Back in 2011, I asked How Long Until OWS Gives Up With Nothing?

I figured they would eventually get pushed aside and things would go back to business as usual. Indeed, that has mostly happened - wall street still runs the show and tells Washington what to do while the rest of us get screwed.

However, it appears that not only did something come from the Occupy movement, but it is a tangible product that you can buy.

I am a widely unreported minority called a 'xenosexual' i am very attracted to foreign women. xeno means alien and of course many xenosexuals want to have sex with aliens from another planet. of course i'm not exclusively xenosexual but i'm not pansexual either (loving all types) as boys/men are ugly to me. the internet for all it's glory has so far hidden the xenosexual to obscure groups even more obscure than 4chan. even though japanese anime has had demon sex and alien sex it is still an obscure offshoot of an obscure media. 'please my teacher' is one such xenosexual anime (which i have copies of)

I am tired of all the persecution and ignorance towards xenosexuals i couldn't even find a page on facebook for xenosexuals, despite there being anime for it.

If you can make it through his 45 seconds without falling asleep you might hear him say:

I will say though, that if somehow the "democrats" manage to nominate Bernie Sanders, it would be fantastic to watch the two square off. Unfortunately Bernie can't raise enough money to be taken seriously by those who have the power to select a candidate - and will eventually be assassinated by the media (in the same was they offed Howard Dean) - which will result in a subpar nominee being on the ballot.

On the plus side, the Kevlar Kandidate keeps packing his offices with people who worked for the Teflon Candidate. This suggests he has a low probability of actual success. Unfortunately, Wisconsin will still be stuck with him after that failure occurs.

I'm surprised this wasn't on the front page. I noticed today in the bottom right corner

And was left to wonder if the Slashdot parent company was bought out. Apparently they just changed their name for better branding. I'm sure this can only lead to good things for this site, right?

There are an awful lot of pages on my web site, and I've been busy making them all "mobile-friendly". Most of them are little or no problem making them look good on all platforms, but there are three that are especially problematic.

I jumped this hurdle (well, sort of stumbled past it) by making two of each of the pages with a link to the mobile page from the index.

Ideally, I could just check to see if it was a phone or not and redirect phones to the mobile page, but there's no way to make this 100% successful*. Each brand of phone has a different user agent, there are a lot of installable phone browsers. On top of that, is it an Android phone or an Android tablet? With the minimum typeface size and viewport set, those pages are fine on the PC version but the phone version looks like crap.

Apple should have thought of this when they made the first iPhone, and Google should have thought of this when developing Android. The answer is simple, but it can only be implimented by browser makers and perhaps the W3C.

From the beginning of the World Wide Web, browsers looked for index.html, the default front page in any directory. This worked fine before smart phones, but no longer.

Phone browsers should look first for mobile.html, and if it exists display that, and display index.html if it isn't there. Tablets and computers would behave as they always have.

It doesn't have to be mobile.html, it could be any name as long as everyone agreed that it was the standard, like they did with index.html.

Maintaining a web site would be much easier if they did this. What do you guys think?

* A reader tipped me to the Apache Mobile Filter. It looks promising, especially since my host uses Apache. I'm looking into it.

Bloomberg View says it is unlikely.

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tqft@tqft-hurd:~$ uname -a
GNU tqft-hurd 0.6 GNU-Mach 1.4+git20150409-486/Hurd-0.6 i686-AT386 GNU

qemu-img Not kvm-img as on the documentation on debian which apparently doesn't recognise that as a valid command or program (I looked via synaptic as well).

Running xfce, apparently gnome and kde don't work yet.

Yet to do a proper reboot.

Download dvd iso, follow commands (except as above), click as per usual debian install. Done

Safe gun storage does not include leaving your loaded and unlocked weapon rolled up in the sheets of the bed where your two year old is playing .

And, as usual:

I finally got the full texts of Nobots and Mars, Ho! to display well on a phone. My thanks to Google for showing me how, even if the way they present the information is more like trial and error, but it's actually easy once you jump through all their hoops. I'll make it easy.

First, you need to make sure it will fit on a phone's screen. I've been preaching for years that it's stupid to use absolute values, except with images; if you don't tell the browser the image size and you are using style sheets, your visitors will be playing that annoying "click the link before it moves again" game.

Some of you folks who studied this in college should demand your tuition be refunded, because they obviously didn't teach this.

Giving tables, divs, and such absolute values almost assures that some of your visitors will have that incredibly annoying and unprofessional horizontal scroll (*cough* slashdot *cough*).

