Honesty.

Now at the Central, #gateshead. A lovely old pub with a peculiar shape. Tonight it has more space than patrons, hence I have this entire lounge to myself.

Cream cracker officionados of Mastodon:
Has anyone noticed a change in Jacob's Cream Crackers of late? I feel they have become wrong somehow. Too crisp, less seasoning?

Superficially twee, but really rather profound.
Topical, certainly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002xhy2/ann-droid

Catching some choons at the Durham Brass Picnic.
🎺 #Durham

Wild garlic and bluebells in Watergate forest park, Gateshead.
#gateshead #bloomscrolling

Went for a walk through Watergate Forest Park today. The lake was almost completely frozen over. Ducks making heroic skid landings on the ice. 🦢🦆❄️ #gateshead

Fungi of Gateshead.

Locomotion No1 replica in steam earlier today at Shildon, County Durham. #railway200

The street that my mum lives in is a one-way street, but wasn't marked as such on #Google Maps. This caused many drivers to drive the wrong way. I have tried to edit it on Google Maps (there is such functionality), but to no avail. No matter how often I submitted a change (with photos of street signs!), Google said "Sorry, we could not verify it".

Solution: Edit the street on #OpenStreetMap! A few months after I did this, Google seems to have stolen the data, as it regularly does, and now the street is correct in both datasets!

We have delusional "long-termism" bros who use the far future 1000 years or more away to justify anything and almost no one with power willing to think seriously about the next 50 to 150 years.

The "soon-termism" our children will see.

They think of the next 3 months or nothing at all.

Nick Wellnhofer: "I just stepped down as libxslt maintainer and it's unlikely that this project will ever be maintained again. It's even more unlikely with Google Project Zero, the best white-hat security researchers money can buy, breathing down the necks of volunteers."

In the olden days of Open Source and Free Software, bug reports would come as a fix attached to a problem description. Just sending a bug report and demanding a fix was seen as lazy and wrong.

1/3

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

"Free Software is free as in freedom, open source is free as in labour."

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/913

https://socket.dev/blog/libxml2-maintainer-ends-embargoed-vulnerability-reports

With America threatening Iran over WMDs, I have 4 questions:

1) Where are Saddam Hussein's WMDs?

2) What consequences did officials face when the WMDs weren't found?

3) Why should proponents of the Iraq invasion, such as Sean Hannity, be trusted now?

4) Is Iran stronger or weaker as a result of the Iraq War?

Factcheck: Why expensive gas – not net-zero – is keeping UK electricity prices so high
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-expensive-gas-not-net-zero-is-keeping-uk-electricity-prices-so-high/

How many times does this need to be pointed out?

It's glaringly obviously so—at least to me: I've been around long enough to remember the first dot-com boom at first hand, plus various property bubbles, the credit default swap bubble, the original bitcoin bubble, and so on.

After a while you learn to recognize a new market bubble on sight. Unfortunately that learning time can be 30 years ... so youngsters ALWAYS think "this time it's going to be different."
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114712748295654159

Scientists solve 30-year micronutrient mystery, opening door to new medical research https://phys.org/news/2025-06-scientists-year-micronutrient-mystery-door.html #science

We're thrilled to announce that CoMaps Android release 2025.06.10 is now live on the F-Droid app catalogue!

This is a big step forward in our mission to provide a privacy-respecting, community-powered navigation app to everyone.

Why F-Droid?
- Free and Open Source: F-Droid ensures that the apps listed contain no closed / proprietary parts.

- Community: F-Droid is a volunteer-driven project, aligning perfectly with our values and the support of the amazing people who use CoMaps.

I read through the overview report on the blackout in Spain and Portugal, and wow does it sound like a lot of things were misconfigured. substations and plants tripping way below mandated tolerance. lots of smaller PV sites ignoring power factor requirements. plants failing to absorb the required reactive power. HVDC export remaining active despite significant grid problems.

The problem for liberal commentators saying that Govts must realise that the populist Far Right has been fed by the unfairness of the economic system, and so the system needs to be made fairer, is that until the return of the threat from the far right they spent quite a lot of time explaining how fair the system was & how it was poor people's fault they were poor because they had not availed themselves of the obvious advantages of our current form of capitalism!

Who'll listen now?

#politics