plenipotentprotogod

Yes, but it's also the common ancestor of kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, kohlrabi, and (obviously) farmed cabbage.

All of those foods were bread from the same plant by selecting for different traits.

Ceci n'est pas une rock

I'm partial to Tom Cardy's view: Pluto isn't a planet, but that doesn't matter because it's still hot shit.

I've wondered before how large an order would be required to entice a white label manufacturer of robot vacuums into doing a production run of units with Valetudo preinstalled.

I would absolutely buy one if someone could work out a fair business arrangement with the developer and throw the project up on kickstarter.

FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that'll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.

You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

This is a fun thought experiment. If I'm understanding correctly, you're writing a story where the character has a flash drive with important information. They have to remove the end to prevent the bad guys from getting access to it, then later replace the end to access the information themselves. Here's my pitch (disclaimer: don't actually try to do this. It would probably work, but if you have actual important files on a flash drive, this isn't by any means how you should be trying to get at them)

For removing the end, soldering would be safe if they have access to a soldering iron. If it's an emergency scenario, then I'd say just snap the plug off. It's a bit risky depending on how the drive is made, but if it's done deliberately by someone who knows what they're doing, then I would say they could plausibly take off the USB connector without permanently damaging any of the guts.

For connecting the drive later, find a spare usb cable and cut it in half. It shouldn't be hard to find one in an office. Even cutting the plug off a wired mouse or keyboard would work. Use a pocket knife or pair of scisors to strip the outer insulation off the cut end. This exposes four small wires. Strip the ends of those as well. Now, you just need a way of attaching each wire to the correct spot on the circuit board in the flash drive. Soldering would be best, but in a pinch, I'd look around the office for some of that sticky clay stuff they use to hang up posters. Pre-chewed gum might also work. Lay the stripped end of each wire over the correct spot on the board, then put a blob of the sticky stuff on top to hold it in place. Plug the other end into a computer, and you should be good to go.

Theres actually a similar story with the fish. From Memory Alpha:

According to Ronny Cox, Patrick Stewart hated Livingston's presence in the ready room, and constantly petitioned the producers to remove the fish. Stewart, a strong animal rights advocate who opposes many forms of pet ownership, felt that using a captive animal in an ornamental display was "immoral" and inconsistent with TNG's core theme of exploring the inherent dignity of different species across the galaxy. Cox, who called Stewart's point "well taken", stated that Livingston's temporary removal in "Chain of Command" was thus a "sort of a bone they threw to Patrick".

Man, I feel you on the affiliate link fluff. I actually ended up unsubscribing from the Popular Mechanics and Popular Science feeds because the signal to noise ratio was so bad.

The creator of Nunti provided a very good primer on the algorithm design here. Basically, you indicate to the app whether you like or dislike an article and then it does some keyword extraction in the background and tries to show you similar articles in the future. I suppose you might be able to dislike a bunch of the fluff and hope the filter picks up on it, but it isn't really designed to support the kind of rules that would completely purge a certain type of content from your feed.

Most of the feeds I subscribe to came to me in one of two ways:

1. I enjoyed reading an article posted somewhere else (Lemmy, etc.) so I sought out the feed of that publisher.
2. Sometimes news outlets enter into agreements to republish each others articles. When they do this, the re-publisher will usually include a little blurb at the end giving credit to the original publisher. If a feed I'm already subscribed to has an article re-published from elsewhere then I click through and check out the original source to see if I want to follow them as well.

It can be as simple as just putting an app on your phone. I use feeder which is fine. Pretty bare bones, but in that way it's easy to learn and use.

I've also been meaning to try out an app called Nunti, which I heard about a while ago from this Lemmy post. It claims to be an RSS reader with the added benefit of an (open source and fully local) algorithm to provide some light curation of your feed. It looks interesting, but I haven't actually tried it out yet because I'm still deciding whether I want any algorithm curating my feed, even one as transparent as Nunti's. It's also only available through F-Droid right now, which is a bit of a barrier to entry.

I've been trying to solve this problem for a while. I've not yet found a really good solution, but I can summarize what I've learned, partly for your information but mostly in the hope that Cunningham's law will finally put me out of my misery. Here are suggestions I've seen, organized roughly along some axis of easiest/most popular to hardest/least popular:

1. Get an NVIDIA Shield TV. This isn't really what you asked for. It's just a commercial smart TV box, but it's generally considered the least annoying and highest quality of the lot. The unfortunate fact is that when dealing with DRM controlled media, having a big company like NVIDIA behind the product goes a long towards simplifying things.
2. Install Kodi. Kodi (formerly XBMC) is the elder statesman of the FOSS smart TV world. You can run it on just about any hardware, including a SBC like a Raspberry Pi. You can even get it pre-bundled with a Linux OS like LibreELEC. It's got a clean interface and good community support, BUT it's primarily oriented towards viewing media from your own collection. If you're a person who consumes content via streaming services then you're gonna have a rough time. Apps (mostly unofficial / community made) do exist for many popular services, but installing them can be a pain, and you may have trouble streaming in high quality (DRM issues).
3. KDE Plasma Bigscreen. Great concept, not maintained any more. See my comment here for all the gory details.
4. Clean build of Android TV. I'm not aware of any major independent android distributions (Lineage, Graphene) providing official builds of the android TV operating system, but this site seems to provide relatively consistent lineage OS based releases. You can run them on a Raspberry Pi. I haven't done this yet, but it will probably be the next thing I try.
5. EarlGrey TV. This one is a deep cut. EarlGrey TV mad a very small splash in the FOSS news cycle a couple of months ago. The concept is simple: install your favorite Linux distro and configure it to boot directly into a browser displaying a static webpage with links to your favorite streaming services and/or local media folders. The implementation is extremely basic, but the upside is that it's easy to tinker with if you're so-inclined.

As for remotes, there are some decent options on Amazon that connect via bluetooth or a USB dongle and basically act like a mouse and/or keyboard packaged in a remote control form factor. I bought this one a while ago and it's been fine. Nothing special, but fine. The play/pause/volume buttons on the front read on the receiving end like the media buttons on a keyboard. The air-mouse functionality isn't for everyone, but this model is one of the few with a little track pad on the back if you prefer using that. Honestly just get anything with a full keyboard. So much easier than using the arrow keys to click-click-click your way through an onscreen keyboard.