If you’re going to add scent to something to perfume your body, it seems to me that it makes more sense to put it in something that you aren’t in the process of mostly washing away at the time of addition. Almost everything there, aside from the deodorant, is scent added to some form of detergent.

I’m not sure about what election you’re referring to. If you mean in the recent US presidential election, most of them weren’t in a position to realistically affect the outcome anyway; they’d need to be in a swing state, a state that wasn’t already very probably going to go one way or the other.

That being said, if they didn’t vote for the President, they probably also didn’t vote for other things on the ballot that probably affect them as well. It’s not just about electing the President.

Changes in the territory of a state of that sort require the approval of both state legislatures and Congress. Cities don’t have any special say in the matter other than the degree to which state law might permit them to affect the decision in their own state – they don’t have the ability to alter a state’s territory on their lonesome, even if the territory includes them. That’s defined in the US Constitution:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-4/section-3/

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

The boundaries have changed before. For example, Washington DC was originally a squareish area consisting of land from both Maryland and Virginia, with the Potomac River running through it. Virginia asked for their side of the territory back, and in 1847, got it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_retrocession

I believe that some of them do change to some degree. For example, the boundary between Ohio and West Virginia is the low water mark on the Ohio side of the Ohio River.

kagis

https://archive.wvculture.org/history/government/wvboundaries.html

The West Virginia Constitution, in Section I of Article II, provides:

. . . The State of West Virginia includes the bed, bank and shores of the Ohio river. . .

West Virginia, as in the case of Kentucky, succeeded to the rights of Virginia in respect to the Ohio boundary and, therefore, her territorial limits extend to the low watermark on the northwest or Ohio side of the river. The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has expressed an opinion that:

Low water mark within the intendment of our law, as related to the Ohio River, is the point to which the water recedes at its lowest stage. {Union Sand and Gravel Co. v. Northcott, 102 W. Va. 519, Point 5 of Syllabus.)

This boundary extends from a point at low watermark on the northwestern side of the Ohio River opposite the mouth of Big Sandy River to the common corner of Ohio and Pennsylvania, marked by a granite monument as indicated in the report on the Pennsylvania boundary.

If there is a sudden shift in a river, as from a radical change resulting from a flood, normally boundaries don’t move with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_v._Tennessee

The Supreme Court affirmed this finding, quoting from its opinion in an earlier dispute between the same states where it had held:

It is settled beyond the possibility of dispute that, where running streams are the boundaries between States, the same rule applies as between private proprietors, namely, that, when the bed and channel are changed by the natural and gradual processes known as erosion and accretion, the boundary follows the varying course of the stream; while, if the stream from any cause, natural or artificial, suddenly leaves its old bed and forms a new one, by the process known as an avulsion, the resulting change of channel works no change of boundary, which remains in the middle of the old channel, although no water may be flowing in it, and irrespective of subsequent changes in the new channel.[2]

But they do shift somewhat as rivers change course.

I think that two items would be pretty prominent for humanity:

• First, if we know not just that it is a simulation but that this brings some knowledge of how the simulation’s physics work that differs from our previous non-simulation understanding, how to make use of those properties.

• Second, figuring out how to “break out”, how to influence the world in which the simulation is being run.

To be fair, he’s always smiling and his predecessor had to be the world’s least photogenic Pope, so it’s probably something that he’s focused on doing himself.

Vinegar is nasty

I like salt and vinegar potato chips.

I like flavored nori. This sort of thing:

https://www.amazon.com/Organic-Kimnori-Seasoned-Roasted-Seaweed/dp/B0815VY3RW

Never had that particular brand, but you get the idea.

Hmm.

• I have a manual screen-lock key combination. I have DPMS (auto power off when idle) on the monitor disabled when it’s unlocked and set to a short period when it’s locked. Powers on when I’m typing to unlock.

• I haven’t touched KDE for a long time, but last I did, I believe that it was a stacking system. Back when I used a stacking window manager, I had the fourth mouse button set up to act as a “drag window” button. Could click anywhere on the window. I did like that.

