Yikes. MAGA can still surprise me over just how fucking stupid they are. I mean, the differences in treatment could not be more obvious.

Same! Also a good opportunity to check out different Threadiverse clients.

Uhh, Ray, they’re really similar.

I saw that post, and honestly, part of the issue is that the pain of messing with mode-lines in /etc/XF86Config and worrying about physically damaging your CRT monitor with out-of-spec frequencies was a very real thing 30 years ago. Hence, the idea that configuring displays on Linux is fraught and difficult has stuck around, even though it hasn’t been true since the advent of DDC, and multiple displays for most use-cases has been sorted out for at least the past 15 years. Non-Linux users will still occasionally talk about displays on Linux as if we were still editing mode-lines in vi.

It’s a sore point, I guess I’m saying, and you poked it inadvertently. When I read the post, I just kind of smiled, because a few days before, I plugged the HDMI cable from a conference room display into my Thinkpad, and it lit up with an extension of my desktop. I started LibreOffice Impress, hit ‘F5’, and the presentation appeared on the big display, and the presentation notes on my laptop screen. (Actually, I was surprised and impressed at how smoothly it went.)

It’s no surprise that issues remain here and there, though. Glad to hear that folks wanted to be helpful!

I was about to get in the car and go buy the Sonos soundbar, but I checked the manual first. The network setup itself is done through an app that connects via BLE, and to use the app, you first have to create a Sonos account. That’s a ‘no’ from me. I may be unreasonable, but I don’t want to share my personal data and be gate-kept by a company, just to use hardware that I ostensibly own and is sitting in my living room. It’s too bad, because from what I read, the sound quality is excellent.

Why didn’t I ever think about RS232 control with an ESP32 device? Great idea!

So the LG TV can get connected to the local network without an app or cloud account? Perfect! I guess HA integration for a soundbar would be a nice-to-have-feature, but not critical. It would be nice to have Music Assistant connect to it directly for music playback, but as long as it turns on and off via CEC, I can continue to play music through Kodi/LibreELEC.

Absolutely! I guess I left out the part about what I want to do. I have an RPi4 with LibreELEC for media playback, so getting a smart TV and never connecting to the Internet is a fine plan. I want to be able to control the basics with HA, like powering it on and off, changing volume, and such. The RPi can turn on the TV that I have using CEC, but the TV doesn’t support powering itself off via CEC. And, even if it did, it’s a chore to integrate CEC with Home Assistant automations.

In my mind, I can’t checkout, because it’s a noun or an adjective. I always do verbs, so I check out.

Probably something to do with a tachyon beam.

So if this person no longer works for Pfizer, spill the beans! Tell us about all of the cures that it killed.

Ramirez is usually a MAGA shitstain, so this is progress, I guess?

I’ve settled on [REDACTED]. Everybody knows who I’m talking about, because everybody knows that they redacted him from the Epstein files.

On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We’re in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There’s some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we’ve become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It’s not just billionaires, it’s all of us.

Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they’re not the ones releasing the gases. We can’t just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We’ve reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.

Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we’d still have the climate change problem to tackle.

And yet, somehow, people willingly step into it all the time!

Another question: Why do they still do natural childbirth when they have transporters?

I took the Amtrak Empire Builder to Glacier National Park, which was supposed to arrive around six o’clock in the evening. The train was already late to Columbus, where I got on, which was not a good sign given the proximity to Chicago. Then, the train had to dramatically decrease speed across North Dakota (85MPH down to 60MPH, IIRC), because record-high temperatures in July were causing the rails to expand too much, making them uneven. I got to the station at the park 8 hours late.

It was way too late to find accommodations. Luckily, I had my camping gear, so I just camped on a bench at the station until morning.

Next martyr, then. You in?

Fine, next martyr, though you knew what I meant. In any case, magical thinking (you just have to want it hard enough) has never worked. If you have suggestions for what to actually do, bring it. Anything short of actions that’ll get you killed never seem to be good enough for the complainers.

Are you volunteering to be the first martyr?