derrickoswald

(just visualize a very rough, thick, quilt/rug to go on the floor)

I've sewn a bunch of old jean pieces together, mostly to learn how to sew jean material with a twin needle (only broke one so far) on my cheap sewing machine, but I didn't think the project through completely.

There are two problems.

1. It seems the quilt batting I can find around here is pretty thin (1cm) and pretty expensive: CHF18 (US$23) per meter, and it is only 150cm wide. So to double or triple it up to get some decent thickness, for an ~84cm × ~84cm top and my scrap project is starting to look a tad expensive (like near enough to half the cost of a sewing machine). Any thoughts on stuffing material (it's just a dog bed after all) - or should I just suck it up and buy the batting? I've looked at using a rug purchased from a low-end Ikea-type store, but they seemed too thin and too expensive - and it goes against the reducing waste idea, right? I thought maybe I could piece together a second layer of batting from the remnant of one purchased meter, to get a bed that's at least a couple of centimeters thick, but wasn't sure how much integrity a separate strip would have when just tacked in (see problem 2). Or I guess I could cut the cover down to under 75cm × 75cm; it's not that big of a dog. Any feedback?

2. I was planning on using an old shower curtain for the bottom under cover, with through tack stitches, instead of buttons, at the checkerboard corners: no problem there I think. But making a bag, to put the filler in, by sewing it inside out leaves one edge different than the others (as the last closing seam) when it's turned right-side out. How do quilts normally get closed on all sides?

Pretty good piece published by the New York Times, but obviously not their consensus opinion. Accurate (IMHO) comparison between 1929 and 2025 stock markets.

“It’s tired of raw fish and wanted to give cooked a try,”: Ashcroft Fire Rescue, B.C.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/15088671

A small brush fire and power outage in British Columbia started on Wednesday not with lightning or a careless camper, but with an airborne fish, according to fire officials.

With the help from nearby ranchers and employees from the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority, a Canadian electric utility company, firefighters were able to contain and extinguish the blaze, Ashcroft Fire Rescue said on Facebook.

On 22 June 2025, the anniversary of the Battle of Murten fought in 1476, the EPFL releases an immersive experience terra-pixel digital twin of a 10m x 100m oil on canvas panorama, painted in 1893 ... https://terapixelpanorama.ch/

I just tried to install tails on a thumb drive - which I've done before - and I have to say the experience has degraded substantially. As background, I'm not a novice. Getting an image onto a thumb drive is not the issue. Booting into tails though is seriously crippled. The boot sequence is seriously broken, and I''d be surprised if any journalists can make tails work. The blue screen of nothing: Activities, Applications, Places is non-responsive with any keyboard, or any mouse (wired, bluetooth, or radio), or keyboard I tried. WTF is wrong with the latest Tails releases?

The U.S. slide into dictatorship, with close ties to Russia, implies a learning curve that should align with events there. When some oligarch falls out of favor with Putin, they somehow commit suicide (see for example the fairly long list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deaths_since_2022), including some who shot themselves five times in the chest. Trump taking advice from Putin is likely to lead to even stranger deaths than Jeffrey Epstein's.

Any thoughts or predictions?

Power will be used within Canada instead, with first 50MW to Nunavut, and opening negotiations for an east-west power corridor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5xxi-MqWFA

Just so you know. Maybe I'm late to the party.

I take pictures of letters that I write in longhand (yeah, I do that, I'm old, and weird) just so I don't repeat myself in subsequent letters.

Yesterday, I searched in Google Photos on a word in the text of a letter, and it worked!.

So, I surmise that Google is using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to index pictures of handwritten text and using that in it's search algorithm(s). I assume it has been going on a while since it found something I wrote months ago.

Don't assume that using an image protects your content from our tech overlords.

Image credit https://unsplash.com/@jbcalligraphy52.

Research results on reverse engineering of the LoRa protocol and an implementation in GNU Radio. An open source LoRa PHY layer project provides access to the LoRa protocol for researchers and hobbyists.

Is it just me, or are most snap packages broken?

A lot of problems have to do with developers using some command to start or run a process, for example:

• dropbox “Launch Dropbox Website” fails badly for Firefox as a snap
• gimp as a snap, preferences-folders--Show file location in the file manager, doesn’t work

Another type of problem is the location for local files, e.g.:

• a snap zoom upgrade uses the same location for recordings as the prior version, which doesn’t work because the old snap version directory is inaccessible

Another type of problem is the integration with Ubuntu (ostensibly the owner of the snap format), for example:

• superkey (Windows logo) search for a snap and click or double-click on the icon just shows a wait cursor and finally times out (you have to right click and choose New Window)
• update fails to update snaps - you need to manually sudo snap refresh, and even then the Software Updater thinks it need to update something until you reboot
• snap-store has no search function - but if you start typing it will search (what kind of sadistic user experience designer thought that one up?)
• snap-store Updates - Update All can fail and display a failure message from weeks ago
• don’t even get me on about disk usage, like /var/lib/snapd/snaps or your ~/snap directory, that likely have more gigabytes than you’ve needed in a long time

Should I just give up on snaps and use Flatpack or Appimage?