• I have a key combination set up to open a terminal with tmux with a shell, a web browser, and one of those dmenu text-based launcher clones (can’t remember which). Those are the things that I most frequently want access to.

• I currently hide the status bar unless the Super key is held down. I’m not completely sure that this is the right way to go – it does mean that any important stuff needs to notify the user via the notification manager system. But it does provide a maximum of usable screen space.

• No animations. They delay the time taken until what I just did is visually complete.

• I have multiple numbered workspaces. I hit Super-q and then a number to jump to them, Super-c and then a number to move the focused window to one, and Super-1 and Super-2 to cycle forward and backward through them. There weren’t chosen to be mnemonic, but convenient to reach, as they’re operations that I do a fair bit.

• Background is just a flat color (low-saturation medium blue, so not super-high contrast). I use sway, a tiling compositor, so I rarely see the background, so your mileage may vary. That being said, I started doing that years before I started using tiling. Background images were just more visual noise for me.

• Killed window decorations (titlebar, close button, etc). This may not be reasonable for a stacking environment. They eat screen space and don’t display anything very useful. I use a tiling environment, so resizing and dragging isn’t necessary. I have a key combination to kill the currently-focused window, so I don’t need a close box. I don’t minimize windows – I do switch workspaces, which has some functional overlap – so I don’t need controls for that.

• I have my mouse pointer auto-hide systemwide if I’m not moving the mouse or clicking its buttons for a few seconds.

• I have a keystroke (Super-`) to dismiss notification manager messages from the keyboard. This may be the norm in desktop environments – I haven’t played with them since before notification managers were a thing.

The one thing that I’d kind of like to do that I don’t currently is to have a toroidal workspace model. Someone’s done this for emacs with buffer switching, which is where I saw it and thought “wow, that’s an excellent idea”, but it hasn’t been done for sway workspaces. Basically, normally you have a “ring” of workspaces that you can cycle through. I’d like to have a “ring of rings” (which in 3D, is a torus), since I normally I’m working on one project and have several workspaces (usually 1-4) associated with that project. I’d like to have a “ring” for each project, with different keystrokes to switch projects and switch workspaces within those projects. Sway probably could support that with just scripting, no core modifications, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

That’s a Windows system, requires a numeric keypad, has been around for a long time. I don’t know what its coverage is, though, whether it can do any Unicode character.

kagis

Sounds like not, that Microsoft has its own mapping:

https://www.alt-codes.net/how_to_use_alt_codes/

The special characters and symbols can be typed by their Alt Code values on computers which are running Microsoft Windows operating systems. They cannot be typed by their Unicode values.

Problem with the numeric entry systems is that they’re kind of a pain to remember. They work all right if you have a small number of symbols that you need to use frequently and can memorize them. But they’re less-handy if you’ve got a wider variety.

GTK-based apps (like, a bunch of Linux GUI apps) will let you do numeric entry of Unicode codepoints if you hit Control-Shift-U and then enter a Unicode codepoint.

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that the open-source Android onscreen keyboards that I’ve seen don’t support user-configurable popup menus on keys with arbitary characters and text snippets, as it seems like an obvious thing to want to configure.

I’ve long wished that FPS games could be updated to modern engines. Problem is, as things stand, it’s normally done with a lot of manual work. Occasionally there are remakes. Sometimes fans go out and do stuff like OpenMW for Morrowind, reimplement the entire game engine and often add support for modern features like antialiasing or reflective water or dynamic shadows or whatever. Which is impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it will never result in it being the norm for games to be forward-ported. Too much work. And it creates ongoing maintenance work, especially if you want to keep up with new hardware.

The way multi-language, multi-architecture compilers work is to have an intermediate representation. So, if you want to support a new language, you just write a translator from your language to that intermediate representation. If you want to support a new architecture, you just write a translator from the intermediate representation to your new architecture. This is increasingly efficient as the number of targets and languages increase, since to support N languages on M architectures, you write N+M translators, rather than NxM (which you’d do if you wrote a specific translator to a specific architecture and wanted to support all combinations). And it isolates the maintenance work – someone adding support for a new architecture doesn’t need to worry about knowing how Language X works or bother to support it.

