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We have another new feature available for people to use from the AI Horde. This is the capacity to use Layer Diffuse to generate images with a transparent background directly (as opposed to stripping the image background with a post-processor).
As someone who’s dabbled into video game development in the past (which was in fact the reason I started the AI Horde) being able to generate sprites, icons and other assets can be quite useful, so once I saw this breakthrough, it immediately became something I wanted to support.
To use this feature, you simply need to flip on the transparent switch if your UI supports it, and the Horde will do the rest. If you’re an integrator, simply send “transparent: true” in your payload.
Take note that the images generated by this feature will not match the image you get with the same seed when transparency is not used! Don’t expect to take an image you like and remove the background this way. For that you need to use the post-processor approach.
Also keep in mind, not every prompt will work well for a transparent image generation. Experiment and find what works for you.
As part of making this update work, me and Tazlin also developed, discovered and fixed a number of other issues and bugs.
What would be most interesting for you is a slight change on how hires-fix works. I discovered that the implementation we were using was using the same amount of steps for the upscaled denoising which was completely unnecessary and wasting compute. So we now use a smart system which dynamically determines how many steps to use for the hires-fix based on the denoising strength you used for hires-fix and the steps for the main generation, and we also exposed a new key on the API where you can directly pass a hires-fix denoising strength.
The second fix is allowing hires-fix on SDXL models, so now you can try to generate larger SDXL images at the optimal resolution.
Finally there were a lot of other minor tweaks and fixes, primarily in the horde-engine. You can read further for more development details on this feature.
This update required a significant amount of work as it required that we onboard a new comfyUI node. Normally this isn’t difficult, but it turns out this node was automatically downloading its own LoRa models on startup, and those were not handled properly for either storage or memory. Due to the efficiency of the AI Horde worker, we do a lot of model preloading along with some fancy footwork in regards to RAM/VRAM usage.
So to make the new nodes work as expected, I had to reach in and modify the methods which were downloading models so that they use our internal mechanisms such as the model manager. Sadly the model manager wasn’t aware of strange models like layer diffuse, so it required me adding a new catch-all class of the model manager for all future utility models like these.
While waiting for Tazlin to be happy with the stability of the code, we discovered another major problem: The face-fixer post-processors we were using until now had started malfunctioning, and generating faces with a weird gray sheen. After some significant troubleshooting and investigation, we discovered that ComfyUI itself on the latest version had switched to a different internal library which didn’t play well with the custom nodes doing the face-fixing.
First I decided to update the code of the face-fixer nodes we were using, which is harder than it sounds, as it also downloads models automatically on startup, which again needs to be handled properly. Updating the custom nodes fixed the codeformer face-fixer, but gfpgan remained broken and the comfyUI devs mentioned that someone would have to fix it. Unfortunately those nodes didn’t seem to be actively maintained anymore so there was little hope to just wait for a quick fix.
Fortunately another custom node developer had run into the same problems, and created a bespoke solution for gfpgan licensed liberally, which I could copy. I love FOSS!
In the meantime, through our usual beta testing process, we discovered that there were still some funkiness in the new hires-fix approach, and Tazlin along with some power users of the community were able to tweak things so that they could work more optimally.
All in all, quite a bit of effort in the past month for this feature, but now we provide something which along with the embedded QR Code generation, I’ve seen very few other GenAI services provide, if at all.
Will you use the new transparent image generation? If so, let us know how! And remember if you have a decent GPU, you can help other generate images by adding your PC onto the horde!
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CW: Nightflyer (Netflix series) mildly spoiler-y, racism, biphobia
Finally finished watching #NightFlyer last night.
Am not a GRR Martin fan tbh, but I do like *some* of his sci-fi stuff.
In a surprise to no one, I found it some what problematic regards to race & sexuality; the PoC characters were othered so unsubtly, plus a bi/pan character was 'unreliable' & so much misogyny.
