Yeah, this is usually the reason I will downvote a news article. Misinformation needs to be marked somehow, and a negative score is a good way to do that.
The USA hasn’t resembled anything near democratic for a bit
What fantasy land are you living in?
I'm making my way through the special features and commentaries in the Blu Ray edition. It amazes me that so much of the bonus content is apologizing for/explaining the bad quality of the show. I've never seen anything like it, really.
I have watched this series several times. There was one way to watch it that makes it pretty good: follow the skippables list. It tells you which episodes to omit and which to watch to get the full story. It's pretty incredible what it does to the experience of binging the show. Suddenly it feels Voyager-like.
Okay, I have a lot of recommendations here.
how can I quit textEdit/close a textEdit document and either:
Choose not to save at all or
To my knowledge, this can't be done. Choose a different text editor, such as BBEdit instead. In BBEdit, if I want to choose not to save, I press Command-W to close the window. The "Save changes before closing?" dialog box will accept Command-D as input for the "Don't Save" button. BBEdit also has command line utilities, which I will come back to.
Choose to save somewhere and pick a location and filename to do so WITHOUT touching the mouse?
You have already answered this one. All application Save As dialog boxes accept the command-shift-G (Go to) command. You can then type the path to where you want to save your file and use tab-completion to make it go faster. Saving files in locations that can be accessed with tilde expansion will dramatically speed your workflow.
For example, I often work on little projects that involve editing lots of files. I will choose to put my project directory in my home directory so that I can access it with the following keystrokes:
- Command-Shift-S (Save As)
- Command-Shift-G (Go to)
~/Rot(tab)/Proj(tab)(which tab-completes to /Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/)- (enter)
But what I keep thinking about while reading your post is how much you should be working with an open terminal window. The zsh commands you can use there will change your life. It requires learning unix, and it requires you changing the way you work a bit, but I can immediately think of approaches that would make it so that you never have to use the Go To command again. Let's walk through that now.
In Linux/Unix, it is not uncommon to create your file in a location before you even edit it. For example, I can do this:
touch ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py
This creates an empty file at that location. Now I can open the file, edit it, and save it, and I don't have to specify where. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. But we can do better:
nano ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py
Now I've opened the text editor nano. I can write in that file. When I save it, it will be saved at that location. But we can do even better.
Remember how I mentiuoned that BBEdit has command line tools? Once those are installed, we can use bbedit as the text editor instead of nano.
bbedit ~/Users/RotaryKeyboard/Project1/tutorial.py
As you might have guessed, this opens a new BBEdit text window. The BBEdit developers have gone the extra mile, though. That empty BBEdit window will have the name you passed to it in the title bar as well as the path to the file visible in the toolbar even though the file doesn't even exist until you save it.
So far so good, right? Once you start using a terminal window in your workflow, you can begin to take advantage of things like environment variables, symbolic links, and commands like find and grep to rapidly increase your productivity.
Oh, one more thing: if you don't know how to use regular expressions, set aside some time to learn how to use them. Regular Expressions are probably the single most life-changing thing I've ever come across for computers.
Commnad-option-C will copy the path of the currently-selected folder or file to the clipboard. If you use a finder replacement like PathFInder, you get this behavior with just command-C.
This is the one group that seems perpetually pissed off about everything, all the time, even getting things they wanted and asked for
This is so true! One thing I've always loved about American liberal culture (yeah, I know; we're not really liberal here) is that we laugh at our mistakes. For most of my life, Cable and Late Night comedy shows have been helping us find the humor in the things we would otherwise be enraged about. I feel like it has helped me stay sane all these years. I kind of feel bad for the Fox News-watching conservatives who spend their days oscillating from outrage to fear to outrage again. It must be hell on their cardiovascular health.
I don't think people should downvote you for this opinion. What I do think you get wrong, however, is the popularity of legal abortion. It has been widely supported for decades. Popularity does vary by state, and it varies depending on how late the abortion is permitted, but it is still broadly popular.
I made this point above, but I'll state it again: the real purpose of this ad is to keep abortion being talked about. Republicans have been very silent about the topic since they began to see that their extremely hard-line stance against abortion was driving away voters. They would prefer to talk about inflation and economic issues, and not anger voters in key states. My bet is that any time abortion is mentioned in tonight's debate, if it is mentioned at all, you will hear "but what we really need to talk about is Americans' pocketbooks."
