Ugh. Easy. The St Barnabus Mite (they call them Wringlers in the US, I think). Hate, hate, hate them. Nasty, relentless, ethereal, bitey little shitlords, and they’re so resilient they turn up everywhere. They can fuck right off.

Edit: Holy shit, it worked!

Right. By alphabetical order of pronunciation.

Aitch, are, ayy, bee, dee, dubble-yuu, cue, eee, ecks, eff, el, en, em, ess, eye, jay, jee, kay, oh, pee, see, tea, vee, why, you, zed.

And the best thing about that is the paragraph of text you needed to provide to make it understandable.

I hike a lot and use Organic Maps, which is a front end for OpenStreetMaps. Far more detail available on OSM, plus you actually get to choose what’s on display, rather than Google arbitrarily deciding that a road/track/landmark aren’t important enough to mention.

No further Wombat Facts are nessecary.

Oh, yeah, haha, very funny joke. Or you could treat the topic with the gravity it deserves:

https://youtu.be/xgnuxd0tiHk

In the UK we had the Data Protection Act before GDPR, but it was so full of words like “reasonable” and “appropriate” and “balanced” that is was basically homeopathic; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this story was from the UK. I’m so glad GDPR got in before Brexit.

I’ve been saying for a long time that “winning” is the key thing amongst his fans, and their ilk elsewhere. They don’t care for making the world better, for righting wrongs, for anything other than winning. But to win, you need two things: a game to play and an opponent to lose - and they’re really good at changing those things at a moment’s notice, like a near-defeat chess player flipping over the board. Even when they run out of games to play, they can still win because your exasperation is a victory to them: maybe we are all poorer and the world is more dangerous and the existential threat is real and we’re all affected, but look how worked up you are! Haha! God you’re so triggered! You pleaded and begged them not to burn it all down, but they sniggered and did it anyway. Yes, they also lose, but they’ll just laugh at your frustration and rage, pretending that was the game all along.

“Sir this is a Wendy’s.”

Hapiversay!

If you can find someone who has been farting non-stop since before you were born, you’d also be able to find out how many times you’ve farted.

I’ll bite. “QALYs”?

No-one criticised Christianity in this thread.

Store it in the balls.

Spring 1998 vibes frfr no cap

For once, I think The Onion has aimed for parody but hit reality instead. I know two people who study geology and they absolutely do have their favourite rocks.

There’s nothing special about us, about Earth, about our situation except that which is self-evident: we’re here, Earth supports us, and we can ponder the universe, but that really might be all there is to it. It’s dangerous to attribute any reason to it, because reason implies purpose and purpose implies oversight. Or, as Douglas Adams put it:

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Genuinely happy the Donkey lived.

Remember that documentary about them? https://youtu.be/6PY8C1KmNwM

The solution in my experience is to not bother with any kind of IP connection and try to find a serial port. If you can connect via serial odds are the protocol will have been reverse-engineered already. A cheap microcontroller can get it talking to Home Assistant and then you’ve got a well-maintained, self-hosted and open source way of controlling the system on your terms.