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Clinton has earned millions more votes than Bernie. Millions. That fact will not change, no matter how much one bemoans the fact that she is supposedly not inspiring or not a progressive or whatever. And Im a true progressive who is inspired by HRC. She will be the nominee. When that happens, it will be voices like this that result in President Trump. This is the reality of politics and our world. Accept the facts or accept responsibility for Trump. I dont see a middle ground.

Okay. She earned your vote. She hasn’t earned mine. Maybe that’ll change, because sometimes we don’t get to vote FOR a president as much as we vote AGAINST someone for president. I’ve voted 3rd party in the past, and I may do so again.

I believe that Trump will be a catastrophe for not just America, but the world. I live in California, which will never go to Trump no matter what, so I have the luxury of voting my conscience. If I lived in a state where it was going to be close, I would likely hold my nose and vote AGAINST him, but Clinton hasn’t earned my vote, and likely won’t earn my vote. She’s too willing and quick to use military force, she’s too close to the Bushes, and she’s too close to Henry Kissinger, who is a war criminal.

I do not, and will not, accept responsibility for Trump, and it’s moderately insulting to tell me or anyone else who isn’t going to vote for Clinton that we have to. If Clinton fails to offer what a majority of Democrats and the wider electorate wants, that’s not on me or anyone who doesn’t vote for her. That’s on her and her campaign.

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The only bathroom rules you need is “lock the door if you want privacy”, and “don’t go in there when it’s occupied”.

“Kroger’s Bathroom Policy”

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ALPHA 26.3 RELEASED

This one is almost strictly a bugfix release, trying to get things stable so that Alpha 27 is a really great version.

Get it on itch.io (Steam key included!)

Get it on Humble (Steam key included!)

Get it on Steam

Changelog:

ADDITIONS:

The total number of deaths you have experienced is recorded on the “you died” screen

New ground target: CARGO, low HP and come in sets of 4, perfect for cluster bombs (custom mission prefab: “Buildings/cargo_pod_4”)

FIXES:

Target lead prediction for AI wasn’t completely correct. Drones and AAA might be a little more accurate, but they are already intentionally bad at leading the correct amount so probably not.

Large numbers of enemy bombers on later islands should not cause a massive framerate drop

The lock-on diamond should never be outside of the lock-on circle, making lock-on times much quicker in some cases

Clouds on the tutorial level should no longer be pink

Directional arrows pointing to the BASE and MISSION targets should no longer get stuck

Player start position should be correctly assigned during a custom mission.

Clicking buttons in the custom mission menu should actually pick the mission selected by the mouse and not the one selected by the keyboard / gamepad cursor

The mouse pointer should disappear / reappear when you use gamepad or keyboard input / click the mouse

“Locked Mouse” option should constrain the mouse pointer correctly.

If you researched a tech (aero, weapon, special, etc) that has since been disabled, you will not be able to use it. Some people managed to research a few that were in an earlier indev version, this is merely to make things fair for everyone and avoid confusion. Don’t worry, everything I’m taking away right now is coming back.

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SSD problems

So my Pi has been giving me trouble lately. I’ve reinstalled, and nothing has changed, so I am starting to suspect hardware, but what do I know? dmesg says:

[970519.112844] Aborting journal on device sda1-8. [970519.128898] Buffer I/O error on dev sda1, logical block 19431424, lost sync page write [970519.164602] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for sda1-8. [970550.743210] EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_find_entry:1289: inode #1703942: comm sshd: reading directory lblock 0 [970691.368765] EXT4-fs warning: 46 callbacks suppressed [970691.388437] EXT4-fs warning (device sda1): __ext4_read_dirblock:674: error -5 reading directory block (ino 2368303, block 0) [970691.421693] EXT4-fs warning (device sda1): __ext4_read_dirblock:674: error -5 reading directory block (ino 2368303, block 0) [970691.457970] EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_read_inode_bitmap:185: comm transmission-da: Cannot read inode bitmap - block_group = 416, inode_bitmap = 13631504 [970691.494077] EXT4-fs error (device sda1): ext4_journal_check_start:56: Detected aborted journal [970691.526540] EXT4-fs (sda1): Remounting filesystem read-only

...and at this point, everything is terrible forever.