As for the demonic eyes, I have a feeling most of the people outraged by that are not voters that Biden can win anyway.
The ad is designed to keep the abortion issue talked about. Have you noticed how Republicans have gone radio-silent on abortion? They don't want it brought up. This is a smart move.
Designate your DMCA contact, pay your $6, set up a clear infringement policy, and rest easy. Full details in this EFF Fediverse Legal Primer.
Given an average gas tax of 31 cents per gallon, and an average distance driven of 13,489 miles, and an average mpg of 15.7 (for passenger cars), the average driver might pay $266.34/year in gas tax in a year. Let's say that the driver had to replace all of their tires every 45,000 miles. That means you'd have to recoup that annual gas tax amount 3.33 times in tire taxes. This would add $886.91 to the cost of the tire purchase, or $221.72 for each tire.
I haven't had to buy tires in a long time (small blessings from Covid), so I had to look up the average cost of a tire at Discount Tire. 16-20" all season tires cost $100-$250 each. Woof! That would take a total tire cost from $400-$1,000 to $1,286.91-$1,886.91.
Don't drive on any dirty roads, I guess. Those flats are going to be painful!
That would have to be one huge payment, though. I can only think of a few cases in my entire life that I've bought a tire.
Seems better to me that they collect the taxes from everyone from the income tax and/or business taxes. Everyone uses the roads, even if they don't have a car.
It's Friday, so today's Community Spotlight post is brought to you by Cats! No, it's not a community about the awful 2019 movie based on the Broadway Play -- yeah, that one -- with the infamous butthole cut. No, this is a community focused on the core purpose of the internet.
No, not porn.
Cats! Posting cat pictures and cat videos and cat-related content! Glorious glorious cats!
Now, granted: this community is pretty small right now. But if there's one thing I've learned in my years on the internet, it's that cat communities grow exponentially. So get in there and secure your spot as one of the founding members of Cats!
Part of making communities discoverable is making the posts in those communities stand out. If you're an admin, moderator, or even if you're a contributor who wants to draw in subscribers and increase engagement, you should always try to attach an image to any text-only posts you make.
Overview
Important note: This post applies to Lemmy 0.18.0. In Lemmy 0.18.1, you will see separate text boxes for the URL and the image of a post.
When you create a post that has a URL, Lemmy will try to grab a picture from the URL's destination to insert into the post thumbnail. But when you create a text-only post, you need to supply that image yourself. Luckily, it's very easy to do.
How To
In the image below, we have a post I'm writing for Lemmy.ninja's Boomer Shooter community. It's about a patch for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, a first-person boomer shooter game. As is often the case with announcements like this, there isn't a good web page for me to link to. Just an announcement on Twitter (ewww!) and a quick note in Steam. This is the perfect candidate for a text post with a picture!
Step One: Get a picture
Start by finding a good image to use for your post. You will need to download this image to your computer so that you can upload it to your post in a later step. For this example, I've selected an image from the news article about the patch. Another good source is an image generated by Stable Diffusion or another AI image generation system. AI-generated images are always different. Using them will give the posts in your community variety when viewed side-by-side.
Try to keep the image somewhat small. Let's say somewhere around 500 x 500 pixels or less. Larger images take longer to load, which can be especially noticeable on overloaded servers. They also take up a relatively large amount of space on the server.
Step Two: Write Your Post and Upload the image.
Once you have your image downloaded, it's time to write your post (if you haven't already) and to attach your image to the post. Attaching it is easy:
- Click the little image icon beneath the URL field.
Note: There's another, identical icon on the Body section. Don't use this one; it's used to upload an image in the body of your text.
- Select the image you want to upload.
When you click upload, the image will be uploaded to the server that the community is hosted on, and you will see the URL field is populated with a path to the image.
Note: You can also supply a URL to a remotely-hosted image in the URL field and get the same result. The bonus is that the image won't be taking up space on your community's Lemmy instance. This will make your administrators very happy.
And that's it! You can now submit your post and the post will contain a nice thumbnail. Users can click on the thumbnail and expand it if they want to see the image at full size.
Let's take a look at the final result!