The finale was so flat, literally saving the spaceship by switching it off & on again. All that build up & 'flip click' 🧐 -
I'm back to playing with LibreWolf because I'm worried about Firefox enshittifying with their decision to enable ad tracking by default. :drgn_sigh: Even though their form of ad tracking is the least invasive of the lot and actually does an okay-ish job of preventing users from being tracked, I don't like that Mozilla will just shove in a tracking feature and flip it on. If it was a modal that popped up similar to what Chrome did, I'd probably be less uncomfortable with it.
As for LibreWolf, it's, uh... very security conscious. :wolfcomfy: It breaks way too much stuff for me to be happy with the default settings, but I'm used to messing around in the Firefox config so it doesn't really faze me much to disable it and mess with other settings.
I really think the LibreWolf settings would massively benefit from a dashboard that lets you switch from Tor's resistFingerprinting to Mozilla's fingerprintingProtection, then allow you to enable or disable each fingerprinting vector manually.
I also don't really get why it recommends installing CanvasBlocker if you enable WebGL when Firefox's default behavior nowadays is sending junk data to canvas elements :blobfoxthinkgoogly: Aside from having more options, is there anything more sophisticated that CanvasBlocker does than Firefox's own canvas data scrambling?
Overall, LibreWolf is nice for people who really want security hardening. If you just want a browser that isn't going to shove in ad tracking, it does work for that, but be warned that it breaks a lot of things in the name of security. If you don't want it to break webpages as much, it takes a bit more work to set up than a normal Firefox install. :blobfoxlaughsweat:
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Mind your attention
I’m sold on the idea that mindfulness is the key which unlocks everything else. I get chuffed when something grabs my attention. I’m fine with noticing; It’s good that I notice emergency vehicles. But realizing I’ve blown the last 5 minutes doom-scrolling in Instagram? Not cool.
There’s a reason for this. Our experiences in the digital realm are usually very novel—and this novelty leads to the release of dopamine in our brain. Dopamine doesn’t lead us to feel happy and satisfied in and of itself—it leads us to feel as though pleasure is right around the corner, so it keeps us wanting more. The more novel an app, the more we get hooked—we feel a constant rush and keep using the app until we remember to stop. (Here’s looking at you, TikTok.)
~ Chris Bailey from, 5 lessons I learned switching to a flip phone for a month – Chris Bailey
slip:4ucile1.
This is a longer than usual article from Bailey and it’s stuffed full of insight. One item of note is he frequently gets very intentional about testing things to their logical conclusion. This article comes from him trying to live his life without a smart phone. His conclusion (and I agree) is that smart phones are awesome. Unfortunately, there’s some bad opportunities mixed in too. (Ocean and surfing, yay! Sharks, not so much.) Want to see how addicted you are to your phone? Try this.
ɕ
#7ForSunday #CalmTechnology #ChrisBailey #Dopamine #Mindfulness
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Hello everyone and #HappyFriday
VGP is making reprints of #Langrisser I&II remaster. We've seen this game less and less available to buy physical, so here's a good opportunity to get this sweet #srpg for #NintendoSwitch if you so wish 😊 It has beautiful new art and you can choose between the old art style and the new. The same goes for the flip cover it comes with. #videogames #nisamerica
https://videogamesplus.ca/products/langrisser-i-ii-switch-open-pre-order-closes-january-12-2024-final-sale -
The Biology of Narratives
Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.
Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.
Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.
We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.
The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.
There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.
One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.
Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.
And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.
But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.
So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.
When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.
This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.
And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.
This explains how the world actually works.
This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.
This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.
This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.
This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.
And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.
But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.
And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.
The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.
One thoughtful repetition at a time.Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂
#Biology #Brain #Branding #Life #Narratives #Persuasion #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Society #Technology #Truth #Wisdom -
The Biology of Narratives
Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.
Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.
Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.
We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.
The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.
There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.
One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.
Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.
And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.
But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.
So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.
When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.
This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.
And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.
This explains how the world actually works.
This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.
This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.
This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.
This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.
