GOP governor of Michigan happy with last minute, anti-capitalist edit to legislation put in by another Republican.
At least Snyder has a plethora of lake to go jump in.
I grow increasingly Independent by the day.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5853401&cid=48193505
I rather like this one. Any time I can play on the ambiguity of a third-person singular verb and a plural noun, I'm crowing.

The airbrush crew loves to forget that MLK was raised in a Republican house, in an era where that kind of meant something.

Friday Philosophy - Is Dave Working?

And the part about the backspace or delete button. This guy is scary. :)

Well, Apple just refreshed the Mac Mini. I was actually waiting for the update because i have a 2011 Mac Mini and upgrades are usually nice.

I switched to the Mac because i got sick of Windows with all their changes. There's the ribbon, the attempt at removing the start menu, the reorganizing of the Control Panel, and the overall homogenization of the desktop and handheld UI, which i want to be different. After disliking Vista, not liking Windows 7, and being horrified by Windows 8, i just gave up. Now i run OSX on my Mac Mini which, for the most part, i find to be fun.

After my conversion, i realized what OSX users had that they could be upset about. First and foremost, Apple is not responsive. Find a bug, they'll probably fix it in the next release, if they care. For me, the Speakable Items bug was the worst, because i wanted it, with a multiple monitor bug being annoying as well. The former has been fixed in Yosemite, luckily someone noticed.

That call upgrades into play. Apple now offers them for free, but it's take it or leave it. Like those blue scroll bars? Too bad, they removed them. Like something else? You can keep them as long as they want them. Yosemite changes the UI giving it a flat look which the community seem divided on. I dislike it so much ihave decided to not upgrade to it. Between it's ugliness and the push to make it like the handhelds, i'm back to my problem with Windows. Oh well.

But now comes the clincher. The Mac Mini has soldered RAM. My current Mac Mini has 16 GB RAM that i bought myself for significantly less than what Apple would have charged. I would not want to limit my next Mac to 16GB nor pay Apple some ludicrously large amount for it either. On it's own this is a bad move. Added to the flat look, and i no longer want a Mac.

So, my next computer will probably run Linux. Question is, should i go back to Debian (i don't think i can handle Slackware anymore) or use one of them newfangled distros. Well, i have some time before i need to upgrade to Linux again. And who knows what will happen?

2 things. One is longer than the other so I'll start with the shorter.

Synergy has decided that they'll charge for downloads. This is totally fine with me and they are fully within their rights. They have not changed the licensing on the code, it is still FOSS. So I went to their nightly build directory and grabbed the rpm I needed today from there. It's a good project to support I just figure I'll do it on my terms. This was easier than grabbing the source and going that route.

Now to the longer part. A little while back the hard drive in my Fedora box starting getting flaky. I was going to buy a new drive but a friend offered one he wasn't using so I took that instead. Then that one started getting flaky so the other day I went out and bought a new hard drive. Same size, different manufacturer.

Then I tried to clone the old drive to the new drive with Clonezilla. The process completed but the new drive wouldn't boot. It mostly did but got stuck - I think because so much hadn't been able to be copied due to bad sectors on the original disk. So I figured it's not hard to do a fresh install and I went that route.

I put the new disk in, pulled the old disk out and installed Fedora. I have done it enough times that I can step through everything pretty quickly. But that quickness made me forget about a couple items on the old drive that I wanted. So I grabbed our little harness that lets me connect sata drives via usb.

When I install Fedora I let the installer configure my storage and I take the defaults. No problems. But when I plugged in via USB I saw the root partition right away but not the LVM partition. Checking with the lvm tools I see that I have two volumes with the same name and I'm not sure which is which. Fortunately vgdisplay will tell you lots of interesting things about your volume groups including their UUID. So for two items that looked identical to me, I could see the UUID of each. And fortunately vgrename takes a UUID as an argument and that let me rename the old volume and then bring it up. Once I activated it, it was automounted and I could use Dolphin to see and grab the files I wanted.

