“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.” — Howard Thurman source
A micro.blog question… how come I can only add categories to posts with titles?
Vivaldi Day 2
Today is the second day of using Vivaldi on the Raspberry Pi 4 desktop, and it continues to perform better for me than Chromium. I decided to run Octane 2 and Speedometer 2 to see how Vivaldi benchmarks against Chromium and I am surprised to find that it benchmarks slightly slower in both even though my practical use finds it faster. For example, Speedometer 2 scores 7.93 in Chromium and 7.614 in Vivaldi. For comparison, the Speedometer 2 score on the iPad Air is 201, fastest in the house.
One of the most dangerous ideas that emerged in politics starting in the 1970s is that changing one’s mind about a policy or topic is wrong. We heard politicians claim that their opponent “flip-flops.”
Unfortunately, too many people have taken this to mean that they must not change their minds about something, but changing one’s mind over time is what growing up is all about. Is it any wonder then that people are now so entrenched in their ideas they simply do not listen nor accept anything spoken by someone else that they don’t agree with?
The “no flip-flop” mindset can have dangerous consequences. If scientists aren’t willing to consider the possibility that how they thought something happens, like how respiratory illness spreads, could be flawed, lives can be lost. Not to mention scientists who don’t believe they could be wrong aren’t really practicing science.
If you want to really impress me, tell me about something you changed your mind about in the last three years.
Trying Vivaldi
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a personal remote computer that I access using VNC during the work day, which enables me to keep my personal web access from going through my employer’s Internet proxy. It’s also an excuse of me to fiddle with the Raspberry Pi.
I have been using Chromium for browing the web but grown frustrated with its performance on the Pi so this morning I decided to give Vivaldi a try. Vivaldi uses the same rendering engine as Chrome and I’ve found it uses the same extensions as Chrome, which is important because I need access to Lastpass.
Installation was a little tricky because I am running a beta 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS and so I needed to find the arm64 version of the installation package.
So far I am finding that Vivaldi does run faster on the Pi4 than Chromium. One thing I did to speed things up is to turn off the drop-down, URL completion of the address bar so that I can quickly enter URLs. However, one function that I use to forage for new updates in the Federated Wiki verse does not work, for some reason, so for now I will need to use Chromium for that part of my daily flow.
In the beginning was the first site of the World Wide Web. source
So, the iPadOS Gawq app does not display in landscape. Bad application design. BTW, the ESPN Fantasy app also has this flaw. No mobile app should only work in either portrait or landscape, forcing a user to only do one or the other is lazy programming.
Had a visitor at the home office today
The main task of the week was getting the Christmas packages shipped out in hopes that the Post Office can get them to their destinations in time for Christmas. Each was sent using the machine in the lobby after hours when nobody else is around from which I got several printed receipts with tracking numbers. If you have a current Android phone, take a picture of the tracking number of the receipts and then you can use Google Lens that finds the tracking number and provides a one-tap button to query the tracking status on USPS.com.
Trump’s election was likely only phase 1, my fear is that phase 2 has begun.
I am always interested in new ways to get and read the news so I am trying out Gawq, which installed on my iPad Mini. First reaction is that it’s slow, probably because the service is being pounded due to the exposure.
I like the fact that home test kits for COVID-19 will soon become available but they sound too complicated and intrusive to garner broad use. The target needs to be something like a pregnancy test.
This quote attributed to Garry Kasparov on Scripting News is so true:
Don’t dare say ‘But the system worked’ when a majority of Republicans in Congress support the overturning of a free and fair election. You don’t celebrate a cancer not having killed you yet. You celebrate when you’re cancer free
I believe that those willing to step out of the forest are seeing the thrashing of the withdrawal symptoms of a society deeply addicted to itself.
“Several years ago when I was in Nicaragua, I asked a man if he had time, and he said, “I have the rest of my life,” and smiled. Who of us would possibly say that? That is what we don’t have. What we don’t have is the rest of our lives because we do not even have the now of our lives.”
“Time is exactly what we do not have. What decreases in a culture of affluence is precisely and strangely time—along with wisdom and friendship. These are the very things that the human heart was created for, that the human heart feeds on and lives for. No wonder we are producing so many depressed, unhealthy and even violent people, while also leaving a huge carbon footprint on this poor planet.”
— Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations for Advent by Richard Rohr a.co/43XJm0A
I am really surprised that there haven’t been more Wear OS watches with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 4100 CPU announced for the Christmas buying season. Wondering what that might mean for Wear OS?
I do not take comfort in SCOTUS deciding to not take up Texas' lawsuit against the four swing states. First, SCOTUS simply hid behind procedure and thus were not the adults in the room standing against tyranny. What is even more troubling to me is that I am sure President Trump fully expected “his” SCOTUS justices to keep him in office, I am sure in his mind that is what they owed him for seating them. The fact that any person considers any judges to be “his,” particularly Justices is frightening.
What we must learn from this episode of U.S. history is that it matters how anyone who would be President views the powers and responsibilities of the office. The U.S. Constitution is not intended to give anyone extreme powers, its intention is exactly the opposite. The fact that people think elections are all about power shows how much we have strayed from the founding principles of the United States.
If we don’t learn from this year and make meaningful changes then all we have done is prevent the end of the U.S. for the time being and increased the likelihood that it will not see its tricentennial. It takes more to preserve freedom than waving a flag and standing for the national anthem.
Tim Wu makes a good case that the vaunted “checks and balances” of the U.S. constitution has not really shown to be reality. The only thing that has prevented democracy in the U.S. from being overthrown has been the integrity of a frighteningly small number of people.
In my opinion we must not allow Republicans to paint a picture that this threat has only been because of Donald Trump. None of what we have endured is due to just Trump, in fact a case can be made that none of it is on Trump, instead it has all been on the Republican Party. Never forget, Trump won the Republican Party nomination for President, and if he had not then we would have not had four years of a Trump presidency and who knows how many fewer lives would have been saved from the pandemic.
We can’t be patting ourselves on the back thinking democracy prevailed. All that we really have is possibly a victory of one battle, but Republicans have been waging war on the United States since the 1940s and will continue fighting that war in to the future. As long as there is no consequence on Republicans they will remain to be a clear and present danger.
Not surprised that SCOTUS fumbled the ball. It seems nobody is willing to make a stand for democracy.