mdlbear | Done Since 2025-05-18 (Reply)

It feels like it's been a busy week. I have actually gotten a few things done. (Some of them today, which doesn't really count.) Most notably, making travel arrangements to get to D.F.D.F..

It's also been a good week for finding stuff, including an obituary for my father, written by his friend and co-worker Walter Slavin [pdf]. Also, a box containing a small carpet, two plastic bins of memorabilia, and a number of old hard drives (which need to be looked at and erased before being discarded) that I thought had been left behind,

Happy Lilac Towel Day Also note that last Sunday was Mount St. Helens Day, so you'll find several more links immediately under the cut.

You'll also find the Epic v. Apple Contempt order, which is epic in more ways than one. I haven't had that much fun reading a court order since SCO v IBM. It's worth an extended quote:

In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. [...] The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.
This is an injunction, not a negotiation.

For a musical finale, here is Duetto buffo di due gatti (Duet for Two Cats). Put your drink down before listening.

Notes & links:
0518Su Mt St Helens 45y ago * sift litter boxen
@ 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens - Wikipedia
& awake 2ish
* up 6ish; ; exercises, ..., Dutch
* drugs: first am 6:17; rest am 07:15; 2*coffee; pm
@ Installing Linux on a Dead Badger | Lucy A. Snyder | Abyss & Apex
Installing Linux on a Dead Badger | smashwords
@ Doom runs on an Apple Lightning to HDMI dongle — SoC inside adapter has enough power
for smooth gameplay | Tom's Hardware
@ The Tulip: Pride of the Netherlands - EPOD - a service of USRA
* walk: around block 10:40. Maybe N or m will want to go out later
@ Mount St. Helens: Eyewitness to History, a KGW+ Special - YouTube
@ Mount St. Helens Eruption: 45 Years Later - King 5 Seattle - YouTube
@ Tornado warnings delayed because of DOGE cuts
@ Epic v. Apple Contempt order | DocumentCloud I haven't had this much fun reading
a court order since SCO v IBM
" In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous
business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn
chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance,
Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated
that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead
allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him
otherwise. Cook chose poorly. [...] The Court refers the matter to the United States
Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal
contempt proceedings are appropriate. [¶] This is an injunction, not a negotiation "

0519Mo * sift litter boxen (N")
& awake 3ish
* up 7ish; ; Dutch
* drugs: first am 07:17; 2*coffee; rest am 8:20ish; pm 20ish
@ How a tornado tested a Kentucky weather office that cut its overnight staff
@ Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer | AP News
@ An Entire Company Was Staffed With AI Agents and You'll Never Guess What Happened
(via ysabetwordsmith)
They all performed as badly as you could expect.
" The best-performing model was Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which struggled to
finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. [...] The worst AI employee was
Amazon's Nova Pro v1, which finished just 1.7 percent of its assignments "
@ AI Chatbots Are Becoming Even Worse At Summarizing Data no surprise
@ Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster
@ EU court rules that tracking-based online ads are illegal | The Record
(there is a link last week (0515) to a different source)
$ C Donate $250 to Carleton via AX (fiscal year ends June 30th)
& bring food up to m; while waiting, found rug, old hard drives in a box in sewing rm.
Not sure what else is there.
% evening: shock-like pains in my R leg. Not happy about that. Somewhat worried.
* load drugs
* order folate
* SL: small wire whisk, aspirin -> Bol
* load fish oil

0520Tu * sift litter boxen
& awake 3ish
% the leg pains were mercifully absent overnight
* up 6:30ish; ; brush teeth, dishes
* drugs: first am 7ish; rest am 08:23; 2*coffee; pm 21:45
* walk: around block 09:56, little pain until the very end.
@ WorldPride Is About to Collide With Donald Trump's Washington
@ Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good - Ars Technica
" QOTD: ai;dr "
@ Cat Choir - YouTube
" from comments: I had to sing this in my choir. it's called "duet for two cats" and
it was a very serious piece ... I still don't know how I didn't die of laughter "
Duetto buffo di due gatti - Wikipedia
: cleaning up my email history, I discovered that links to $FB from 2016 are broken.
ALL of them.
: found Walter Slavin's obit for Dad. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ac990013z
It looks like a scan from the ACS's Analytical Chemistry magazine.
-> I took the "read via your institution" option, specifying Carleton College.
surprisingly, that worked withouut requiring anything else from me.
-> copied to thestarport.org/suites/Starport/Family/Dad/ [pdf]
@ How to prevent AI agents from becoming data security threats | CIO Dive
@ AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt - Ars
@ Microsoft closes 9-year-old feature req, open-sources Windows Subsystem for Linux
@ CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe - Ars Technica
@ 8 security risks overlooked in the rush to implement AI | CSO Online
* retrieved the rug. 18:28. There were also a couple of tubs of my, and my family's
memorabilia. That can wait, as can the two boxes of hard drives.
% tired, a little sore, but happy.
* guitar - trying to pick cleanly -- talking blues, bad guys, band played...; don't
remember exactly.
* 19:00 - 20:30 (10am-11:30 PST) Healing Center Passages support grp - 1st, 3rd Tu