What I’ve wondered about is doing something like that for video game worlds. Have a software package that can convert Fallout: New Vegas’s world to such an intermediate representation, something capable of expressing all of the stuff in existing game worlds, then having a generator that can output that intermediate representation to Starfield’s engine, for example. A number of games make use of Lua for scripting support, which also would somewhat-facilitate forward-porting game logic. Some functionality that isn’t present in older games would require some human involvement – like, say Old Engine doesn’t support volumetric fog and New Engine does, maybe when converting to the intermediate representation, one has the option to add it, requires some game-specific work in the part of the Old-Game-To-Intermediate-Representation translator.

Well, if you know someone who doesn’t have a nice pair of headphones, you could donate the old pair to them.

Personally, I think unless you’re after a specific feature that the new headphones have (like, I really wanted multipoint Bluetooth on a pair of headphones so that I could use my phone and laptop at the same time), I’d probably keep using the old ones. Old headphones are still pretty good.

Not what you were asking, but I’d like to highlight for others that you replaced the earpads on your headphones.

I wasn’t aware that this was a thing for a long time, but they’re often the thing that goes first, and for many headphones, inexpensive replacement headphone pads are available. They may even be preferable to the originals (e.g. maybe you want puffier pads, or a velour instead of pleather surface, or whatever).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

Works in X11 and Wayland.

Not as powerful as Emacs’s input methods, but it covers a lot of common cases.

While I agree with the general premise that Caps Lock is in a terrible place on standard US English keyboards – that’s prime real estate and people just don’t use it that much – I swap Caps Lock and Control and have Menu remapped to Compose. If you’re typing in English, you’re gonna use Control a lot more than Compose. If you use emacs, that’s doubly true. And that’s about where Compose has been on some keyboards.

Might also try [email protected].

I don’t know if it’s identical to the posterize effect, but in GIMP, you can reduce an image to indexed color using a fixed, user-specified palette and then back to RGB.

Image->Mode->Indexed…

Select your palette. Set dithering to None. Hit OK.

Image->Mode->RGB

You might try adding a subsequent despeckle…I think that Posterize might do something along those lines as well.

EDIT: Okay, after running a test image in GIMP, and then examining histograms on the output is that it looks like what Posterize does in GIMP is to take a “number of levels” input, then strictly divide each channel evenly along those lines (e.g. for “3”, you’ll have 0%, 50% brightness, and 100% brightness for each of red, green, and blue channels), and then it reduces the number of colors using only those colors. I don’t think that it does a despeckle. I used to enjoy making “more-poster-like” images than Posterize did, and usually did a despeckle to simplify them before running outlines on it, stuff like this:

But looking at a test image from GIMP posterization, it clearly has single-color single pixel regions, so Posterize isn’t doing any sort of despeckling:

Why take a Nimitz-class when you could have a Ford-class?

I haven’t heard of it, but I guess it makes sense. Like, it’s not uncommon in the US to drink hot coffee in the morning when it’s cold out if you’re camping or in an outdoors environment that’s hard to heat up. Delivers a big slug of heat directly to someone. But there’s no real reason that it has to contain caffeine.

I don’t know about Korea or other places, but Japan traditionally didn’t go in for house insulation, aimed to use the kotatsu rather than heating the living space as a whole.

Steam does spit out some diagnostic messages, and I believe – don’t quote me on this – that programs that it runs normally have the same stderr/stdio, so stuff they write will show up there as well. Normally, these are not saved in a file. I generally launch it from a script, so that it’ll save said log messages in a file that I can view.

gam-steam.sh:

#!/bin/bash

# Some games (Wasteland 2) require more file descriptors
ulimit -S -n 4096

exec steam "$@" >~/.steamlog -console -nobigpicture -nochatui -nofriendsui -silent 2>&1 &

Leaves log messages in .steamlog in my home directory. You may or may not want some of those other options being passed to Steam.