Slashdot's greatest knave should spring into action to defend Her Majesty against the latest tidbit:

Instapundit notes: "THEN SHE STOOD NEXT TO THE COFFINS OF THE DEAD AND LIED" also "they locked up a filmmaker for a year, just to support their cover story. Nice people."

I realize it's more of a difference of degree than kind between her and any other megalomaniac running. However, I think that after eight years of electro shock therapy from #OccupyResoluteDesk, Her Majesty has the potential to turn an economic hangover into a full-on coma.

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.

Now, wait: the fruit of Progress is an impenetrable thicket of legislation/regulation produced by the clerisy. Of course it's rigged. You can't stab capitalism in the heart and then bemoan the rise of the nomenklatura. Or maybe the entire article is just a refined Progressive troll.

Read the full monty here. Damning? Why, yes: yes, it is.
http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/b9c746caccb2aa718aed0e0e67ae14be.pdf
To the liars spreading this ruse: we've known you're false for some time. But by all means, roll out ManBearPig for another round of drollery.

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.

IowaHawk:
WH: historically cold winter to blame for weak GDP
WH: we're having hottest year in history

I'm not really ashamed of my country, but #OccupyResoluteDesk is a total piece of work. To say nothing of his sycophants littering this site.
The real question is whether President Jarrett can submarine Her Majesty enough to allow running Michelle, so that President Jarrett can hold power for another 8 years.

Clinton Foundation admits making mistakes on taxes. Do. Tell.
I pretty much think every utterance from a Clinton is at least corrupted, if not mostly a bucket of lies.
In response to Barabara Hudson's JE, I should have also said that, sure, Schweitzer is peddling a book, and has a history of selling books with heavy claims. To address d_r's inevitable accusation, I'm not saying that we should take Baltimore-style action outside of a proper legal proceeding.
Restated, just because Her Majesty uses the Rule of Law like a chamber pot is no excuse to join her degeneracy.
Rather, there should be support for actual reform.
Anyway it hasn't mattered Fig #1 these last years. The electorate seems to crave hell. Well, there are people who will deliver.

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?

Yeah, probably.

I guess our favorite Pavlovian degenerate will claim this is just a stunt, there's no "there" there, and it doesn't matter until certiorari is granted.
What's the difference between a mallard with bird flu and a Wisconsin Lefty?

Oh, and I guess the WSJ urging SCOTUS to take the case is just an example of conservative media bias, or something.

Scooby Snack (no-Chiptle division) for the haters who gotta hate my links. Mother Jones:

Troll level: Grand Master.

If pockets as deep as Rush Limbaugh are calling you out by name for your perfidy in the Wisconsin John Doe prosecutions, he's pretty confident that even the smartest shark in the tank isn't going to get Ol' Rush To Judgement convicted for libel, no?
A big fat whale like Rush would be sooooo tasty for the Left. They'd probably pour the kind of resources into taking Rush down that they did in trying to unseat Scott Walker, if they didn't know Rush was dealing that thing which to the Left is like sunlight to a vampire: the truth.
The usual suspects may now vaporize the messenger.

Instapundit in USA Today:

And the slack-jawed syconphants on here that support these abuses can just fall off the planet. History, I surmise, will show, to Wisconsin's credit, that the American residents of the state effectively and peacefully threw off what was tantamount to a Commie takeover.

http://freebeacon.com/hillary-laugh-button/

Around the first of the year all three working computers were just about stuffed full, so I thought of sticking a spare drive in the Linux box, when the Linux box died from a hardware problem. It's too old to spend time and money on, so its drive is going in the XP box (which is, of course, not on the network; except sneakernet). I decided to break down and buy an external hard drive. I found what I was looking for in the "Seagate Personal Cloud". And here I thought the definition of "the cloud" was someone else's server!

I ordered it the beginning of January, not noticing that it was a preorder; it wasn't released until late March. I got it right before April.

I was annoyed with its lack of documentation -- it had a tiny pamphlet full of pictures and icons and very few words. Whoever put that pamphlet together must beleive the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Tell me, if a picture is worth a thousand words, convey that thought in pictures. I don't think it can be done.

I did find a good manual on the internet. For what I wanted, I really didn't need a manual, but since I'm a nerd I wanted to understand everything about the thing. Before looking for a manual I plugged it all up, and Windows 7 had no problem connecting with it. It takes a few minutes to boot; it isn't really simply a drive, it must have an operating system and network software, because it looks to the W7 notebook to be another file server. Its only connections are a jack for the power cord and a network jack.

The model I got has three terrabytes. I moved all the data from the two working computers (using a thumb drive to move data from XP) and the "cloud" was still empty. Streaming audio and video from it is flawless; I'm completely satisfied with it, it's a fine piece of hardware.

However, it WON'T do what is advertised to do, which is to be able to get to your data from anywhere. In order to do that, Seagate has a "software as a service" thing where you can connect to a computer from anywhere, but only the computer and its internal drives, NOT the "personal cloud". And they want ten bucks a month for it.

I downloaded the Android app, and I could see and copy files that were on my notebook to my phone, but I couldn't play music stored there on it. I uninstalled the crap. "Software as a service" is IMO evil in the first place, but to carge a monthly fee to use a piece of crap software like this is an insult. Barnum must have been right.

If you're just looking for an external hard drive, like I was, it's a good solution. If you want what they're advertising, you ain't gettin' it. The Seagate Personal Cloud's name is a lie, as is its advertising.