Dear American citizens, whatever you wish more German citizens would have done in 1933, do that now.

Y'know, Lucky Charms added blue diamonds in 1975, but it wasn't until 1998 that Pfizer made them actually do anything

I've just donated to archive.org for the first time. We've entered the age of memory-holing and we stand to lose far too much, far too quickly.

I wonder to what extent airlines with routes to and from Canada rely on connections through the US? For the safety of its citizens and visitors, I suspect Canadian airlines and their partners are going to have to open more direct routes to other countries.

Thanks to the risks and burdens imposed by the preposterously draconian blunt instrument that is the (UK) of 2023, I've just unceremoniously closed down a collaborative website I've operated for almost exactly 27 years.

A week or so ago I received a rather bizarre email from the London Transport Museum Shop, telling me that if I didn't want to see Mothers' Day spam, I could opt out now. In other words, encouraging me to engage in a whole interactive experience with specific reference to Mothers' Day, in order to spare myself any potentially traumatic references to Mothers' Day.

The thought processes involved in creating this campaign beggar rational comprehension.

@thisisrjg Yes, I've just shut down a participatory server I've been running since 1998. It was never hosted in the UK but it unambiguously served a UK-centric user base, and as you say -- between steep, costly, onerous requirements and unclear but potentially huge penalties, there was simply no case for leaving it up.

Time traveller from 1995: I’m new here, what’s the latest with computers?

2025 guy: We have AI integrated into the OS!

TT: Wow! So whenever you spot a bug in Windows or Mac OS, you just show the AI the problem, and it fixes it in a couple of seconds?

2025 guy: Um

TT: Minutes?

I'll be damned. All of my Audios are back, not even one day after a fix was announced. Unusual for a surprise to be pleasant lately.

Google support has announced in the Google Nest forum that they're pushing out a fix for the expired cert problem

And the third one is working for this purpose as well, after unplugging it and plugging it back in. (No factory reset for me!) .

Was wrong about the app though, it's no longer finding the devices.

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Hang on, they're still working, for that purpose. Enjoying some Brubeck streamed off my own file server while making dinner.

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Well, until this morning two of my Audios were still working with noncommercial apps like and , since they don't ask the devices to authenticate. But today those have dropped off the network as well.

@dm319 @LateNightLinux

I've installed Moode Audio on a Raspberry Pi and hooked it up to my living room sound bar alongside the Audio. It can't do casting but it can do AirPlay.

But that's a somewhat inferior solution, since for the most part AirPlay doesn't hand off streams for the target device to handle on its own, you're actually streaming from the sender device, using its resources (e.g. battery, CPU, bandwidth), and you can't close the app. So I really hope Google fixes this thing.

Interestingly two of my devices are still working for local media -- I can cast to them from VLC on the iPhone, using music that's actually stored on the phone, for example. But none of them work for internet streams.

Just took a cat to the vet today, and I think I finally begin to appreciate what an emotional toll it would take to be one. A veterinarian that is, not a cat.

I mean you can't be a good veterinarian (I hereby posit) without being a compassionate and empathetic animal lover, but there's no way to tell the animal that this bewildering, invasive and sometimes painful experience is necessary and done out of love and concern.

I don't know how you get over feeling that every day of your professional life. I don't know if I could.

(Personally I never mail my ballot, I take it to one of the drop boxes. Which are easily as common as polling places are in other states, so it works out to be the same except no lines or malicious poll workers.)

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