None of the elements (images, divs, etc) can be more than 320 pixels wide, and you need to tell the browser to make it fit on a screen. To do this, add this meta tag to your page's head:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

Next, you need to make sure the text is large enough to read without double tapping. The <p> tag does this:

<p {min-height: 16px}>

This needs to be placed after the <body> tag and before anything having to do with text.

To test it, just pull the page up on your phone. If it scrolls sideways, you need to work on it.

If you're worried about your Google pagerank, Google has a "mobile friendly test" here. If you flunk, well, when Google says "jump"...

My main index page fails their test. To make it pass the test I would have to ruin the desktop/tablet design. As it is now, the text is readably large on a phone but it has a sideways scroll, which is tiny if you hold the phone sideways, and I added a link at the very start of the page to a version that will pass Google's test, looks fine on a phone, not bad on a tablet but looks like excrement on a computer. The main index works fine on a tablet, since I've made it as "mobile-friendly" as possible.

I'd have it redirect if it saw Android or iOS, but it's been fifteen years since I've done that and I've forgotten how.

We recently had a school shooting in Washington state where the (student) shooter was stopped after firing but before hurting anyone. He was indeed stopped by a teacher from that school.

Did the teacher draw a weapon and send lead flying down the hallway? No. The teacher tackled the boy to disarm him. The school principal also helped to hold down the student until police arrived.

I have two new stories nearly finished, but I've decided to see if I can sell first publication rights to a magazine. If everyone rejects them, I'll post them then. If one is accepted, it will likely be quite a while before I can post.

With three books in the works I've been really busy. Hell, I've been working harder since I retired than I did when I worked! I got the index pages to my three published books and the "coming soon" page for Yesterday's Tomorrows "mobile-friendly". I don't know why I'm bothering; almost nobody surfs in on a phone or from Google. But at any rate, I got the book Triplanetary and the first two chapters of Mars, Ho "mobile friendly" as well. The Time Machine is next; the epub versions of my books are better than the HTML versions, on a phone, anyway. Twain, Dickens, and God are going to be mobile-hostile for quite a while because of all the artwork in them.

I couldn't make the main index "mobile friendly" without making it look like crap on a computer screen, so I made a copy "mobile friendly", posted it as mobile.html and added a link from the main index.

Site stats say Google has spidered, so I tried to find Mars, Ho!" by googling on the phone. Nothing but Marsho Medical Group, Andy Weir's The Martian, and a facebook page for someone named Mars Ho. Googling "Mars, Ho! novel" did bring up Amazon's e'book copy halfway through the page.

"Mars, Ho! mcgrew" brought up Amazon's e'book first, followed by the mobile-hostile main index, THEN the actual Mars, Ho! index which IS "mobile friendly" (it passed their test). And I thought "mobile friendly" was supposed to raise your ranks? What's up, Google?

The second copy of Yesterday's Tomorrows came yesterday. I didn't expect until the day after tomorrow. I went through it twice yesterday and it's almost ready; there is still a little work before it's published, but it won't be long.

It's a really nice book, with stories by Isaac Asimov, John W Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, A. E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, and Jerome Bixby. Covers of the magazines they appeared in are shown, with short biographies and photos of the authors. It's also well-illustrated with illustrations from the original magazines.

Random Scribblings: Junk I've littered the internet with for two decades will probably be next year.

Oh, how do you like my new shirt?

It seems that some people might not be familiar with this function, so I thought I'd mention it as I find it useful. Slashdot can send you a message when someone on your friends list posts a Journal Entry (JE). This feature is under "Message" in the "User Preferences" settings. If slashdot renders as oddly in your browser as it does in mine, you now get to User Preferences by clicking the icon that looks like a 6-toothed gear that should be near your name in a small panel on the front page. Then once that is open, find the "Messages" settings (in my case it is the last link on the right). Scroll about half-way down until you see Journal Entry by Friend. In there, you'll see several options

• No Messages
• E-Mail
• Web
• AIM
• REST API

I find the Web option to be the most useful myself, by YMMV.

We'll see if this is a lasting new stance or evaporates as usual. My bet is on the latter.

After a whole bunch of Somalis decided to pile on me for actually answering a series of questions, I can see why they have few friends.

Seriously, Somalia has been starving since I was a baby, and the US and Russia dropped mil equipment in Africa that destabilized the region, and now China and Saudi Arabia are going to ensure nothing good ever happens there.

But, sure, yell at me. that will do you good. Not.