In the future when installing I should probably choose a non-default volume name to avoid this kind of thing. Or make it a post-install step to change what's on the box.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5827369&cid=48144609
Sweet Troll Tuesday!

Rule from the Shadows - The Psychology of Power - Part 1
The easy litmus test for any of this crap is whether it favors individual sovereignty or not.

Liberalsâ(TM) new message: You know who is responsible for Ebola outbreak in America? Conservatives
Never mind that I really don't actually wish harm to anyone; have vulnerable children; understand that ebola is likely to hurt the half of the economy still working, and not the couch potatoes. Oh no. The Holy Narrative must be protected. So, dutifully, I assume the role of bitter, raaaaacist, misogynist cling-on, Bible in my left hand, .45 in my right, and strike my best straw-man for you.
Selah.

You have to enjoy the full context of this cranial rectalitis:
damn_registrars: "You were one of slashdot's foremost purveyors of President Lawnchair's pointless TLA"
me: "FDR, LBJ, BHO, WTF?"
d_r: "We have had the discussion before on why that argument holds no water. Bringing it back up is pointless. Take your fear mongering to a different discussion."
me: "That argument, and the rest of my post, is thoroughly buoyant."
d_r: "Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are full of shit on that one for the same reason you were full of shit on it before. You gave examples of three past presidents who are known by their initials, and I pointed out why they are known by their initials -
The all came from families where others with the same last name were president and/or commonly known as holding elected office in DC
You cannot say the same about Obama. Our government has never had anyone else elected by the last name of Obama. Your argument is invalid, end of story."

Listen, Hot Rod: you don't get to make some arbitrary distinction understood only by you, take the American tradition of referring to Presidents by initials, and bully people into not saying BHO.
BHO!
BHO!
BHO!
Jehova!
Jehova!
Jehova!
Now take your bullying and get thee hence, creep.
You're just being peevish because you straight up lost the 'tantamount' discussion.

A friend sent me a link to a synopsis of work done on a 13th century treatise that has theories about cosmology very close to the Big Bang and Mutliverse theories.

It's amazing how the old is new. Or is that the new is old?

It's amazing how many friends and fans i have that no longer post. Well, on second thought, it actually isn't that amazing. But, when i sent the voting fairy to do her job, she had a hard time finding posts to moderate!

Nonetheless, she got the job done. Though, noone left her any presents under their posts.

After 5 years of Obama, the labor force is decimated.

So much so, that you could, and should, call Obama's job killing policies the Obola Virus. Just as lethal as Ebola, only the Obola virus kills jobs.

Christianity offers spiritual matter; modern liberalism is anti-matter.

I haven't posted in a bit. I was travelling and then busy when I got back.

I spent a week-end in Vajta and then a few days later I was in Athens for a week. Greece is a very pretty place. The weather was fantastic. Vajta was also really nice. Here in Hungary we are getting into fall and that may be my favorite season. Growing up in the Southwest I didn't experience such a high degree of change every year and I'm really loving it now.

I finally figured out something today that was really unexpected. When the 64 bit version of Chrome became available for Linux I installed it. It's nice but I did notice something right away. Mouseover wasn't working. This is a huge pain. Especially as I'm a heavy user of gmail and google drive. But even little things like reading the mouse over joke for xkcd became a pain.

Anyhow I just figured it was a problem with Chrome. Today as it was bugging me again I decided to look and see if anyone was talking about it. I found this synergy bug report. I would never have guessed that synergy was the problem. And I have the server automatically start when I log in - so even when I don't have my laptop at my desk, the server is still running on my desktop. So even when I "wasn't using" synergy I still had the problem.

Now that it is fixed I'm pretty happy.

When I read this report, I immediately shut the server down and instantly Chrome became normal and everything worked. The comments for the bug report said that turning off hardware acceleration in chrome helped. So I did that. And now I can use synergy and Chrome is working normally. Very interesting stuff.

edit - is the free beer at work part of the problem? (In the paragraph under the heading "Life at Synergy Si..." -- and I'm kidding. I want free beer at my work now.)