AlgoCompSynth 🇺🇦

Buck Borasky, Frontier Programmer {he/him}

#ComputerMusic #WhiteDudesForHarrisPartDeux #HonouraryCanadian

Retired scientific applications programmer: algorithmic composition, digital sound synthesis, #WNBA analytics

Desktop: https://projectbluefin.io

Bandcamp: https://algocompsynth.bandcamp.com/
GitHub: https://github.com/znmeb
Blog: https://www.algocompsynth.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/znmeb/

Public Key

npub15l8ama9v6ncwxjypm0k5janl6r8mqr9r2dt4w0u2p74s9vu4mhpqhghk4s

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs20n7a7jkdfu8rfzqahm2fwelapnaspj34x46h879ql2czkw2amsspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds93epuj

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub15l8ama9v6ncwxjypm0k5janl6r8mqr9r2dt4w0u2p74s9vu4mhpqhghk4s

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Last Notes

2026-01-22 17:19:50 CET

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Were you looking for the episode with Elizabeth Rather? I've got that filed away somewhere.

2025-12-04 04:05:05 CET

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/115657806895602968
"We will have to work through societal disruption"
Sundar Pichai will never have to "work through societal disruption." He is set for life. What he meant is, *you* will have to work through societal disruption.
#note153f…8m54

2025-07-23 05:25:18 CEST

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Yeah, bit-serial makes sense little-endian. Rumor has it that Turing wrote binary numbers with the least significant bit on the left because that's how they showed up on an oscilloscope trace on serial computers.

2025-07-23 03:40:47 CEST

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I don't think little-endian was even a thing until Intel started shipping little-endian microprocessors by the billions.

2025-07-20 23:49:56 CEST

Professor Emeritus Barry Vercoe, a pioneering force in computer music, dies at 87
https://news.mit.edu/2025/barry-vercoe-computer-music-visionary-dies-0707
#ComputerMusic

2025-07-14 17:34:39 CEST

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Seems like one of us should build it. ;-)

2025-07-14 07:35:10 CEST

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No idea - sounds like something from Strange Loops though. Maybe @npub1z8r…mrq6 would know.

2025-06-08 05:10:46 CEST

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They're really taking the whole "History is written by the armed dudes who won the war" thing seriously. This has Stephen Miller's evil hands all over it. I hope the Sunday news shows don't give him an audience.

2025-06-08 02:40:54 CEST

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It gets worse - they are trying to write this ICE mission into law in the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill." They might negotiate on the budget numbers, but I doubt that they will back down on ICE. We have to try to change some Republican minds in Congress.

2025-04-08 05:55:22 CEST

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I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm right, SCOTUS *could* deliver the rebuke that Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Tom Homan deserve for violating the Bill of Rights to fulfill a campaign promise! How do We, the People, make that happen? 2/2

2025-04-08 05:53:51 CEST

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Their public statements since the Republican convention and their recent court filings have convinced me that the administration has *never* had a plan to rescue someone from that El Salvador prison. The *only* plan was to round up people and give them a one-way ride to that hell-hole. 1/2

2025-04-03 00:49:06 CEST

They probably didn't "bend at the first sign of pressure." It's more likely that the decision makers in the firm have always supported the Trump Project 2025 agenda.
https://federate.social/@mattblaze/114270138632010621

2025-03-26 04:55:46 CET

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Day 26 of Women's History Month 2025
Laurie Spiegel
https://lauriespiegel.bandcamp.com/music
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-25 01:46:40 CET

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Day 25 of Women's History Month 2025
Lesley Barber
https://lesleybarber.com/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-24 03:14:15 CET

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Day 24 of Women's History Month 2025
Fronte Violeta
https://frontevioleta.com/about
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-23 04:56:20 CET

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Day 23 of Women's History Month 2025
Björk
https://www.bjork.com/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-22 04:03:04 CET

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Day 22 of Women's History Month 2025
Zoë Keating
https://zoekeating.com/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-21 06:00:47 CET

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Day 21 of Women's History Month 2025
Enya
https://www.enya.com/watermark-35-years/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-20 04:58:54 CET

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Day 20 of Women's History Month 2025
Chen Yi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Yi_(composer)
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-19 06:15:50 CET

