Today’s post is a bunch of little stuff that was too big for Twitter but not big enough to post on their own:
I remain thoroughly defeated by national politics this time around. Fortunately, my ability to make a difference at the national level is too small to measure. The silver lining to this is that I feel compelled to pay more attention to the local scene where I might actually be able to make a little difference. I’m going to be paying a good deal of attention to how local candidate approach law enforcement. If you’re at all interested in this sort of thing, I cannot recommend Grits for Breakfast, a blogger covering law enforcement in Texas, highly enough. I’ve learned more about that nuts and bolts of law enforcement policy since I found this blog than I ever expected to know.
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I’ve determined that anything “featuring Lil Jon” is superior to anything which does not feature Lil Jon. This rule can be applied to almost anything: The 111th United States Congress feat. Lil Jon is better than the 111th United States Congress. A sunset walk on the beach feat. Lil Jon beats a sunset walk on the beach. Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead feat. Lil Jon is superior to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. There are probably some exceptions to this rule, but there don’t seem to be very many. Feel free to try this one out. You can even take the credit. I’m not here for the glory; I just want to make my little contribution to society.
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A year after it’s release, Microsoft’s Edge browser finally supports a few extensions. The fact that it shipped without such important functionality is kind of sad, but I thought I’d take it out for a spin now that it at least cleared that very low bar. After a week of using it at the office, I’m prepared to say it’s an impressive browser. It’s quick, it’s more reliable, for me, than Chrome*, and it’s got less of a memory footprint. It’s got a clean, pared-down look that’s thoroughly in keeping with the current aesthetic. It was enough to make me see if I wanted to try out the whole Microsoft “ecosystem.” It turns out that Outlook is chock-full-o-ads and they want a monthly fee for Office online. Nope nope nope. Not interested. Edge is fine and I’ll probably keep using it at work for some things, but that’s as far in that direction as I’m going to go.
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Speaking of Microsoft, I managed to kill my laptop by applying a great deal of weight (my foot) to the screen. It’s a cheap enough machine that repairing it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So, I pulled a five year old laptop out of the closet and thought “Well, I’ll just upgrade it to Windows 10 and away we go.” Windows had other ideas and I someone managed to corrupt the master boot record. Figuring I was looking at a total loss (the OEM DVD wouldn’t load, either), I put Ubuntu 16 on my thumb drive and installed it instead.
I’ve never made much of an effort to get to know any of the various flavors of Linux, but this has been a pretty easy transition. Firefox is Firefox, and I was already using LibreOffice, so it wasn’t completely foreign territory. What really struck me, though, was how much better GIMP runs in this environment. Even on a fairly potent gaming computer, GIMP takes an age to load on a Windows machine. On this older laptop, it runs approximately as quickly as Paintbrush does in Windows. In fact, this laptop is faster and more responsive that the nearly-new machine I use at the office. I knew Linux as quick, but I didn’t really get just how well it performed. I’m impressed.
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We got some rain here for the first time in ages. Teeny little frogs hatched by the scores and the side streets were covered with the little guys. We hit up the farmer’s market and saw our duck people and our goat cheese people and our micro greens people and had a lovely little impromptu lunch. It never got above 90 degrees today, so it was practically arctic out there. Even Ice Cube would have called this a good day.
-RK
* My issue with Chrome is that sometimes all button controls stop working. This issue affects all pages and reloading the pages doesn’t help. I have to restart the browser to get it working again.