This looks great! All of the posts in the community have a good variety of eye-catching images. On the All feed, this post will stand out among all the other posts from different communities, hopefully encouraging people to subscribe and participate. It's also a signal to others that the contributors care about the comment of their community!
[Edit: Wefwef has been rebranded as Voyager, and the community has moved as well. This post was updated to include the new name and links.]
Today's spotlight centers on the community for the nascent Lemmy web application Voyager! Voyager isn't a binary application that you install; it's a web application that you can run on most phones with a web browser. It's targeted toward iOS, but the developers say that you can run it on Android, too! It is a spiritual successor to the extraordinarily popular Apollo mobile app for viewing Reddit content.
Much of that enthusiasm for Apollo has certainly carried over. Just look at these engagement statistics for the Voyager community:
The community is a hive of activity, with pretty much what you would expect from an application community: bug reports, feature requests, and feature comparisons. The community users are even submitting icon concepts and other contributions. It really feels like an open source effort.
So if you have the web application, or if you just like watching development in real time, check out the Voyager community.
Summary
This is an Apple .shortcut file that will make it easier to subscribe to the community you are currently viewing. It was designed for Lemmy 0.18.0 and requires a device running Mac OS or iOS and using Safari to view Lemmy. You have to be on the community page you want to subscribe to when you invoke the shortcut.
[Update: I discovered this version doesn't work for iOS. A different action was needed to capture the URL in Safari. If you want to use this on iOS, Download this file instead. To make it work on iOS, you need to go into the shortcut and enable "Include on Share Sheet." Invoking it requires you to click the share button when you are on the community page that you want to subscribe to.]
Important: Be sure to edit the shortcut and change the Instance URL at the very top from lemmy.ninja (my home instance) to the URL of your home instance. If you don't do this, it will not work unless you are a registered user at Lemmy.ninja.
Overview
Today @chase@midwest.social asked for an Apple .shortcut file that would make it easier to subscribe. I've linked the file I built for him here.
Due to the way Lemmy is designed, you can't just visit a community and subscribe to it. You first have to search for that community at your home instance so that your instance will connect to the community, and then you can click the link in the search results to visit the community and subscribe to it.
This shortcut works by taking the link you are currently viewing in Safari and directing Safari to search for it at your home instance. You then have to click on the community link in the search results and click the subscribe button. (See Usage below.)
The shortcut was designed for Lemmy 0.18.0. I believe the search functionality changed between 0.17.4 and 0.18.0, so I doubt it will work for earlier versions.
I'm sure this shortcut will quickly become obsolete as Lemmy's UI improves and third-party apps get developed. Until then, this should help speed up the process of adding communities to your subscribed list.
Usage
Let's say you are reading through the All Communities feed at your home Lemmy instance and you come across a great post about a vintage Atari 2600, hosted at lemmy.sdf.org.
You want to subscribe to the community this post is in. In the screenshot you'll see the community name at the top there: Atari 8bit. Click that link and it will take you to the community page at lemmy.sdf.org.
Here we are in the Atari 8bit community. This is where you invoke the shortcut. I put my shortcut in the menu bar group so that it appears in the shortcuts menu. Invoke the shortcut now.
When you click on it, the shortcut will take you back to your home instance (provided that you configured the correct address in the first step of the shortcut file). It will take the URL from the Safari page you were on and search for that URL at your home instance. After a few seconds, you should see the name of the community appear in the search results.
Click on the community link. Then, go over to the sidebar and click on Subscribe until you are successfully subscribed to the community.
Configuration
After you download the shortcut, you must edit the shortcut and change the first step. Change https://lemmy.ninja/ to the URL of your home instance. If you don't complete this configuration step, the shortcut will not work for you unless you happen to be a registered user of Lemmy.ninja.
After that, the shortcut is ready to use and should be available on all devices connected to your iCloud account. If you're using MacOS, I suggest that you drag and drop the shortcut box into the Menu Bar group to make it easy to access. I have only ever used shortcuts on my iPhone via Siri, so I have no idea where the most convenient location would be on iOS.
Laws like this are designed to be deterrents. You don't need to catch very many offenders with checkpoints as long as you can create enough fear about the consequences of breaking the law to keep people from traveling to get an abortion.