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Day 19 of Women's History Month 2025
Rachel Portman
https://rachelportman.co.uk/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-18 02:03:30 CET

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Day 18 of Women's History Month 2025
Sarah Peebles
https://sarahpeebles.net/bio.htm
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-17 03:20:27 CET

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Day 17 of Women's History Month 2025
Maggi Payne
https://www.womencomposing.com/MaggiPayne.html
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-16 02:57:01 CET

Day 16 of Women's History Month 2025
Judith Lang Zaimont
https://www.judithzaimont.com/
#WomensHistoryMonth
@npub1htj…55j3

2025-03-14 22:15:54 CET

It's people like Elon Musk that make incompetent drug-addled fascist narcissists look bad.
#Curmudgeonry

2025-03-09 01:48:23 CET

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Something along the lines of "Multiplan" should be doable in UXN; it ran on 8080s and 6502s.

2025-03-02 01:30:21 CET

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Labor alone cannot do it. The Democrats alone cannot do it. Business owners screwed by Musk's conflicts of interest alone cannot do it. News organizations alone cannot do it. Anti-fascists alone cannot do it.
Stopping the racketeers in our government is a whole-society effort.

2025-03-02 01:26:20 CET

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It takes *organization* to stand up to bullies! See hundreds of years of labor organizing and Presidents / Congresses enabled by *landslide* elections.
Trump / Vance / Musk / Vought and their minions do not have a landslide mandate or a landslide Congress, but they *do* have a compliant Congress and the jury is still out on the Supreme Court. It's going to take a stronger coalition to stand up to them.

2025-02-11 07:23:32 CET

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Y'all ought to rename Lake Superior to Lake Canada! 🇨🇦

2025-02-05 01:43:52 CET

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No matter what Trump says, running a protection racket disguised as American foreign policy is a bad idea and Marco Rubio needs to get the spine to tell him that yesterday!

2025-02-04 15:58:09 CET

Official DOGE Motto: Move Fast and Break Laws
#Curmudgeonry

2025-02-04 06:40:49 CET

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Day 3 of Black History Month 2025
W.E.B. Du Bois
https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/civil-rights-leaders/web-du-bois
#BlackHistoryMonth

2025-02-02 23:02:32 CET

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Day 2 of Black History Month 2025
Duke Ellington
https://www.si.edu/spotlight/duke-ellington
#BlackHistoryMonth

2025-02-02 07:32:38 CET

Day 1 of Black History Month 2025
Nina Simone
https://youtube.com/@ninasimonemusic
#BlackHistoryMonth

2025-01-27 22:26:14 CET

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Bob's Red Mill is an amazing company, right here in Oregon to boot!

2025-01-13 18:16:52 CET

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Magnificent birds! Watching them take off and land is a thing of stunning beauty.

2025-01-12 21:52:01 CET

Any social media platform with algorithmic control over who sees what when serves only the political and financial interests of its owners.

2025-01-10 21:42:41 CET

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I would go one further. The *web* does not need to be Turing complete, nor does it need to support e-commerce. That is why we have operating systems, relational databases and GUI clients.
All of that existed and worked via TCP/IP *before* Java, JavaScript, and Windows 95! Those are what you get when capitalists co-opt a public good like the World Wide Web and the visions of Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush.

2025-01-10 10:30:15 CET

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We have game engines for writing games; why does a browser need to be able to run games? We have digital audio workstations for music production; why does a browser need MIDI and audio APIs? Etc., etc., etc.!

2025-01-10 10:20:12 CET

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Browsers need to be discarded and replaced by something simple and modular like the "Unix" command line / shell.

2025-01-10 09:58:39 CET

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Chromium has been dead to me for years. IMHO there's no reason to save it.

2024-12-29 07:46:37 CET

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Lisa Bella Donna | The Mothership II: Night Flight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflRnt-H3aI
#WomenComposers
@npub1htj…55j3

2024-12-29 07:44:53 CET

Lisa Bella Donna | The Mothership
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIRQbIckYPo
#WomenComposers
@npub1htj…55j3

2024-12-24 16:31:16 CET

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I don't have a preference since I switched to Universal Blue Bluefin. I can run any distro I want as a Distrobox container, and I have both fixed-release and rolling-release containers.