And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.
But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.
And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.
The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.
One thoughtful repetition at a time.Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂
#Biology #Brain #Branding #Life #Narratives #Persuasion #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Society #Technology #Truth #Wisdom -
The Biology of Narratives
Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.
Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.
Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.
We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.
The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.
There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.
One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.
Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.
And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.
But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.
So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.
When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.
This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.
And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.
This explains how the world actually works.
This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.
This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.
This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.
This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.
And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.
But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.
And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.
The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.
One thoughtful repetition at a time.Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂
#Biology #Brain #Branding #Life #Narratives #Persuasion #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Society #Technology #Truth #Wisdom -
The Biology of Narratives
Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.
Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.
Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.
We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.
The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.
There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.
One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.
Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.
And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.
But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.
So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.
When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.
This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.
And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.
This explains how the world actually works.
This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.
This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.
This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.
This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.
And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.
But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.
And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.
The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.
One thoughtful repetition at a time.Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂
#Biology #Brain #Branding #Life #Narratives #Persuasion #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Society #Technology #Truth #Wisdom -
The Biology of Narratives
Persuasion is hard. You can’t just walk up to someone and drop your request on them. You have to set the stage. You have to build context. You have to be patient enough for the other person to normalize the idea, and only then, slowly, bring them to a point where the decision feels like their own.
Kids do this with their parents all the time. Politicians do it with citizens. Brands do it with customers. The mechanics are the same. Build the narrative, water it, and wait.
Now, have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to shift someone’s stance on a topic, even when the facts seem obvious to you? Resistance to change isn’t really the person’s fault. It’s natural. It’s biological.
We are physiological beings. Our brains are wired by neurons, and those neurons govern our perceptions, our beliefs, our values, our identity, and the emotions wrapped around them. We don’t actually think critically about a situation as a first move. The very first reaction the brain produces is emotional. A piece of news, a sentence, a visual, an audio clip, whatever the trigger, our brain, depending on how it has been wired by childhood and past experiences, releases a cocktail of hormones. Happy. Sad. Angry. Hopeless. Excited. Whatever fits the pattern it has already learnt.
The second step is where reasoning enters, and this is the part most people miss. The brain doesn’t reason first and then feel. It feels first, and then it goes hunting for reasons that justify the feeling. It pulls from our belief system, our values, our self perception, our identity, basically the bundle that adds up to what we call personality, and constructs an argument. If you win that argument with the other person, you feel great and satisfied. If you lose, something more interesting happens. And that brings me to a pattern I keep noticing.
There seem to be roughly three kinds of people when it comes to handling counter opinions.
One, the stubborn type. They are rigid. They protect their world view at all costs and resist changing it even when shown evidence. This is the kind of person for whom hearing something bad about themselves is painful, almost physically so, because you’re not just challenging an opinion, you’re challenging an identity. That’s actually why criticism stings the way it does. The brain interprets it as an attack on the self, not on the idea.
Two, the easily influenced. They flip with the wind. Whoever spoke to them last shapes their view. They fall for lies and clever framing because they haven’t anchored their thinking in anything strong enough to push back.
And three, somewhere in the middle, basically the most of us.
But here’s the catch. It’s not that you are permanently one type. Depending on the topic, the person you’re talking to, your confidence in the subject, your mood, even how tired you are, you fluctuate. You can be the stubborn one in one conversation and the easily influenced one in another. The three types aren’t fixed identities, they’re positions on a sliding scale we keep moving along.
So why am I going into all of this? Because every bit of it is governed by biology. By how your brain is wired. Whether you are open minded or closed minded, in what corners of life, comes down to the architecture of your neural pathways.
When we come across a counter opinion or something we don’t align with, the brain has two paths. Either it rejects the input outright, which is the cheap and easy option, or, if we are even slightly open to change, it has to do something expensive. It has to build. New neurons have to connect. New synapses have to form. A new neural pathway has to be carved through tissue. That is the actual, physical, biological cost of changing your mind.
