reCAPTCHA wants to use your camera
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leighelse{}
@leighelse@mastodon.nz
mastodon 4.7.2I've spent half my working life as a broadcaster and half as a software developer. Along the way I've been a professional musician, and an assistant to apiarists and undertakers (although not at the same time).
I live in Whanganui, where I write and record music, write web and desktop software utilities for my own amusement, and enjoy biking, reading and travelling.
697 Followers
449 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 07, 2022
Website:
Pacific sea temperature rise
Inventing the future
AI = Accelerating Inelasticity
eBook reader
Reviewing the protections put in place as Nixon's term in office ended, and comparing that period to the current president's decline.
https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/36-doctors-just-staged-the-quietest
'On April 30, 2026, thirty-six American physicians slipped a document into the Congressional Record that every future historian will be forced to reckon with.
As of this writing, not a single mainstream reporter has touched it. The Times has not. The Post has not. 60 Minutes has not called. The MSM has done the math. They looked at what happened to the law firms, the universities, and Jimmy Kimmel and politely said, “Not my rodeo.” '
"My Android!" saith Google
The open source UnaWatch can be disassembled with one screwdriver, with user-replacable parts.
- Ultra low power cortex M-33 CPU
- 2.5MB RAM
- 4.3GB storage
- Bluetooth LE 5.2
- Haptic vibration
- Piezo alert
- Altimeter
- Temperature sensor
- 280mAh hard shell battery
- 1.2" 240x240px LCD with backlight
- Dual frequency GPS
- Heart rate monitoring
- Peripheral oxygen saturation
When potato salad goes bad.
My take on government calls for further amalgamation of local bodies is that larger regional organisations are less accountable to the local community and more readily manipulated by central government. I also have not seen a shred of evidence that larger councils result in any of the vaunted cost savings, either immediately or forty years out.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/594354/mayors-consider-government-s-amalgamation-ultimatum
'The biggest problem councils faced was financial pressure, and amalgamation "doesn't necessarily save money and it doesn't necessarily make everything magically better," King said.'
Reviving obsolete hardware with Linux
From September, phones running Google's implementation of Android will no longer be able to side-load applications. I'm one of those who believe this is Not A Good Thing.
https://keepandroidopen.org/en/
I've written Android apps in the past, both professionally and for my personal use. I currently use a third party build of Android (LineageOS) without Google Play Services and believe the proposed changes will not directly affect me ... but they will certainly affect me indirectly as Google's unilateral action will change the Android landscape for everyone.
No, not RAM or SDD upgrades ... taking a file to the body of your Macbook. Yup.
https://kentwalters.com/posts/corners/
'The bottom edge of the MacBook is very sharp. Indeed, the industrial designers at Apple chose an aluminum unibody partly for the fact that it can handle such a geometry. But, it is uncomfortable on my wrists, and I believe strongly in customizing one's tools, so I filed it off.'
Cory Doctorow presents a simple equation: responding to economic crises with austerity results in fascism.
What will the current Aotearoa New Zealand government do when the Strait of Hormuz strangles our economy?
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/13/always-great/#our-nhs
'Fascism – what Hannah Arendt called 'organized loneliness' – can only take root when people stop believing that their society will reward their lawfulness with an orderly and humane existence.'
A developer discusses his reasons for moving.
https://jorijn.com/en/blog/leaving-github-for-forgejo/
'GitHub is no longer an independent company with its own CEO. Since August 2025 it is a unit of Microsoft's CoreAI division.
The April 2026 outages and the Copilot training-data default flip are downstream of the same shift. Both are predictable from the structure.
US-jurisdictional risk under FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act is real and unresolvable from the customer side. EU data residency is a comfort, not a fix.'
Replying to
On this subject, Mercedes Benz are restoring physical buttons.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/mercedes-benz-commits-to-bringing-back-phycial-buttons/
'The German brand remains committed to offering large screens in its models, but has listened to its customers and will offer physical buttons for key functions in future.'
The average American generates more than USD1600 a year for Google.
https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth-to-google
'Every cross-product integration, every friction point on data export, every feature built to increase daily engagement is backed by this math.
Google’s advertising mechanics have always been deliberately opaque. The data shows why: users are considered money-generating assets, assigned a value and targeted accordingly. Every feature built to increase engagement, every product designed to deepen lock-in, serves that extraction.
Most people would not knowingly hand a corporation hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime to process their email. But that is what the system is built to collect.'
Open webcams world-wide
Cory Doctorow on the loose but growing international coalitions opposing Trump and, of necessity, US Big Tech monopolies.
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/05/three-is-a-magic-number/#coalitions
'I have been an activist all my life, and a digital rights activist for the majority of my adult life. I'm sure there are members of this post-American coalition who want things that are absolutely antithetical to my agenda. That's what makes us a coalition – we disagree about so much, but we all agree on this: it's past time for a post-American world, and Comrade Trump is delivering it.'
