or is there another app?
2. How is the battery life IRL?
3. What does the watch face & app space look like? The FAQ mentions a “gallery”, and instructions for contributions describe the github PR process. Is the gallery just the list of watch faces on the sqfmi website?
4. What’s the process for changing faces, and installing additional functionality? From the docs, it looks as if this must be done over a serial cable, despite the device having WiFi capability. I assume that’s because adding faces is basically re-flashing the firmware, which is not supported over wireless? So, to get a new face, you clone the repo, compile a new firmware, and flash the device over a serial cable?
5. The FAQ verbiage is confusing regarding the display technology, but I think it’s saying the display isn’t reflective LCD like the Pebble.
6. Can you have multiple faces on the device, or do you have to re-flash it to change the face? The FAQ says the face is the entire firmware, implying only one face on the device at a time.
7. If you’re part of the community: have there been any discussions about future development to add, e.g. health monitor hardware?
8. Is there any integration with a phone, such as notifications? This is sort of the GadgetBridge question, but more about what integrations - if any - are supported. Vibrate on phone ringing? Quick responses to texts? Phone calls over the watch - yeah, I know it’s not that advanced, but for example.
9. What’s your opinion of the device? Do you use it as a daily driver?

At under $70, I’m not expecting much, but it’d be nice to know what you expect. The sqfmi site is pretty sparse on details. If there’s an additional, deeper FAQ or Wiki, a link to that would be great.

Thanks!

You’ll have to enlighten me, because I know very little about modern Satanists (I read some Crowley and his ilk decades ago), but doesn’t the Church of Satan (Satanists) believe in Satan? I thought they did, they just had their own version of the Bible where (the Christian) God is a bad guy and Satan is really the good guy.

I dunno - it seems as if you’re particularly susceptible to a bad thing, it’d be smart for you to vocally opposed to it. Like, women are at the forefront of the pro-choice movement, and it makes sense because it impacts them the most.

Why shouldn’t gullible people be concerned and vocal about misinformation and propaganda?

This is hilarious.

And Slava Ukraini.

That said, I’m always melancholic about these videos. I kinda feel bad for the trees, you know? Like, Ukraine has suffered so much, and environmental damage is probably the least thing to be sad about this whole criminal invasion (the trees will eventually regrow), but still.

Satanist, I could respect, although Satanism is a rather comical religion: basing the name of your religion on the villain of the holy book of another religion is pretty funny. But regardless, at least they’re pushing back against fundamentalist Christians in a way no other religion is.

The rest of it is cringe, and the “woke-free” is a dead give-away, as you point out. The combination is disconcordant, which reinforces my suspicion this is a propaganda account.

Cool, thanks

What battery life are you getting on that?

Thanks; TIL.

Pebble advertised their displays as “e-ink”, and I never thought to question it. The best lay resource I found while digging into this was an article on TechRadar, which was about a new product but gives a good overview of the technology and history.

I’m not sure why that makes you so angry.

I’m not at all angry. Like you, I call out bullshit when I see it.

Remember when everyone used to accuse me of only posting Green Party stuff to “spoil” the election and help Trump win?

Dude. That’s not a “remember when” thing - that’s a today thing.

It was like they thought my whole mission was to help Trump win!

That’s what spoilers do: they siphon votes from one party. Sometimes the leaders are puppets, sometimes they’re aware of what they’re doing but don’t care; I don’t know which I think it’s worse, but I have a hard time believing that any national level party leader is ignorant of their impact on US elections, for which I hold them culpable.

Actually, people still accuse me of that!

K, now you’re being ironic. Because that’s me. I’m the one who consistently responds to your posts. I have a small hope that someone who might be teetering on voting Green will give a hard think, look at history, and change their minds.

And, look: I want people to be able to vote for other parties. I’ve voted Green before. But first we have to fix the election system in the US to reduce the Spoiler Effect, as we’re doing at the state level with initiatives like the Minnesota RCV effort. Until we get there, though, voting for a third party is only supporting the greater of two evils - whichever party you don’t want to win. Remember, the last time any third party won aUS presidential election was 1861.

my goal is to shine a light on the hypocrisy and corruption of both Democrats AND Republicans.

