500 wildfires are burning in British Columbia.

There are so many fires because of global heating. It is getting worse over time. The Canadian government is trying to push through a pipeline that will accelerate that process.

This process will eventually become self-limiting as fires destroy the pipeline and shut it down.

Uber and Lyft are lobbying California's Democratic legislators to oppose a plan to give their "independent contractors" the rights of employees.

When companies are powerful enough to block justice for their employees, we cannot allow them to remain so powerful. But Uber and Lyft do wrong to their clients customers as well as to their workers, through surveillance systems. Let's get rid of them entirely!

How Monsanto Plants Stories, Suppresses Science and Silences Dissent to Sell a Cancer-Linked Chemical.

A Dutch court ruled that Pastafarianism is not a religion.

I agree with the court's decision. If your religion does not require you to wear some headgear essentially all the time, if you don't have to wear it while driving, then you don't have to wear it for your driver's license.

Most US Democrats think favorably of socialism, but not capitalism.

Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive; they exist in a mix. What the US has today is a plutocratic form of capitalism which gives the rich the power to extinguish all the socialism, and that makes it unjust.

Under the anglo form of capitalism, which controls the US, Canada, Australia and UK, companies dominate the state so much that it lacks the power to stop companies from dragging civilization into the grave. China is more capable of this than the US is.

The Theater of Security Agency says that of the 5000 people it tailed through airports for no real reason, zero did anything potentially criminal. Sounds like the TSA has too much time and money on its hands.

Now that they have verified there is no real danger, how about ceasing this dangerous injustice?

Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never, Ever, Ever Be Illegal. EVER.

Israel destroyed a large theater in Gaza. Israel's strategy in Gaza is to make people suffer, no matter how.

US citizens: call on car companies to commit to meeting fuel efficiency standards even if the bullshitter's men officially cancel them.

If you sign, please spread the word!

Everyone: tell Cambodia's ambassador that Cambodia should drop charges against housing rights defender Tap Vanny.

With JS disabled, the web site won't show you that you succeeded in submitting your message to the ambassador, but you should get an email confirming this.

If you sign, please spread the word!

It took me a little while to get used to it, but after using it for a couple of days, I think I've decided that I like the Kinesis Gaming Freestyle Edge more.

Here's it's layout:

And the Kinesis, for comparison:

The good:

• It's really solid, and heavier than it looks. It's a very nice build.

• Key switches are... ok. They say they are "Cherry MX-style", which I gather means "Kailh Brown", but they are definitely mushier than the real Cherry MX Brown switches that I have in the Kinesis.

• Ctrl, Opt and Cmd on both sides! Finally! Why do manufacturers always omit some on the right?

• After attaching the tenting legs, it was at exactly the angle that I like, and the default connecting cable is long enough, after giving it a good stretch.

The bad:

Most of my complaints stem from, I'm guessing, that their top priorities in designing this thing were:

• Make it as physically small as possible;
• Make it dock together into a square keyboard;
• Control the mouse.

I literally could not care less about any of those things, but those decisions forced most of the bad stuff to happen.

• It's is 5 rows tall instead of 6. This means that there is no Function / Media row, and most critically, no Escape key.

• I'm going to say that again to let it sink in. There is no Esc key. You type Esc by holding Mod and typing tilde. (Just a hunch, but their "ultimate hacking" probably doesn't happen in vi.)

• There's no arrow cluster, and no right navigation column (Home, PgUp, etc.) You type arrows by holding Mod and typing IJKL.

  So because of the Esc and arrows thing, I find it damned near impossible to use Photoshop or Illustrator at any speed. It's a horror.

• As if that wasn't bad enough, the weird little half-height Mod and Space keys that are beneath the "real" keys (so that you have both Mod and Space on both sides) are not real keys, they're microswitches. They require a lot of pressure, and you have to hit them way over at the end. I hate them. Hate.

• So, that Mod key. There's no spacebar on the left side, because you need to use Mod all the time to get at navigation and function keys. You can only type Space with your right hand, or, under duress, you can type it using the horrible microswitch on the left.

• The chord keys in the bottom row are Ctrl, Opt, Cmd, Fn. The "Fn" key is how you get to the Media keys (which is weird, because it seems like those could have been added to the Mod layer, but whatever.) Anyway, the very presence of this key is a problem, because it means the Opt and Cmd keys are too far to the left. It's hard to type singled-handed Cmd/Opt keystrokes without contorting your hand into an uncomfortable claw.