2024-12-23 18:49:55 CET

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Absolutely! Do it in classes of 20, one for each different desktop! 😈

2024-12-23 01:48:11 CET

Playing Music on the Oldest Running Computer in America!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HibkocVn1U

2024-12-19 04:35:44 CET

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They can collect code from my open source repos whether I use Copilot or not. Copilot isn't the problem; GitHub is.

2024-12-17 07:33:36 CET

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Trust me, I have already forgtten XFCE 😉

2024-12-17 07:01:30 CET

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Nah, that's solved - it's down to Arch Linux or Universal Blue Aurora (KDE) or Bluefin (GNOME).

2024-12-15 02:09:55 CET

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They're just in it for the mice.

2024-12-09 21:44:45 CET

He has a mind like a steel trap - caught a squirrel yesterday.
#Curmudgeonry

2024-12-07 02:19:32 CET

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But in the end it was Lieberman who scuttled the public option. One man, who wasn't even a Democrat, but who "caucused with the Democrats."

2024-12-06 06:15:33 CET

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"The holdouts came down to Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who caucused with Democrats, and conservative Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson. Lieberman's demand that the bill not include a public option ... was met"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act#Senate

2024-12-06 04:15:29 CET

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My recollection is that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) was one committee vote or one floor vote in the Senate away from having a public option. That is very sad.
#MedicareForAll

2024-12-04 23:37:48 CET

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Just because half the voters want a mob boss in the Oval Office doesn't mean it's acceptable.

2024-12-04 23:32:30 CET

The media and the Democratic members of Congress need to rub Trump's nose in this *daily* until he gets the message and de-nominates Patel. Kash Patel should be nowhere near the levers of power. I don't want to hear, "Maybe he's bluffing" or "yabbit they'll need warrants from a judge".
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/kash-patels-list-of-60-enemies-that-he-published-in-his-2022-book-government-gangsters/articleshow/115937080.cms

2024-12-03 22:36:53 CET

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Put me on the mailing list for the Billionaire Cookbook

2024-11-25 08:41:34 CET

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I can’t imagine why anyone would want to own a lib. We eat like pigs for openers, we have weird tastes in music, films and television, and most of us snore.
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-25 04:11:29 CET

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The first one said, "Wait! Our camel hazh two ashsholezh." Then he walked over to the row of camels and started lifting their tails up to check.
"What?"
"Don't you remember? When we got here, some jerk yelled to hizh buddy, "Geez - look at the two ashsholezh on that camel!" 3/3
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-25 04:05:50 CET

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So they rented a camel and rode it to the stadium. The tied it up in the parking lot and went in and sat through the game.
They got wasted and the Mets lost. They staggered out to the parking lot, and there they saw *fifteen* camels tied up!"
"Yeesh," the first one said. And the second said, "There must be two dozen camels there! How will we find ours?" 2/3
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-25 04:00:19 CET

A couple of decades ago, two ne'er-do-wells from Brooklyn decided to go to a Mets game. One of them was a little hesitant.
"The last time we went to a Mets game, you got wasted, the Mets lost, and it took us three hours to find the car in the parking lot. It ruined the whole game!"
The second one said, "Yeah, that was a bummer. How about we rent a camel instead of driving?" 1/3
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-22 03:16:11 CET

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They do the same for Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", which is also about sex.

2024-11-21 05:21:38 CET

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`sudo nice --19 top`

2024-11-21 00:25:40 CET

Portland Taiko and No-No Boy
Orient Oregon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-d3rUxWRN8

2024-11-20 19:10:31 CET

ChipWits’ 40th Birthday: Original FORTH Code Open Sourced!
https://chipwits.com/2024/11/16/chipwits-40th-birthday-original-forth-code-open-sourced/
#Forth #RetroGaming

2024-11-18 03:00:18 CET

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John McCutcheon "Deportee (Plane Wreck At Los Gatos)" (Woody Guthrie) @ Eddie Owen Presents
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxsPL4uEo34

2024-11-18 02:55:37 CET

"Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" Joan Baez - 2017 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmN2nodeHuk

2024-11-17 05:44:10 CET

There are 6.01 Suckers Born Every Minute (1/2)
According to Wikipedia, the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute” first appeared in print in 1885. So:
1. Assume that the number of suckers born per minute is proportional to the number of people born per minute.
2. Assume that the number of people born per minute is proportional to the total population.
3. According to Wolfram | Alpha, the population of the USA in 1885 was 56.6 million people.
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-16 07:05:14 CET

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I am probably switching my main computer from Windows 11 to Universal Blue DX at the end of the year.