#linux #raspberrypi

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The Instant Messenger Balkanization

I am sure much has been written about the fact that we all have a dozen IM clients installed on our phones, and every one of our contacts uses a different one. I've mostly not bothered to trim that down, installed all of them, and had an account with each, whether it's Hangouts, Twitter, Facebook, Threema, SMS or IRC. But this last week makes me think that we need to get out of this situation. I have been in hospitals for the past 6 days. That's a time when people want to get in touch, get updates on my status, but also a time of bad Internet access. The first hospital had barely any patient WiFi to speak of, and this second one has an unsecured AP. I have an Android phone and no computer. The phone's storage is nearly full, and I'm going to have to cut down on the number of installed apps, but can't really kill any one of these messengers yet, except for Skype, because it really doesn't work well on mobile devices. SMS is overall the most reliable form of communication, because it is the most democratic and widely distributed, and will always stick around as long as we have phones. I also need to keep it for my sister, who still doesn't have a smart phone, and hardly checks messages on her laptop more than once a week. Facebook chat is the one where all of my friends are, but it lacks encryption. Almost all messengers fail on the encryption, so it's nice that I can at least use these VPN functions in Orbot to route all of the internet traffic on my phone through Tor! Threema has end-to-end encryption, but literally no adoption. The latest offering in this space is Signal, which bills itself as an SMS client, and sends SMS when necessary, but encrypts messages over the Internet if both parties have it installed, and keeps everything inside a single app. A desktop client is in beta, too, which makes this more attractive than Threema. Given a choice, I would prefer that all of my friends ditch the text messaging clients on their phones for Signal, and ubiquitous encryption just happens eventually, but inertia is a terribly difficult thing to overcome.

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HTTPS Everywhere und spiegel.de

Seit einer Weile schon habe ich das Problem, dass auf spiegel.de Teile der Artikel fehlen. Gelegentlich sehe ich nur die Einleitung eines Artikels, und alle interaktiven Inhalte, ob Infografiken oder Sporttabellen, sind kaputt.

Zuerst habe ich natürlich den Adblocker als Schuldigen vermutet. Ein schneller Blick auf die Seiten im Inkognito-Modus von Chrome, wo alle Extensions deaktiviert sind, zeigt den vollständigen Artikel. Also nach und nach alle Erweiterungen abgeschaltet, bis der Artikel lesbar war, und siehe da: Es war HTTPS Everywhere.

Nun will ich auf keinen Fall die Erweiterung abschalten müssen, also habe ich mir die Liste der Regeln vorgenommen, und auch hier eine nach der anderen deaktiviert. Schuldig waren am Ende zwei Regelsätze (siehe Bild). Ich werde die mal komplett abschalten, statt herauszufinden, wie man die Regeln ändert, und hoffe, dass das kein zu großer Hammer ist. Am schönsten wäre natürlich, wenn man bei SPON in der Technik ohne diese Mengen an IFRAME Elementen in den Artikeln auskommen würde, aber das ist wohl zu viel verlangt?

Korrektes Webdesign ist schwer.

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About this TIDAL win-back campaign

WiMP sent me an email telling me that they are now called TIDAL, and as one does as a startup, they tried to win me back as a user by offering a three month free trial. I’m unhappy enough with the state of music streaming that I was going to give this a shot, but their campaign ultimately failed to win me over, for several reasons.

1. The link in the email goes to a registration page, with no mention of the email campaign. As a customer, I already feel like I’m in the wrong place, but as a developer, my guess is that this is just laziness. Someone probably added a parameter to the URL to track the campaign, but was sloppy on copy writing and custom code, especially in a foreign language (I browse in English).

2. I should be a registered user, because I had a WiMP account once that should have gotten transferred in the TIDAL rebranding. Since I used my Twitter account to register, I clicked the Twitter button on that page to gain access, but that ultimately results in an error message telling me that this account already exists. This is why you don’t recycle the general registration page for your win-back campaign.

3. I go through the email plus password process, where I have to enter my email twice, and then get an error message stating that “This email address is already registered”. Guessing that what it really wants to tell me is that my password did not match (that training as a developer comes in again), I try another password, and I am in. Or am I?

4. The next step immediately asks me for payment information. And this is where you’ve finally lost me. I’m here for a free trial, not to give somebody my credit card info, before I’ve even seen what the service is. If you want to run a free trial in this day and age, then you must not ask for credit card info until the trial is up, or users won’t even give your product a chance. I can’t believe I am seeing this.

5. Your only payment methods are VISA, Mastercard, Amex and Paypal? That’s bold. When I was at IMVU, we implemented several dozen payment options, and even in Norway I get a menu with at least three additional non-CC options. And while Paypal and VISA make up the the bulk of the payment, can you really say no to the additional revenue from SMS payments, bank transfers or prepaid cards?

6. Trying to send this rant to a human being at TIDAL leads me to their support page, and in roundabout steps to a Google Docs feedback form (more signs that there are no developers) which allows no more than 1000 characters. I understand that database storage space costs money, but WTF? This post is way above 2000 characters already. Are you sure that you  “appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us”? I’ll send them a link to this post instead, and hope that they go through the trouble of clicking through.

