Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Old Yeller

If that movie doesn't get you to shed a tear, you're not human.

I'm a pretty hard-boiled tough guy by most standards, and I'm getting a little misty just thinking about it.

I have a friend who likes his because he can have it halfway open or clip it to his shirt pocket to use it as a hands free work light.

Depending on what kind of clothes you wear they can also carry better in your packet. (Assuming clamshell folding and not a folding tablet)

Yep, I actually mentioned his videos in another comment on here. I thoroughly enjoyed them (and all of his other videos for that matter)

Definitely worth checking out for anyone who likes this kind of stuff.

Jawn

It's Philadelphian, it's a general purpose noun and can be used for any person, place, or thing.

Go birds!

I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

If you're touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it's reasonable to expect that it's going to cover at least most of the globe.

It also doesn't really seem like it's intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you'd fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn't want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

EDIT:

Also, for pretty much the entire history of TV, different parts of the world have operated using different and often incompatible broadcast standards. I don't really see that changing and the rest of the world adopting ours, especially with the current administration being blatantly hostile to our allies. At best they'll adopt their own standards that will do something similar to BPS but probably won't be directly compatible, there may be devices that can make use of both, similar to how a lot of GPS devices can also use Galileo or Glonass.

I won't pretend to know all of the details, but as I understand it, the basic idea is something along the line of Christianity was an attempt to make Judaism more palatable to the masses so that their influence for spread.

Which, when you're looking at it through that kind of crazy racist lens, I guess it makes some kind of sense, Jesus more or less did say "hey, you know all that old testament nonsense with crazy rules about how you can cut your hair, not eating pork, circumcision, wearing different fabrics, not turning on the lights on Saturday, etc? Yeah, ignore that shit, no one likes it and it's not important. Now go out and spread my new, cooler version of Judaism around the world" (Not a direct quote) And it was successful, some sort of jewish-derived religion did end up taking over much of the world.

I don't buy that there was any sort of conspiracy to rebrand Judaism into Christianity, and if even there ever was I think they clearly lost control of it at some point.

As for who believes this, again, it's a big fractured world of crazy racists, so it's not always easy to say "here's an organized and recognizable group of people with shared beliefs" and I really don't feel like going down the rabbit hole to find a bunch of fringe white supremacist groups who hold some variation of that specific idea.

But off the top of my head, I believe Varg Vikernes, known for being influential in early Norwegian black metal, murder, and burning down churches, subscribes to some version of that conspiracy.

It does sound a lot like LORAN-C, which I admit I forgot was a thing that once existed.

I know that in areas it covered, LORAN was supposed to be pretty accurate for positioning. I don't know exactly how well this would compare to that, things like what frequency they transmit on, how much power, digital vs analog, number of transmitter sites, etc. will all come into play, and I don't feel like digging into exactly how the two systems would stack up against each other. Could absolutely be the BPS totally blows LORAN out of the water, they might be comparable, it might be markedly worse, we're well outside of my pay grade now.

While they're all pretty much the same in all the ways that matter to everyone who isn't a racist asshole, if you care to dig into it there's a lot of different white supremacists ideologies that really aren't compatible with each other. Historically a lot of different movements there spent a lot of time arguing and fighting with, and hating each other, which is why the "unite the right" thing was kind of a big deal.

KKK doesn't like Catholics, that's a sizeable portion of white people they have a problem with

There's some that think Christianity in general is a Jewish conspiracy, which is part of why you get some of them being all about Norse paganism and such.

Do they want to take over the US and remake it how they want, or do they want to split off from the US and start their own country?

Are they in favor of some sort of democracy, monarchy, theocracy, dictatorship, even occasionally some form of anarchy, etc?

You can go really deep down the rabbit hole trying to unpack all of their competing ideas. They're all crazy and extreme, but they're crazy and extreme in different ways.

It's not at all surprising to me that some of them don't like trump, maybe they just outright don't like him, maybe they think he's a useful idiot who has outlived his usefulness, maybe they think he isn't going far enough, maybe they're just insane.

If I understand it, the title while technically accurate, may be a little misleading.