You don’t, though; you explicitly and consistently advocate for Jill Stein. If I gathered a list of all your posts criticizing Biden, Kamala, and Trump, what do you think the pie chart would look like?

Both sides are terrified of true alternatives,

This is absolutely true, and it’s why they oppose Ranked Choice and Approval Voting (the two most popular alternative voting efforts in the US) initiatives.

and that’s exactly why third parties need our support.

Efforts to replace FPTP need our support. Third parties for the Presidency do not. Third parties in Congress, I’m all for; we could do with more pressure to build coalitions in the legislative branch.

I’m not sure “respect” is the word I’d chose, but “support,” sure. As I’ve said before, you have the right to write in “Bozo the Clown” for president; it’d have as much impact, but it’s your vote.

However, I will not stop trying to convince people to not make the mistake I made in 2000. I hated Tipper Gore because of her involvement in the founding of the PMRC, and didn’t want her anywhere near the White House. So I voted Green Party. I take resposibility that my vote, which would otherwise have gone to Gore (if I’d been smarter) and contributed to the election of Bush Jr. and consequently the invasion of Iraq (I believe Afghanistan was inevitable after 9/11, but Iraq was opportunistic Jingoism). My “protest” vote, among a wave of other protest votes, contributed to a needless war and very likely led to politics and policies that ultimately resulted in the Trump Presidency.

Maybe you’re able to divorce yourself from responsibility, and blame other people for your actions; if you vote for Stein and Trump wins, you’ll blame Democrats - you’ve said as much elsewhere. That’s an attitude I have no respect for. Take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions, and if the greater of two evils wins, at least have the ethical fortitude to admit you helped it happen through your vote.

I don’t say all of this for you, but for any other person considering a protest votes: please look back at the 2000 election and the measured analysis of the impact of spoiler parties and the subsequent ripple effects which have led to today.

As your yourself, I’m still not convinced you’re not an agent saboteur; your posts consistently target Democrats more than Republicans, and if you were a true Green Party activist, you’d be attacking Trump and Republicans more than any Democrat. The Democratic party plank aligns far more with the Green party than does the Republican party’s; the current conservative agenda is supposedly completely counter to the Green party’s, and yet Jill Stein and her supporters target Kamala more than Donald because that’s where they know they can siphon votes. And this is the very definition of a spoiler in a FPTP election system.

The very idea of a “spoiler” is a tool used by those clinging to the duopoly to scare people into submission, to keep us from voting our conscience.

No, it’s a tool that exists in some flawed voting systems, recognized by political scientists and used by bad actors.

You are correct that I don’t buy into that narrative, but in this community, where the term is tossed around like a weapon, I use the vernacular to communicate effectively.

Why I distrust you, in particular, is that you only recognize the spoiler vernacular, and only post these articles, when they’re about “spoilers for the Trump campaign.” You never do the same for Democrats.

Jill Stein isn’t a spoiler—she’s a voice for the people, challenging a corrupt system that fears true democracy.

We disagree. She’s a spoiler, except unlike the person in the article you posted, she doesn’t have the moral fortitude to admit it. Her position on Ukraine makes her a complete non-starter for me; even if we did have approval or ranked choice voting, she’d wouldn’t get any vote from me. The Greens need to dump her idiot ass.

Wait… so you believe in spoiler candidates, but not that Jill Stein is a spoiler?

Because you fight pretty hard when anyone calls Stein a spoiler siphoning votes from the Democratic party.

Huh.

So I was wondering where the US was and dug in a little more. It looks as if the source of this picture is here. From what I can tell,

• This was the third Noble Raven this year: Noble Raven 24-3
• There were two in 2022
• The US usually participates, but were not involved in 24-3
• Submarines from various countries usually (always?) take part.
• We (the US) took part in the first one this year
• The countries involved in each exercise are often different; the only consistent participant is Japan

The last point leads me to believe that Japan is the organizer of these parties.

Also, there’s a related repeated exercise called Noble Jump, which is different branches; last year’s had Italian hand-launched drones called “Ravens,” which makes for interesting search results.