File this under It’s-About-Fucking-Time: Walmart announced they are going to stop selling military-caliber ammunition, handgun ammunition, and all handguns. They also asked people to stop open-carrying weapons in their stores (duh) and go so far as to say the assault-weapons ban should be “debated.” I guess it’ll take another 22 dead customers for them to actually push for a ban.
John Margolies was an art historian and critic who traveled America and took photos of signs he saw along the side of the road. His collection, almost 40 years’ worth of work, was purchased and donated to the Library of Congress, who digitized the negatives and have now lifted all copyright restrictions on the photos.
As a student of design and a fellow enthusiast, this is like a bucket of dopamine injected straight into my cerebral cortex.
Prompted by a post on Kottke.org, I followed a link to an Ask Metafilter thread where the poster was wondering if any old-school bloggers were still active and what the links were. I’ve been a member of Metafilter for over a decade and visit it daily, but haven’t posted anything for years. I figured this was as good a time as any and added my site to the list.
Update: See this interesting 2018 review of a blogroll from 2003. These names take me back, kids.
Oh, man, this sucks: Jessi Combs, a television personality, fabricator, racer, and speed record holder, was killed yesterday trying to break her own land speed record in Oregon. I used to watch the 4×4 show she was on about 15 years ago, and then was pleased when she did a stint on Mythbusters. She was doing a bunch of other things since then, including setting the Women’s Land Speed Record of 398mph in 2013 and winning in her class in King of the Hammers. There aren’t enough positive female role models out there, and she was one of them: someone who could design, build and race her own stuff. RIP.
Nice! I wouldn’t have known this if I wasn’t faculty at UMBC, but we now get a free Lynda.com account through our Baltimore Public Library library cards. (I thought we might have access to an account through the college).
WRI has been in the news this week for various reasons, some of them troubling. One of our board members hosted a fundraiser for Trump last week, and took a lot of heat for it. Another member resigned this week after being linked to the Epstein scandal. While I wouldn’t characterize the state of things as “upheval”, I know there are a lot of concerned employees who are looking for answers, and it forces us to look at our practices and expectations for inviting high-profile figures to advise and guide our organization.
Another excellent article on the growing water crisis popped up in my Flipboard feed, this one from NPR. Go WRI!
This gets convoluted. Verizon bought a bunch of shit a couple of years ago from Yahoo, including Tumblr, the hosted microblogging platform. They paid $1.1 billion for it. They owned it for a couple of years, did nothing to it other than to ban porn, and are now selling it to Automattic, the company behind WordPress, for somewhere north of $3 million and south of $20 million. For some reason this reminds me of the last years of 6 Apart, when they (for some reason) bought LiveJournal and then sold it to a Russian company before imploding and moving to Japan.
The internet is a strange place, my friends.
Boing Boing has a great wrapup of a Times article (behind a paywall) detailing the total donations to Democratic candidates currently in the race; it’s eye-opening to see how far ahead Bernie Sanders is and more importantly the fact that he takes in smaller amounts from more people. The Democratic Party had better not ramrod Biden in as the nominee like they did with Hillary last time.
My iPhone 6’s battery has been draining faster and faster over the last couple of months, to the point where it was down to 50% by noon. I did some looking into the usage stats (Settings -> Battery -> Battery Usage By App) and saw that the Calendar app was gobbling up 54% of the available power. I read up and realized Exchange (my work email account) was at fault and followed some directions to turn off Push notifications—even though I don’t allow them to show up on my home screen—and set everything in my mail settings to Manual updates.