And to be clear, it's very possible I'm misunderstanding it, and a brief Google search doesn't turn up a whole lot of good information in a format that's easily digestible to me.

When most people hear "gps alternative" I think most of us are picturing some kind of system that will tell you where in the world you are.

It seems to me that BPS is mostly concerned with time and not location.

Gps relies on having very accurate time information, you need to know exactly where the satellites are supposed to be at any given moment, and since they're whizzing around the earth every 12 hours or so, you need to know exactly when it is to know where those satellites are supposed to be in order to properly triangulate a position from them.

So since we have these super accurate clocks flying around overhead beaming out time information, a lot of other critical infrastructure that relies on accurate timing has just latched onto using those time signals because they're already there, no need to reinvent the wheel and come up with your own timing system.

But since GPS is theoretically susceptible to jamming, anti-satellite weapons, etc. we need a backup time signal in case gps goes down.

And since we already have television stations everywhere already broadcasting all kinds of digital data, we can just kind of piggyback off of them to broadcast the same sort of timing information you'd get from GPS.

I'm unclear whether it could actually be used for navigation, the name (Broadcast Positioning System) would seem to imply that it can, but I can't seem to find anywhere that's talking about it being used in that way.

In theory I suppose it can, no reason you can't triangulate your position from some radio towers. In at least one sense it's probably easier than satellite because those towers aren't moving much (maybe swaying a few feet in the wind or so, but otherwise they're about as stationary as anything is on this rock hurtling through space) so they make for a nice fixed reference point.

On the other hand, I suspect there's kind of a line of sight issue. In general there's not much between you and a gps satellite except for a few thousand miles of atmosphere, that signal is coming in a straight line down to you from space. That makes the math nice and easy.

That may not be the case with a TV signal, theres a good chance that there's all kinds of buildings, hills, valleys, etc. between the tower and you, and so it's harder to know if that signal is coming to you in a straight line or if it took a longer route and bounced around off of some hillsides and skyscrapers.

If it does bounce around, it takes longer for the signal to reach your device, which would make the calculations show that you're further away from the tower than you are.

It's also not at all a global system. It's part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which is mostly only used by North America and South Korea, the rest of the world uses different broadcast standards (that may or may not have similar provisions, I haven't looked into them) so if you're not in one of those places, you're probably not going to be able to make use of BPS in any capacity.

Again, I'm a bit out of my depth here, I've said a lot of words, but I don't have great confidence in a lot of it, I didn't do any deep research into any of this and a lot of this was just me throwing thoughts out there. If anyone knows this stuff better than I do I'm excited to hear from you and for you to tell me what I'm wrong about.

I'm no archeologist, watchmaker, engineer, or anything of the sort, but it occurs to me that the archeological context it was found in kind of points to the thing working as intended.

Metal and labor isn't cheap, even less so in the ancient world, you'd probably be looking at a few hundred bucks at least to rebuild this mechanism between materials, design time, manufacturing time, etc. using modern tools and techniques.

If you're some ancient Greek proto-watchmaker who's just spent probably hundreds of man-hours working on this thing, cutting hundreds of gear teeth with hand files,, fitting things together, engraving it etc. and it's not working what are you going to do with it?

I know what I'd do, I'd either keep working on it until it does work, or I'd cut my losses, melt the damn thing down and turn it into something I can sell.

In either case it's not leaving my workshop until it's a finished product.

So unless it got looted after my town got sacked or something, which is a possibility of course, it's probably not ending up on a ship to go somewhere unless it's a working device. And since it was found on a shipwreck, that's pretty telling to me.

Also it seems to have been built into a wooden frame. I'm not certain of the details of it's construction, that could have been a structural piece that holds the whole thing together, but to me from the pictures I've seen of the device and attempts at reconstructing it's it seems like a largely decorative element, probably the last thing I'd make for it after I'm done troubleshooting the mechanical issues. And if it was structural and the thing didn't work I'd expect the thing to be more disassembled because the maker was still working on it.

Just my 2¢ on the matter.