Overall, I suspect that this campaign has not been properly A/B tested, and that the TIDAL business development team is not aggressive enough about chasing new opportunities. Sure, all of this requires implementation resources, and developers are expensive, but your competitors are willing to make that investment, and if you continue to leave money and opportunities on the table, they will be happy to take up your slack.

#startup #norway #fail #trial #payments #wimp #tidal #streaming #music

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The GIF arms race is disturbing to watch

At first, some users added big GIFs to imgur etc. Next, imgur et al  re-code GIF back to videos, for better bandwidth, especially on mobile. In response, people create sites that turn entire youtube videos into GIFs, because imgur etc "can handle" GIFs that size. And suddenly, imgur is just a shitty copy of youtube with better navigation and social features, but no sound. Someone done fucked up, and if I've learned one thing in this business, you cannot blame users. My guess: someone's hackweek project to reduce bandwidth requirement has completely changed what their site is about. Mow they are a silent video hosting site. I bet you that nobody in management decided that this was the strategic direction they wanted to go in.

#imgur #startups #gif

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This guy really goes the extra mile on his Raspberry Pi case design, and has some great instruction videos. I want one of these. Now, where is my hot glue gun?

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Success Story: Sony Xperia Z3

Earlier this year, my trusty and much beloved Nexus 5 broke, and I suddenly found myself in the market for a new phone. I knew I did not want a Samsung, for reasons that are mostly related to the additional malware installed on them, and I could not get a new Nexus through the office's vendor. A friend seemed happy with her Z1, and the Z3 was getting good reviews, so I decided to put my dislike of all things Sony aside, and got an Xperia. I must say, I don't regret this. The Z3 runs Lollipop, and has some Sony bundleware on it to push their media empire, but it is mostly unobtrusive and feels almost like a stock Google phone. My worries about the quality of Sony hardware were also unfounded. It seems that the Ericsson engineering is showing in this device, with a great touch screen and far superior battery life than my Nexus had. I get almost 5 days of standby or two says of active use from a charge. That is after disabling mobile data, since I am on WiFi at least 80% of any given day anyhow, so YMMV on this, but I sure like not having battery anxiety towards the end of every day like I did with virtually all previous Android phones that I have owned.

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Success Story: Pocket Reader

I have recently discovered Pocket Reader, and I am getting a lot of value from it. I noticed that I tend to have a lot of open tabs, both on my phone and in Chrome, that are "I will read this later", and now I just store that into Pocket for later reading. It makes those pages available offline on my phone, so I can catch up on my reading on the bus or plane when I don't have a network, which is great. Also, when I read something good, it's always there in the archived posts for me to find later. So this app has conveniences that RSS readers don't, and in fact supplements feedly for me, especially for wordy posts. Whenever I think “this is interesting, but too long for my bathroom break”, I just shove it into Pocket for later.

What offline reading does not deal well with is video content. So all the lazy-ass web journalisms that talk into their webcam instea of writing, you suck! The same goes for websites that break every article into several “pages” as if there was a limit to how long an HTML document can be, just to get more ad impressions. Stop doing that, or at least add a “full article” view.

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Perks of being firmly rooted in more than one culture: discussing the difference between the German concept of "Sollbruchstellen" and the American "built-in obsolescence".

#culture #language

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I <3 Bad Machinery, John Allison is a ruddy genius. That last panel is possibly my absolute favorite thing he has made. Lottie Grote is the best!

Bad Machinery Appreciation Post

More webcomic appreciation!

I started reading Bad Machinery by John Allison a while back when I saw it linked on Kate Beaton’s Tumblr. It’s basically about six kids, three boys and three girls, who go around solving mysteries. It’s also got some of the funniest dialogue I’ve ever read–I keep trying to compose a list of my favorite quotes, but it includes pretty much every third comic strip, because they are all hilarious. However, even with all the silliness and randomness, of which there is a ton, there’s also a lot of subtle and realistic character moments that flesh out the kids and their world incredibly well.

The most recent mystery, The Case of the Fire Inside (god, I think I’m in love with that title, seriously), wrapped up about a week ago, and the next one will start August 27. So it’s the perfect time to trawl through the archives, I am just saying!

Also, Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court has totally done a guest strip for the series, which was an awesome surprise when I was reading through the archives!

And now, because I simply must introduce you to these characters:

Shauna!

Lottie!

Mildred!

Jack!

Linton!

Sonny!

Also: Colm, because even though he’s probably not technically one of the main boys, he’s my favorite after Sonny, mostly because he says this line: