Arghblarg

If you haven't heard of it, this island has a population that the world has collectively decided to leave alone, mostly because they have proven, on multiple occasions, that they absolutely do not want visitors. Like, arrow-to-death anyone attempting to land or even visit near their shores.

This probably cannot go on forever... but maybe, it could. Essentially, we are already implementing a 'Prime Directive' of sorts here. Would the 23rd, 24th, ... centuries in Star Trek canon still have this little island on Earth, isolated from not just from Earth's own unified Federation society, but from the greater Federation races? What steps would the Federation and Earth take to maintain their isolation and the ecosystem on which they depend?

Would make for an interesting episode, or at least a cool side-note reference in one :)

Best book for learning the ins and outs of MIDI I've ever encountered. Relatively obscure, but an invaluable reference book for anyone wanting to dig into the details of how MIDI works.

Nothing we apes don't already know (at least those of us who've been here for 84 years or so), but an interesting take from the MSM on it.

The system is rigged, this is one of the reasons why I Buy, HODL, DRS!

A wire broke off the ignitor element in our Harman unit. I have ordered a replacement and it looks simple enough to fix myself. But before sourcing the part I had called about 5 different fireplace companies in the area, and it seems everyone has dropped all support for pellet stoves in recent years! Not only does no one sell them any more (other than Canadian Tire), but they all outright refused to even consider sending a repairperson to help.

It's a bit infuriating. I am calling them, literally saying "please come take my money at your standard hourly rate". One would think "struggling businesses" would be more willing to take on what should be profitable work.

Is it such a liability issue for them that they're actually afraid to take on the work?

What if something bigger fails someday on my pellet stove? Why is no one on the island now willing to work on one?

If you know of someone who does still service wood pellet stoves on the island (Courtenay/Comox), please reply here or DM me. Thanks.

EDIT: formatting

See linked posting. I've commented there with a link to a CLI tool in Python that allows downloading of IA collections. I've submitted a patch to enable specifying start and end points so that it's easier to resume downloading a huge collection, or to allow multiple people to split up the work.

https://archive.org/details/georgeblood

https://archive.org/details/78rpm_bowling_green

F*ck the RIAA and absurdly long copyright.

EDIT: There is more than one collection of 78s on IA, so I updated the title.

The issue with these collections are that they're absolutely HUGE. And yes, IA offers torrents for them, but as a separate torrent for every. single. album. And the torrents have all data in them -- FLAC, fixed-rate MP3, VBR MP3, PDF liner notes, etc. etc... there may be some extremely hardcore data-hoarders out there who want everything, but IMHO as these are scratchy old 78 records, FLAC is overkill to just save the audio in a listenable format. The George Blood collection, just the VBR MP3s, is looking to be about 6TB. With ALL data it might be over 40TB! I can't afford that many hard drives :)

So, my approach at the moment is to save just the VBR MP3s (they seem to be done at up to 320kbps VBR) and the JPEG album cover. If I have a chance and any storage left afterwards, I can make a separate pass to get the album liner PDFs...

Tool used: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive

Patch to allow setting start and end item indices for downloads: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/pull/605

Example usage to grab just the VBR MP3 and record label JPG for each (note the --start-idx and --end-idx arguments):

#ia download --start-idx=4001 --end-idx=8000 -a -i --format="VBR MP3" --format="JPEG" --search collection:georgeblood

I'm going to concentrate on the George Blood collection for now.. I'm starting at item 1. It would be great if others started at index 50,000, 100,000, 150,000, ... and others started at the end and worked backwards in similarly-sized chunks, so that it's assured someone gets each of them.

Found this community, saw no posts. Why not start off by letting us know what FORTH you use in the modern day?

I know there's GNU FORTH, and variants like 8th, which I downloaded ages ago but haven't really used. I like the idea of FORTH but haven't had the itch to write anything in it (I need to get over my current fascination with APL first, I guess, so I can try out FORTH again someday 😀 )

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/3589345

(Credit to rexxit user u/JackTheTranscoder)

Could this be the start of a big foreign ownership dump?

Marked NSFW just in case :)

Our girl cat brought a rat she'd either killed or found already dead to our patio (she hasn't done this for a few years).

As the wife and I discussed how best to dispose of it, we saw to our horror 3 large, purplish-black (2cm x 1.5cm?) fat larval things emerge from the rat's abdomen. A quick web search ('Vancouver Island rat botfly') shows matching images. Eyyyyyych.

I bagged the carcass and captured the larvae in a jar for the moment... there's a burn ban at the moment, so I can't do that, but I don't just want to throw them in the trash either so

• Is burying them sufficient?
• Are our two cats in any danger of infection? (I phoned our vet, no answer from them yet)
• Should we notify the town pest control dept.?

There are lots of cats in the area besides our own, so we thought rats weren't a big problem on our street. Now I'm not so sure.

EDIT: We didn't want to wait any longer to deal with it, so I dug the deepest hole I could under some back bushes and squashed every larva I could find, in and out of the carcass, then buried everything. I hope that's the end of that. Yuuuuuuuck.

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