0521We * sift litter boxen
& awake 2:30ish
* up 5:40ishsh?; ; Dutch, exercises
* drugs: first am 5:55; rest am 07:03; 2*coffee; pm 19:37
@ ZEUS Is Officially America's Most Powerful Laser, With 2-Petawatt Blast
@ Internet Archive |
The practice of typography; a treatise on title-pages, with numerous illustrations in
facsimile and some observations on the early and recent printing of books : De Vinne,
Theodore Low, 1828-1914
$ C $50 + 15/m AX archive.org
* apply for personal OV-Chipkaard (keybounce on username)
* 20:00 - 21:30 (11:00-12:30 PST) Virginia Mason Living w\ Cancer grp - 1st, 3rd We
* contact Framework support to add donation and get into the fast lane.
@ Some Canadian musicians halt U.S. tours over border fears, political climate - CBC
featuring filk's own Leslie Hudson explaining why she cancelled her US tour

0522Th * sift litter boxen
& awake 3ish
* up 6:30ish; ; exercises
* drugs: first am 7ish; 1.5*coffee; rest am 09:23; pm 22:10
: heard back from Framework - apparently one has to cancel the existing pre-order in
order to make a donation. Order #R166644531 - dropped back to i3 for battery life
$ C $250 to Hack Club via AX
: may have to go pick up the folate. Maybe they only ship prescriptions?
: While they were downstairs putting together breakfast (and asking me to make coffee),
m noticed something beeping; finally traced it to Colleen's watch [in a little purple
box on her shelf, with her wedding ring on the wristband]. I can't hear it, and can't
see the labels on the controls. Will have to get help.
* hackclub/some-assembly-required: An approachable introduction to Assembly.
* walk: around block. 10:00. Maybe time to start going farther?
@ Archaeopteryx fossil with soft tissue proves that Darwin was right - Earth.com
@ Are the means of computation even seizable? (14 May 2025) – Cory Doctorow
" So I think that DRM doesn't work. I think DRM is a legal construct, not a technical
one. I think DRM is a kind of magic Saran Wrap that manufacturers can wrap around
their products, and, in so doing, make it a literal jailable offense to use those
products in otherwise legal ways that their shareholders don't like. "
@ 12 Airline Freebies Seniors Over 70 Can Get (But No One Talks About!) - YouTube
@ Mysterious Database of 184M Records Exposes Vast Array of Login Credentials
@ The Era Of The Business Idiot - Ed Zitron
* guitar: windward, ...
% 17:02 it's 26.2° in here and I'm feeling comfortably cool in my short-sleeved shirt
That's 79.2°F. Am I turning into a lizard?
@ 2023 - 2024 Annual Report – Wikimedia Foundation

0523Fr * sift litter boxen
& awake 3ish
* up 7ish; ; Dutch
* drugs: first am 7:30ish; rest am 08:55; pm 20:192
@ Roombot Swarm Creates On-Demand Mobile Furniture - IEEE Spectrum
@ This Robotic Silver Swan Has Fascinated Fans for Nearly 250 Years
@ 78 Years Ago Today, BBC Aired the First Science Fiction Television Program RUR
@ Lose the Trackers: The Best Private Browsers for 2025 | PCMag
* am take out kitchen garbage
* order cat fud, litter
* find flights to DFDF - going with m Fly to Hamburg and take the S-Bahn to Hamburg main
station. From there take the HVV to the hotel (or the train to Buchholz). Public transport in Hamburg with the HVV
-> flights purchased ~17:00 % 18:26 still terrified.
@ Is a River Alive? a book by Robert MacFarlane - Bookshop.org US
: The personalized OV-Chipkaart I ordered yesterday arrived.
* laundry 16:04 wash. 1:06 cycle
* 5ish go walkies with m ~1km

0524Sa * sift litter boxen
& awake 3:30ish
* up 6:30ish; ; Dutch
* drugs: first am 7:00; rest am 08:25; coffee; pm 19:30ish
: 30g of beans (2 scoops) in this morning's coffee. Just about right, and almost
exactly matches what the grinder is expecting. (a little more, unfortunately)
@ blogs.nasa.gov now appears to have moved to nasa.gov/nasa-blogs; without dates and
summaries it's practically useless. Switching the bookmark to the main site. May
change that to the press release page if that looks better.
@ Why I suspended my LinkedIn account
" In my (cyber utopian) ideal world, people would have their own websites.
¶They’d publish whatever they felt comfortable publishing, which might include their
current situation, or their contact details.
¶There would be no need for something liked LinkedIn, a glorified
address-book-with-blog-features-and-surveillance-and-advertising. "
* walk: around block. Not hurting. 9ish
@ The End of Glitch (Even Though They Say It Isn't)
@ Tesla Owners are Installing DIY Rip Cords to Avoid Being Trapped in Their Vehicles in
Case of Fire - FuelArc News
@ Unbreaking
How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.
@ Paper clothing is on the catwalk but is it a solution to fast fashion? - ABC News
: I don't know where my Bose headphones are. Thought they were down here somewhere.
-> inside the chaise, next to the mixer. Obvious when I thought about it.
@ Philadephia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times Publish Summer Reading List of Nonexistent
Books | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books
* _finally_ purchased the download version of Bridge
I'd made the mistake of buying the CD directly rather than from Bandcamp, so I didn't
get the free download. Anyway, done.
$ 180 EUR to Truthout
* guitar: Ship of Stone, ... windward - having trouble with F
: WTF became of the supply of N95 masks I brought with me?