There's a guy on youtube- clickspring, who made a replica of it, and used a lot of homemade tools that could have been available in ancient Greece. I don't think he strived for 100% accuracy, but it definitely seemed like he put some thought into how such a device could have been built in the ancient world.

I'm certainly no archeologist, engineer, watchmaker, etc. but it left me feeling pretty convinced that such a device could be made to work with tools and techniques available at the time.

I think he had it spread out over about 12 main videos probably about 15 minutes each, give or take, so it's a bit of a time commitment to go through them all, but I found it pretty interesting.

Not that it isn't a little sus, but my personal interpretation would be:

Blue sky is still fairly new, most people haven't been on it for very long, not everyone is really an active poster, some are just there to follow other people, and maybe only decide to create an account or start posting if something exceptional happens, like maybe getting an email like this that they feel they need to share.

So that explains the short history.

She makes the post, it gets attention from being seen by the right person at the right time who shares it to Reddit, Lemmy, a news outlet, a YouTuber, etc. and it blows up, a bunch of people show up to follow her to see where it goes, so she goes "ah shit, I have followers now, I guess I'd better introduce myself"

As for the people joking in the comments, welcome to the internet. We have a lot of idiots here, and a lot of people who cope with fucked up shit with dark humor that not everyone gets.

Just kind of my 2¢ on it anyway.

Could absolutely be fake, could be bots, trolls, foreign agents, whatever your favorite online boogie man is. Or it could be just the internet being a dysfunctional mass of assorted individuals using it however the hell they want.

I'm not considering it verified, nor am I dismissing it out of hand. I'll wait to see what else comes of this.

I'm a 911 dispatcher, when I was in training part of my class was held at our county's public safety training facility, where a lot of police, fire, EMS, etc. training is done.

One day we were there the same day they were running one of these kinds of classes.

We were in the cafeteria, and noticed a table of people who were being a bit rowdy, not out of control, but definitely louder and more boisterous than you'd normally expect to be in a somewhat lesser-used county government lunch room.

We noticed they had a case of cheap beer, and found out that they were volunteers for the dui training class. I suspect most of them were off-duty cops, they had that certain look to them, and let's be real, where else do you hear about that kind of volunteer work? (I've looked and can't find them around, I can find some schedules of when the classes are but nothing on how to volunteer for them)

I wouldn't exactly call what they had going on a "party," but they were definitely having a good time, and I've probably taken calls from people complaining about less than what they were doing.

I could definitely see one of these getting a bit out of hand if the wrong people sign up and whoever's supposed to be monitoring the volunteers isn't keeping on top of things.

I personally think it's also just kind of a bad look for the chief to be getting drunk around his underlings.

No real point to this story, just kind of sharing my thoughts.

I was freshly 21, still living at home. My parents and sister went on vacation, I decided to stay home, wasn't really interested in their vacation.

I had a couple friends over one night, sat around the fire pit, drank a few beers, etc. nothing too crazy, and it went off without incident.

Then like 2 days later 2 detectives showed up at my door. One from my town, one from the next town over.

My first thought was that this was the weirdest, most delayed noise complaints I'd ever heard of (up until that point in my life anyway, as fate would have it I now work in 911 dispatch and nothing surprises me anymore, if someone called in a complaint about a party that happened 2 years ago that probably wouldn't even be the dumbest call I got that hour)

That turned out to not be the case.

Instead they were asking about a second cousin or some such relative of mine. He'd apparently been breaking into cars and they were trying to find him.

I've never met the guy, we don't really associate with that side of the family, but I know them by reputation, they're a bunch of lowlife assholes. My extended family is fairly large, and our last name is kind of unique. Someone else they had asked in their investigation basically said "I don't know where he is, but there's some [my last names] that live in [my neighborhood]"

They asked if they could come in to make sure he wasn't there and we weren't holding stolen property for him

I thought about telling them to pound sand and to come back with a warrant, but I was about to go to work and I didn't particularly want them to come back when I wasn't there and shoot my dog. My family is also about the most boring, law-abiding bunch you can imagine so I begrudgingly let them in and walked them through the house.

