April 18, 2021
— Ace Open Blog
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
10:09 PM
| Comments (470)
Post contains 1839 words, total size 20 kb.
— Open Blogger
Posted by: Open Blogger at
07:00 PM
| Comments (516)
Post contains 1651 words, total size 16 kb.
— Ace Open Blog
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
04:00 PM
| Comments (436)
Post contains 1046 words, total size 9 kb.
[Buck Throckmorton]
— Ace Open Blog
Volkswagen takes its new ID.4 electric car on a cross-country trip.
It
only took 18 days to drive from New York to Sacramento. Phileas Fogg of "Around The World In 80 Days†might be impressed. I’m
not. This isn’t 1872.
Heck, the Pony Express was able to get mail from Missouri to Sacramento in only 10 days. In 1860. On horseback.
But Volkswagen is very excited about their electric cars. With 21st Century technology they are able to make what was once a 4-day drive with quick and easily-available refueling, into a multi-week ordeal where you must obsess about fuel availability."We proved exactly what we set out to do with this drive, which was to show that with a little planning, covering long distances in an EV can be easy," said Dustin Krause, Director of e-Mobility at Volkswagen of America."
So I can drive an electric vehicle to my next ski trip in Wyoming or Montana? Uh…no.
"Of course, the 18-day trip largely stayed clear of some notable dead spots in charging station availability, notably in the upper midwest and the western plains, highlighting instead the ease of finding chargers along the southern route."
Well, assuming I stay in the southern US, and follow a route where there are plenty of charging station, and that I am in no rush to get where I’m going, there is nothing to stop an EV owner from enjoying the open road, right?
Wait – what about those California electricity blackouts? That sounds problematic. Didn’t Texas also have a massive electricity blackout this past winter? And rolling blackouts last summer? And oh look – Texas may have more blackouts next summer.
It’s almost as if the greens and government planners are successful in getting us out of gas-powered cars and into electric cars, we might find our freedom of movement greatly constrained by an inability to power our cars. Go figure.
Gasoline-powered vehicles probably did more to advance liberty and standards of living in the 20thcentury than anything else. They’ll be missed if the corporate / Marxist alliance is successful in stamping out the internal combustion engine. Of course, freedom will also be missed.
(buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com)
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
02:00 PM
| Comments (284)
Post contains 416 words, total size 26 kb.
— Ace Open Blog
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
I have never been in real quicksand, and you probably haven’t been, either. But many of us have the sense that our constitutional republic is sinking into a kind of political quagmire—what James Madison in Federalist 48 memorably called an "impetuous vortex.â€
When one part of the framer’s constitutional arrangement tried to exert "an overruling influence over the others,†Madison warned, no "parchment barriers†would be sufficient to keep it under control. Instead, the founders’ specific intention was for other parts of the system—including the people themselves—to assert their powers and prerogatives and restore a proper balance.
I am less confident than the author that the state legislatures were or are capable of controlling the United States Senate and its increasingly unhinged behavior, but the point is a solid one; there are other avenues by which the People can return some semblance of sanity to our political process.
And paradoxically, one of those ways is the election of strong and philosophically grounded governors. Notice the "and," because that is a very important bit of grammar.
We have powerful governors, and New Yorkers will sadly raise their hands and proclaim, "Be careful what you wish for!" But the comparison of Cuomo The Geriatricidal Groper and Governor DeSantis of Florida is an apt one. Cuomo's lust for and accumulation of power was as a partner with the federal government's worst impulses. Governor DeSantis carefully and logically pushes back against the insinuation of federal control over state issues. Even semi-disgraced executives like Abbott of Texas and Noem of South Dakota have been successful. Hell, Governor Kemp of Georgia, with his minimal pushback against the destruction of robust voting has been a (barely) net positive.
There are a few others, but we need more. Returning power to the states via a powerful executive branch is a delicate balancing act, and we will undoubtedly get more than one Cuomo. But refocusing our attentions to States Rights and the original construction of the country may be our best chance. Just look at the current climate in Iowa and Texas: Constitutional Carry is now the law in Iowa and is pending in Texas, and that is at least in part a reaction to the overreach in Washington and specifically the Memory-Care wing of the White House.
Would we all love to see senators brought to rein ore even recalled by the state legislatures? Sure. Of course! But the 17th Amendment isn't going anywhere...our best option is the governors' mansions, not the legislatures.
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
12:00 PM
| Comments (230)
Post contains 574 words, total size 5 kb.
— Ace Open Blog
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France
(click pic for larger view)
France began building the collection housed in its national library back in the Middle Ages, long before even the invention of movable type. After the French Revolution, the Royal Library became part of the national collection, along with materials confiscated from the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy—including the private collections of Louis the 16th and Marie-Antoinette. The library’s Richelieu Branch was designed by renowned architect Henri Labrouste, who had previously designed the spectacular Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. His work on the site was completed in 1868 with a reading room capped by terra cotta domes and skylights. Like wizards, readers could conjure books from thin air, thanks to a groundbreaking series of pneumatic tubes.
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
09:00 AM
| Comments (300)
Post contains 1954 words, total size 17 kb.
— Ace Open Blog Happy Sunday!
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
06:00 AM
| Comments (222)
Post contains 4 words, total size 1 kb.
— Pixy Misa
Top Story
- The main server is up and running again, but not live yet because I'm taking the opportunity to do software maintenance while no-one is using it.
One of the things that worried me was that I didn't have a recent, complete off-site backup of the system; the most recent one was over a month old. That's because the server is configured with LXD virtualisation, which has two backup methods
- Snapshots which are fast and efficient and generally wonderful, but are stored on the main system disk (in our case, a large SSD).
- Exports which are none of that, but turn your virtual server into a single portable backup file that you can restore onto any other LXD system.
With the server back but not in use I have configured exports, and discovered they are much more of a pain than I had ever suspected. If you have a container with mixed applications and databases and a bunch of snapshots and you try to export it, expect it to flatten the system for hours and use massive amounts of storage.
And there's no progress bar, not even a Microsoft one that sometimes goes into reverse.
And you can't cancel it.
So back to the drawing board on that one; I'll need to write a custom backup script.
Update: I managed to bludgeon the export facility into behaving itself. Onwards and upwards-ish!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:25 AM
| Comments (79)
Post contains 1278 words, total size 11 kb.
April 17, 2021
— Ace Open Blog
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
10:00 PM
| Comments (774)
Post contains 1412 words, total size 15 kb.
— Ace Open Blog
Color
In the mid-aughts at Virginia Tech I took a handful of classes with the late Stephen Prince, a film scholar with a particular focus on Kurosawa (along with others). One of the courses I took with him was a survey course of the history of movies, and he started the first class by stating one of his primary objectives: to convince us that black and white was beautiful.
My generation had never grown up in a world where black and white film was normal. Black and white films were either old or special projects that were more art-house than blockbuster. We weren't conditioned to see black and white film as just another way to tell cinematic stories. Instead, we were conditioned to see them as inherently different and, often, inferior.
The movement from black and white to color film as the standard in movie making took decades. It wasn't like sound where The Jazz Singer caused a huge sensation and within five years ever studio was exclusively making talkies. Color had existed since the earliest days of motion pictures, but it was an incredibly expensive and laborious process to get even short films by someone like Melies colored. Black and white was the standard out of necessity, and it can take a lot to get people out of their ways.
more...
Posted by: Ace Open Blog at
07:55 PM
| Comments (397)
Post contains 1716 words, total size 14 kb.
42 queries taking 0.6542 seconds, 210 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