2024-11-10 22:02:04 CET

His Majesty The King
Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA
Sir:
If we pay the back tea taxes, will you take us back?
#Curmudgeonry

2024-11-10 02:42:26 CET

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I don't know. I have a Soma Ether and an NTS-2 oscilloscope - I could probably get an FFT of what the Ether sees when I hold it next to a power plug. It'll take me a day or so to figure out where the Ether is though; I unboxed it and roamed around a bit but didn't find anything interesting enough to sample. 😉

2024-11-10 00:38:40 CET

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The power is *supposed* to be a pure sine wave - if you're getting harmonics, there's distortion somewhere. That said, personally, I'd filter out the harmonics and then add a wavefolder to get them back in a controlled manner. 😉

2024-11-02 23:49:49 CET

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At this point I don't care enough to watch the video. Thank you for your service. 😉
I voted by mail about three days after I got my ballot and I've been kicking a few bucks towards some campaigns when I have some spare cash.

2024-10-29 06:30:31 CET

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Being directed by management to use an IDE instead.

2024-10-14 10:49:15 CEST

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I think it indicates wisdom in the C suite and a willingness to listen to their customers.

2024-10-14 04:14:11 CEST

"Earlier Saturday, a resident came to a supplies distribution center, now largely run by relief group the Cajun Navy with the help of a Baptist Church organization, and threatened FEMA personnel who were also stationed there in a trailer, according to two Cajun Navy volunteers."
I look forward to the speedy arrest and incarceration pending trial of the perpetrator of this obscenity. ZERO TOLERANCE!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/10/13/federal-officials-nc-temporarily-relocated-amid-report-armed-militia-email-shows/

2024-10-13 00:54:35 CEST

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Happy #caturday Mira!

2024-10-11 01:50:44 CEST

🇨🇦 🇨🇦 Canadian Thanksgiving is in October because it has to happen before the turkeys fly south for the winter.
#Curmudgeonry

2024-10-10 06:03:38 CEST

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There has never been a time where I even wanted to use C++, let alone like it.

2024-09-22 23:52:06 CEST

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Yep - my first job out of college many years ago.

2024-09-22 23:50:36 CEST

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I lived in Poughkeepsie for three years and I drove down to NYC almost every weekend the first year or so.

2024-09-22 18:44:19 CEST

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Then what's the point of having a stress ball?

2024-09-20 22:35:05 CEST

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"dies" for me is "stops getting security updates". IIRC for Apple that's five years. My Samsung phone is approaching five years and I think it's still getting security updates. But it used to be three years for Android.
So no, you can't ignore the supplier's hype. The phone may still take pictures and all that but you do *not* want it on the internet if it is vulnerable to hackers.

2024-09-19 06:09:32 CEST

For all my Canadian friends ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyAe_eiGj9A
#Canada 🇨🇦

2024-09-17 03:03:29 CEST

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Plus we went from depending on Russia for crewed space flight to depending on Elon Musk for crewed space flight.
I worked in the aerospace industry as a NASA contractor employee for six years. The rules for contractors are complex and are supposed to insure competition, but in reality there is often only one bidder who can actually do the job. Reagan and his cronies made it worse, and I don't think we've ever recovered.