  At least, I think that's what going on? I'm not sure. I just know that typing single-hand chords is uncomfortable.

• There's a big 3 character 9-segment LED display on the keyboard that tells you which keymap you are using (Mac QWERTY, Windows EBCDIC). I don't know about you, but the frequency with which I change my keymap is: exactly once ever. So I don't really need this thing glowing at me. You can turn the light off, but even when unlit it's still ugly as sin. It begs for a piece of electrical tape over it. Also, I'm baffled that they chose to devote so much physical space to such a useless indicator.

• The 6 is on the left only. There should be one on each side.

• No USB ports, so nowhere to plug in your mouse.

• While fumbing around trying to figure out how to type a function key, I accidentally put it into EBCDIC. This is a time bomb that I do not need. (I then remapped that key away, but still.)

• I might like to have palm rests, but the ones that they sell are woodgrain. Ew ew ew, no no no.

What would make me like this keyboard would be:

• Arrow cluster at bottom right;
• Add top Esc/Fn row and navigation column;
• Fix the bottom row layout by omitting Fn and Mod.

As is, this keyboard would be good for you if you:

• Can't quite commit to switching from a rectangular keyboard to a split keyboard;
• Want it to fit into a small bag;
• Have some weird fetish about moving your mouse with IJKL;
• Don't use arrow keys or ESC.

This is mostly a request for testing, because I've received zero feedback on the patches that I merged a month ago and libinput 1.12 is due to be out. No comments so far on the RC1 and RC2 either, so... well, maybe this gets a bit broader attention so we can address some things before the release. One can hope.

Required reading for this article: Observations on trackpoint input data and X server pointer acceleration analysis - part 5.

As the blog posts linked above explain, the trackpoint input data is difficult and largely arbitrary between different devices. The previous pointer acceleration libinput had relied on a fixed reporting rate which isn't true at low speeds, so the new acceleration method switches back to velocity-based acceleration. i.e. we convert the input deltas to a speed, then apply the acceleration curve on that. It's not speed, it's pressure, but it doesn't really matter unless you're a stickler for technicalities.

Because basically every trackpoint has different random data ranges not linked to anything easily measurable, libinput's device quirks now support a magic multiplier to scale the trackpoint range into something resembling a sane range. This is basically what we did before with the systemd POINTINGSTICK_CONST_ACCEL property except that we're handling this in libinput now (which is where acceleration is handled, so it kinda makes sense to move it here). There is no good conversion from the previous trackpoint range property to the new multiplier because the range didn't really have any relation to the physical input users expected.

So what does this mean for you? Test the libinput RCs or, better, libinput from master (because it's stable anyway), or from the Fedora COPR and check if the trackpoint works. If not, check the Trackpoint Configuration page and follow the instructions there.

After waiting several hours, they soaked the octopuses in a MDMA bath for 10 minutes, washed them off with saline, then returned them to the partitioned tank for 30 minutes.

Worst. VIP. Room. Evar.

After a dose of MDMA, the octopuses spent much more time with other octopuses, of both sexes, than before. This is markedly unusual behavior for the creatures, who normally stick to themselves, and the researchers suggest it could be because social behavior that's normally suppressed was being expressed. They were also observed making "slow, voluntary, non-stereotypical, semi-purposeful movements" after being marinated in MDMA, something the researchers think might also be an example of normally repressed behavior coming out.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I can't make it go because I don't know how to make my web browser listen to my microphone (in fact, I'm horrified at the idea that this is even possible) but the concept checks out.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Something changed recently in Youtube such that many of the higher resolution video formats are no longer listed in url_encoded_fmt_stream_map but must be extracted from the dashmpd file instead. But the MP4 URLs I am finding are giving me 403 or 404 errors. So I'd like you to help me figure out where it's going wrong.

1. Get HTML from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlaoFHe6JL0
2. Find the "dashmpd" URL, which will look like https://manifest.googlevideo.com/api/manifest/dash/...
3. Note that it contains /signature/ rather than /s/ which means indicates that it is the real signature, not an enciphered version of it.
4. Find the <Representation id="137"> in there.
5. Its BaseURL should be a downloadable audio-only 1080p MP4, but instead it is 403 or sometimes 404.

What am I missing?

Update: Uh maybe I fixed it maybe.

This conglomerate report of fleshy appearance encourages us to delve into the intriguing orifice that, treasuring the appearance of a great anus, presides over its front. An internal camera waits for the intrusive hand that fractures this barrier.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.