I can't tell if you're serious or sarcastic, so I'll bite: why on Earth would you ever want to change the temperature settings of your fridge?

It's worth pointing out that night is doing some of the work in this statement. Texas is unusual, as far as I know, that darkness makes a big difference in how self-defense and danger are viewed. It kinda makes sense, because in the dark, the would-be victim is less able to fully and accurately assess the situation. So Texans need to be aware that their actions may be interpreted more harshly in the dark.

And regarding expense on public bathrooms:

* San Francisco spent $1.7M on a single toilet

* Seattle spend $5 installing 5 toilets.

* NYC's public restrooms routinely cost $2M-$4M

Now, those are building projects rather than ongoing operations. But it shows that governments are willing to spend absurd amounts on toilets.

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but there's something about government (mis)management in the issue.

This might tell us something about the nature of government management or employment.

But having a degree of some kind still serves as a signaling mechanism, demonstrating lots of things including the ability to "play the game". to follow instructions, and so forth.

Last week they released a change that put the header Strict-Transport-Security into all responses (yes, even non-HTTPS ones!). This broke not just BookOrbit, but every other app I had running on that server, because suddenly everything being served by that host refused to work without HTTPS.

I probably should have done it sooner, but I spent a big chunk of the afternoon setting up new DNS entries so I can access each app through a different hostname. That was easy enough for me, running OPNsense with my own internal DNS, but you may not have that much flexibility in your home.

I submitted an issue (see https://github.com/bookorbit/bookorbit/issues/760) and a few days later, they created a semi-fix such that the header is only sent out in secure responses. But this still has the effect of forcing every app on that server to require HTTPS.

To be fair, it is now possible to load your favorite fonts onto baseline Kindle.

I discovered BookOrbit about two months ago. I think that it, together with the KOReader plugin that exposes the remote BO UI, may turn out to be a game changer in how I organize and access my ebook repository.

If you're working at just the most basic level of functionality, I don't think KOReader is necessarily worse than native Kindle. The latter is hampered by being very opinionated about how you should experience it, and that includes pushing their store above the user's own library, and this is a real annoyance.

As you start to demand more capabilities they diverge more. Organizing when you've got many books on the device is clunky on both platforms, but in different ways. The native Kindle options for grouping are simple, but not necessarily easy. They're very generic, and very cumbersome to work with. Bare KOReader's support for folders makes more sense to me, and it's easier to deal with bulk books than is Kindle's.

Getting books onto Kindle is super-easy if you get them from Amazon, but complexity ramps up for other sources. Your best bet is plugging it into USB and transferring via the file system. Native KOReader add to this an OPDS capability (if your book repository supports it), which works but is less than pleasant. If you use BookOrbit as your repository, there's a plugin that gives you the remote BookOrbit UI from the Kindle, which makes things a LOT better.

I experimented with Simply UI for a bit but could never get it to work quite right. About a month ago I found Bookshelf, and this makes the UX pretty wonderful. It has a very attractive and intuitive UI. And it simplifies the interactions needed for group management a bit.

Bottom line is that KOReader + Bookshelf are, for at least a power user, a potentially far superior experience compared to baseline Kindle.

I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this from the American government and media.

For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.

There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.

However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.

Around here we'd come to that conclusion at least a couple of years ago, due to abusive SEO and so forth. And that understanding was becoming even more widespread.

I don't know if Google's got the later parts of the game figured out yet, but I have to think that they'd realized that Search was dying. While there's still some value there, may as well use it as a hook to pull people into what they expect to be the next era.

Judging from my own frustrating attempts to use Gemini for vibe-coding, it seems like Google is badly over-sold (i.e., under-provisioned).

From all those promos giving away their pro-level subscription with phones; spinning up a mid-level subscription to undercut other providers and (probably most significantly) putting AI queries into ever search response because their flagship search product had become useless; they're promising a lot more processing to customers than they can reliably deliver.

The recent iterations seem to be intended not to push the capabilities forward, but to deliver capabilities at the current level while consuming less resources. That will allow them to maintain their trajectory until (I'm expecting) they get the huge infusion of extra compute resources from Space X later this year.

If I'm right, then I expect we should see Google start pushing forward again (rather than more of this lateral stuff) by the end of the year.