The one detective was really giving me the third degree over everything, the other one was pretty chill. I don't think it was a good cop/bad cop act, now that I work on the police side of things, that's just kind of those two officers personalities.

Couldn't reach my parents or sister on the phone while this was going on. My mom was pretty livid about it (rightfully so) and called and gave the two of them an earful when they were back home.

The cooler cop (happened to me the one from the neighboring town) was pretty apologetic about it. Said that he could tell right away that we weren't involved. We're not exactly unfamiliar faces around that town, we're probably there more than the town we lived in, and despite the other branch's bullshit we have a pretty decent reputation. My mom worked at the elementary school there and my dad worked in their wastewater treatment plant, and apologized for the other cop being a dick.

Other cop was kind of a dismissive dick about it.

Not sure if they ever caught up with him about that, but at one point I found his Instagram and at least one of his pictures was clearly taken on the front stairs of the county courthouse.

There's a few things you could potentially take away from this. There's an ACAB angle for sure, cool cop didn't exactly do anything to keep the other guy from being a dick. There's also an angle of picking your battles, it was a lot easier for me to just cooperate than to try to bang on about my rights, ask for a warrant, etc.

Overall though, this was just kind of an interesting footnote to my day.

I work in 911 dispatch. I think that there are some valid arguments for encryption. Hypothetically in something like a barricaded subject or hostage situation, you don't want the subject inside to be able to listen in on a police scanner to know what the swat team is about to do.

A lot of personal information also goes out over our radios, names, addresses, dates of birth, vehicle descriptions, medical information, a lot of stuff that people would probably rather keep private if possible.

But I'm personally of the opinion that as much as possible should be out in the open

I'm not sure exactly where the line should be for what should be encrypted and under what circumstances. It's a pretty tricky balancing act, and honestly to toe the line the right way we probably need massive overhauls to the kinds of radio and computer systems were using.

I can't speak to how common it is, but a few years ago I was camping in a rural part of PA, I brought my baofeng with me and loaded it up with the local repeaters before I went.

And when I was looking them up I was a little shocked to find that pretty much all of their emergency services were using pretty basic 2m or 70cm radios. Outside of the frequencies allocated for amateur use but still within the capabilities of most amateur radios.

Surely I thought I must be missing something, there must be some kind of encryption or something, but no, when I tuned to those frequencies I could hear all of their communications with my little $30 glorified walkie talkie.

I didn't try to key up on them, because that would be illegal, but I don't see any reason I couldn't have if I really wanted to.

I am very hangover resistant. I'm into my 30s now, I've only ever had one hangover, and I attribute that to a bit of blood loss (mishap trying to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre, I have now mastered that art)

I don't drink particularly often, I'll often go a few weeks without a drink, but I do occasionally find myself in a position where I get absolutely hammered and I wake up the next day feeling absolutely fine.

Years ago I was camping out at a music festival and got totally incoherently drunk, stumbled halfway into my tent and crashed there for the night. The next morning my friends who hadn't gone nearly as hard woke up all feeling pretty rough, and we're created by me already awake and making breakfast feeling fresh as a daisy.

I do tend to mix in plenty of water and food with my nights of debauchery, so I can't say that it's genetic or if I just happen to be doing the right thing. It's not a purposeful anti-hangover measure, I just want food and water while I'm drinking.

I'm not totally immune to the negative effects of alcohol though. I absolutely get red wine headaches, and a good night of drinking may sometimes give me a Charley horse the next day.

The definition of a species is a very fuzzy thing, being able to breed or produce fertile offspring used to be considered a defining characteristic of a species, but there are a ton of exceptions to that.

I think I also remember hearing that something about canid (dogs, wolves, etc) DNA makes them very tolerant of a lot of genetic variation (I mean look at dogs, would you ever in a million years think that a great Dane and a teacup poodle were the same species if you didn't have prior knowledge about dogs being a thing?) There's a decent amount of debate over how to classify various candids and a lot of them can interbreed just fine, and there's more than a few coydogs, coywolf, and wolfdog hybrids out in the wild. The company that made these "dire wolves" also said they cloned some red wolves, which is considered a subspecies of wolf, however every known living red wolf also carries coyote DNA, and there's some debate over whether they should actually be considered their own thing, or are they just a specific population of wolf/coyote hybrids (wolves and coyotes are considered different species) and should they be reclassified to reflect their coyote ancestry as well?