2024-09-16 04:33:02 CEST

TIL I should follow my own advice more often, specifically:
"I have had intermittent issues with boards when connected by a USB hub or one of those USB-A to micro or USB-C adapters. If you have problems, connect with a known good USB cable directly to the host computer."
I still want to know why this is the case! Is there firmware in a hub, or is it just power management and switches? I have `dmesg` logs if anyone cares. 😉
#USB #Sucks

2024-09-12 20:17:58 CEST

In space, there are no guillotines.
#Curmudgeonry

2024-09-12 04:22:36 CEST

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Have you ever taking acting lessons? I have ... that was definitely a rehearsed bit. 😉

2024-09-06 05:19:46 CEST

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Can you get a clean download with 'httrack'?
Once you have that, open the index,html in Calibre via "add books". It will take some time but eventually you'll get a zipped HTML document.
If the HTML book doesn't have a title and author, set those values so Calibre can create a cover page, Then go into the Calibre "convert" menu. Change the output type to EPUB and leave the rest of the defaults alone. Start the job. Again, it will take some time but it should convert.

2024-08-15 22:43:54 CEST

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Can't the LibreWolf team duplicate the Flatpak and Snap packaging infrastructure that Mozilla has for Firefox? I run Firefox as a Flatpack on Linux.

2024-08-15 20:27:25 CEST

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I finally deactivated Twitter last week. I was mostly Inactive already, but I went there tp follow the saga of people pressuring President Biden to drop out and insisting that if he did, Kamala Harris be handed the nomination without any more brouhaha.
Once that happened I stayed through the initial fundraising calls, but there were two last straws:
1. Musk saying civil war was inevitable, and
2. The site itself was flaky. I had too many posts needing retries.

2024-08-14 09:14:17 CEST

It's people! Pumpkin spice is people!
#Curmudgeonry

2024-08-12 22:57:25 CEST

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That's not going to happen. I saw Jake Tapper do it once. I forgot who he was interviewing. I suspect CNN reprimanded Tapper because it hasn't happened again despite numerous opportunities.
Boycott advertisers, cancel subscriptions, cut out your viewing and tell the owners why. The journalists work for them, not for us

2024-08-12 05:10:06 CEST

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IMHO a $10M bribe from the 2016 election isn't news, it's history. Barr made it go away and who knows what the Supreme Court would do if the current DOJ went after the previous AG.
I'd much rather the press follow up on *today's* news:
1. The Trump campaign got hacked. By whom and why?
2. ProPublica got some devastating training videos about Project 2025. Are they conspiring to break the law? Who's being "trained" to do what?

2024-08-11 19:51:19 CEST

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I was 19, a senior in college and not quite sure what I wanted to do. My degree was in math but I didn't want to go on to grad school and I didn't want to teach.
I took an assembly language programming course and by the first project I knew that was what I wanted to do! It just came naturally to me and I was good at it - better than anything else I ever tried.

2024-08-11 19:30:26 CEST

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I don't know what fraction of programmers do it because it is fun, but it certainly has been true for me since day one. And I suspect it's true for the really good ones.
I'm retired and I still do some programming every day.

2024-08-11 07:59:29 CEST

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No matter how big the Electoral College landslide, we have to hold the Senate and take the House, and preferably *gain* a Senate seat or two. Otherwise, Harris and Walz will spend their first two years using their bully pulpits to fight off Project 2027 in the 2026 election!
If you've got money, donate to the https://democrats.org/, https://www.dscc.org/, https://dccc.org/ and https://dlcc.org/.

2024-08-11 00:20:57 CEST

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Well, you see, once upon a time, not all computers were byte-addressed, used binary two's complement integer arithmetic with word sizes a power of two and had IEEE 754 standard floating point arithmetic. 😉

2024-08-09 10:59:09 CEST

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I assume you both know that AMY has been ported to the RP2040 - they converted the arithmetic to fixed point. I'll be testing it on my RP2350s as soon as they get here.
https://github.com/shorepine/amy
#RP2350

2024-08-08 08:26:21 CEST

For those of you who know me from Twitter, I have deactivated my account "@npub1cyz…l2pd". I was there for 17.5 years. and it was not an easy decision.
The final straw was when Elon Musk posted that civil war was inevitable and the CEO posted an angry screed about suing advertisers who won't advertise there.
So if you're still on Twitter and someone asks you, "Hey, what happened to @npub1cyz…l2pd? please let them know I'm alive and well at
https://mastodon.social/invite/w4QqiDfW
Thanks - please boost.

2024-08-07 23:06:51 CEST

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When I was 30, most operating systems only had one text editor and your employer chose your operating system for you. There were no flamewars. 😉