Android's walled garden
This Atlantic article about the power of the aged in the USA prompted me to consider how we might make democracy work better for the future.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/gerontocracy-wealth-power/686585/
The young will inherit the world we leave them so, in my opinion, they should have the largest voice in shaping that world. Would some form of weighted voting be workable? Could people under 40 get two additional votes, and those under 65 one additional vote?
Or is there some other mechanism we can adopt that compels government to think in the long term rather than the short term?
Replying to
@ClareBear@mastodon.nz Hell no.
Better to expand the BSA's brief to include print and internet content.
Replying to
@thomasbeagle @v_for_verbosity I had two episodes of Shingles in three months early last year. Thankfully I'm now protected against any recurrence because it was not nice.
Replying to
@billbennett @lightweight @xurizaemon @stephen The cashier at Harvey Norman had to call her supervisor because I declined to provide either my phone number or email address when buying a low cost item. Evidently most folk just hand the information over on request.
European governments are moving employees off WhatsApp and Signal.
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-civil-servants-new-messaging-services/
'The move toward government-controlled messaging apps is part of Europe's search for alternatives to American technology, sparked by fears of being strategically dependent on Washington. WhatsApp is owned by U.S. tech giant Meta, while Signal is run by a U.S.-based non-profit and managed by a large community of open-source software enthusiasts.'
Replying to
@null0x0 I think a touchscreen is fine for entertainment and navigation but, yes, physical controls are much to be preferred for everything else.
I'm running Thunderbird as my email client. It has four email accounts, three of which I host myself. This morning the inboxes for two of the self-hosted accounts on the same domain contain items which are not fully compliant email messages. Between the dash separators is one full message including all headers.
--------
X-Account-Key: account18
X-UIDL: UID481-1708895215
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:
Please contact us through the qtox tool
Download qtox https://github.com/qTox/qTox/blob/master/README.md#qtox
If you can't contact us, please contact some data recovery company(suggest taobao.com), may they can contact to us.
Add our TOX ID and send an encrypted file and 'Sorry-ID' for testing decryption.
Our TOX ID: 3D7889AEC00F2325E1A3FBC0ACA4E521670497F11E47FDE13EADE8FED3144B5EB56D6B198724
--------
Has anyone else seen anything like this? How does such a message get delivered without address fields?
Defusing social media
Replying to
@BobLefridge @mwt You could have considered a Jack Rabbit Turbine, perhaps?
https://www.cleancurrent.com/jack-rabbit-turbine/
Replying to
@mwt Sadly I think the actual output would be infinitesimal. The payback period on installation and connection costs (on a quick estimate) would be in multiple human lifetimes.
I've finished digitising all our aged uncle's photographs. Most are quite faded, and I've done what colour correction I can.
I've bought him two 128GB USB keys - Fortnite branded, on a ridiculously cheap special at Noel Leeming - and we'll rotate these each time we visit. As well as his own photographs each new USB key will have fresh videos and photos of suitably classic vehicles downloaded from the internet.
I suspect this entire exercise may be a waste of effort, as what I intuit he really wants is to paper his room with images for the purpose of room customisation, rather than because the images themselves are important to him. The retirement home has a strict policy about the number of photographs that can be hung on the wall. However, we've responded to his stated request, and he can now view all his pictures, generally better than before.
We'll see how this pans out.
Replying to
@joannaholman@aus.social I've had the same thing happen. I ordered two non-urgent items, they dispatched one immediately, then sent the second one the next day from the same warehouse. Crazy.
An analysis of works from individual artists and schools of painting provides inspirational colour palettes.
https://paletteinspiration.com/
' PaletteInspiration.com is a curated color intelligence platform dedicated to the study and exploration of color as used by the world's greatest painters. We extract, analyze, and present the dominant color palettes from thousands of artworks spanning the Renaissance through the Modern era.
Our mission is to make the color wisdom of master artists accessible to designers, artists, researchers, and curious minds — bridging the gap between classical art history and contemporary creative practice.
Each palette on this site is derived through careful computational analysis of high-resolution artwork images. Colors are grouped, named, and ordered by prevalence, giving you an honest representation of how a painter actually used color across their body of work. '
Replying to
@BobLefridge @v_for_verbosity @civillibertynz Usually if it succeeds I get a "thank you for your submission" email.
Replying to
@billbennett I recall that in the late forties Lord Nuffield was paying a marginal tax rate of 19/6 on every pound.
A USB drive with a hidden partition
Replying to
@billbennett No more email spam than usual here.
I still get regular spam mail from right-wing "news" sites in the USA. These are entirely my fault, and adding them to my filter only works briefly, because the email list I've ended up on is continually sucked up by new American right-wing outlets.
The death of American democracy
International payment duopoly
Venezuela