I took Amtrak from NYC to Montreal last year for the eclipse, I had a great time.

Would have been technically faster to drive, but the flip side is that I didn't have to drive, and it was a beautiful ride. And once I was there I definitely didn't miss having a car, I found everything to be very walkable and the subway beat anything I've personally used in the US. If the weather is nice I'd probably also consider using their bike share.

Assuming you're doing the same train, just a heads up that Amtrak WiFi is practically useless. Make sure you have whatever you need downloaded before then because a lot of the way had spotty or no cell service. Bring a pen, you're gonna have to fill out a form at the border crossing and pens seemed to be in short supply on the train. The Canadian border agents when we went seemed like they were kind of dicks, but I think that's just kind of a feature of border crossing officials around the world. Coming back the American ones seemed a bit more chill but a lot has changed since last year. The food options on board aren't amazing so you'll probably want to pack some snacks, but they'll hold you over for the ride.

Some other unsolicited advice/highlights from my trip-

If you've got the wiggle room in your budget, au pied de cochon was hands-down the best meal I've ever had in my life. In general all the food I had there was amazing but I can't recommend that place enough.

The biodome, planetarium, and insectarium were really cool.

There was a store we stumbled into in the plateau- mycoboutique, that sold all kinds of mushroom stuff. Dried mushrooms, mushroom foods, mushroom growing stuff, various mushroom themed bric-a-brac. My wife and I are big mushroom eaters so we loved that. The stand-out though was an ice cream made from maple milky cap mushrooms. It contained no maple, just the mushrooms and it tasted just like you'd want a maple syrup ice cream to taste.

Take some time to explore the "underground city"/RESO, for the most part it just kind of feels like a shopping mall, but it's kind of amazing just how far you can get around in the city without setting foot outside.

The art museum seemed pretty cool, but unfortunately the day we tried to go someone had apparently called in a bomb threat so we didn't get to see that.

Poutine, smoked meat, bagels of course.

Everyone we ran into seemed to speak passable English, and no one seemed to give us any attitude about it. I can stumble my way through some basic French pleasantries with my half-remembered high school French, and people seemed to appreciate my token efforts, but it's probably not totally necessarily as a tourist.

I'm from Philadelphia, in general Montreal kind of felt a lot like the best parts of Philly if we cleaned up and got our shit together.

There's not many cities I've visited where I'm itching to go back, normally I'm more of a woods and camping kind of guy, but I would definitely go back to Montreal in a heartbeat.

There's a small newspaper article someone unearthed about my great grandfather.

In 1920, he was sued by his neighbor for slander, claiming that he "called her bad names in the presence of other persons"

It stemmed from the fact that pigeons belonging to someone who boarded at her house, stole preserves belonging to my great grandmother. He went and got into an argument with the boarder. The neighbor came out and told him to get lost. She also said that judging by the racket in his house Friday and Saturday nights that he must be running a speakeasy

(Which honestly was not entirely unlikely, this would have been a few months before prohibition went into effect, but our home town did have its share of bootleggers and moonshiners back in the day. We are also an Italian family and I wouldn't exactly be surprised to learn there were some mob ties once upon a time, and it would kind of fit with some other random bits of family lore, but that's really just wild speculation on my part. It also could have just been that there were 7 kids in the house, plus probably assorted other family and friends at any given time, not many in my family have ever been accused of being quiet, and it was kind of a rough and tumble blue collar mill to n back in the day full of all kinds of colorful characters)

But anyway, he asked her "what kind of a house she kept and said some more" according to the article. And also said to the boarder that he had better be sending his money to his starving parents in Italy instead of spending on her.

Defendant (my great grandfather) made denial charges. Verdict for the defendant.

I love that it seems to be an agreed-upon fact that these pigeons did in fact steal my family's preserves, which I assume means jellies and pickles and such.