This is also why we tend to get more rigid as we age. It isn’t that the brain stops being flexible. People learn new languages, new instruments, and enter entirely new careers well into their later years. But the muscle gets weaker if you don’t use it. The more you practice learning new things, the easier learning becomes. The less you challenge your own views, the harder it gets to challenge them later. Rigidity isn’t really a personality trait. It’s a fitness level.
And these new pathways take time. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the point is, you can’t upgrade a belief the way you upgrade software in an instant. The brain has to physically rebuild itself, and that takes real time.
This explains how the world actually works.
This is why politics is the way it is. You’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with their entire wiring. The narrative they’ve been living inside isn’t an opinion they hold, it’s the only world they have access to. To change it, the brain has to literally redo itself, and that is exhausting and slow.
This is why public policy is so hard. You can pass a law in a day, but you cannot pass a behavioral change in a day. Behavioral change isn’t a software update. It’s biology rewriting itself, repetition by repetition, across millions of people, in parallel.
This is why brand building takes years. A brand is essentially a stable narrative living rent free inside a customer’s head. Building one means slowly carving a neural pathway across millions of brains. There is no shortcut. You either repeat enough times to become the default association, or you don’t.
This is also why pivoting an audience is brutal. If you’ve been known for one kind of content and you switch to another, your audience doesn’t start from zero. They start from below zero. They first have to erase the old version of you they had built in their head, and only then can they begin building the new one. You’re working against the pathway you yourself helped create.
And this, I suspect, is how social media algorithms work too, and on both sides of the screen. The algorithm itself learns the way a brain does, through sheer repetition. Every click, every pause, every share, every second you linger, is one more rep feeding the loop. The patterns get stronger, the predictions get sharper, the model’s internal wiring goes deeper. In a real sense, the algorithm is building its own version of neural pathways about you.
But here’s the twist. While it’s busy learning you, it’s also shaping you. It keeps serving the same flavor of content over and over, not just because it’s engaging in the moment, but because every repetition carves a groove on your side too. So you end up with two systems quietly training each other in parallel. The algorithm learning what reliably hooks you, and you slowly becoming the kind of person who gets hooked. The algorithm isn’t just predicting what you’ll like. It’s shaping what you’ll become. And you aren’t just consuming content. You’re teaching it, scroll by scroll, who to make you into. Over months and years, those pathways, on both ends, become you.
And this happens at a scale and speed our biology was never built to defend against.
So the next time you find yourself struggling to convince someone, or being convinced too quickly, or wondering why a political conversation went nowhere, remember. You’re not really fighting opinions. You’re fighting biology. You’re asking a brain to spend energy rebuilding itself, and brains, like most things in nature, prefer the path of least resistance.
The good news is that the same biology that traps us also frees us. Pathways are not destiny, they’re patterns. And patterns can be redrawn, slowly, deliberately, with patience. The same way kids work on their parents. The same way politicians work on the public. The same way brands work on us.
One thoughtful repetition at a time.Subscribe to get notified or follow the blog, and if you like what I write, please share it with your network 🙂
#Biology #Brain #Branding #Life #Narratives #Persuasion #Philosophy #Politics #SocialMedia #Society #Technology #Truth #Wisdom -
In a complete departure from my usual meanderings, I’m going to present an in-depth comparative review of eight iOS Mastodon/Fediverse apps. (Video: ‘What is the Fediverse?’) Given that I’m not alone in moving to Mastodon from Twitter at the moment (whether tentatively or bridge-burningly), I’ll also draw comparisons with the official iOS Twitter app, noting points of comfort and familiarity as well as things that might jar a little at first. But please bear in mind that Mastodon isn’t meant to be a clone of Twitter. I’ve chosen these eight apps in particular simply on the basis that they have a rating of 3 stars (out of 5) or higher in the iPhone App Store (in fact, all of them are rated 4–5 stars):
- Fedi for Pleroma and Mastodon v. 3.2.0 (Big Fig/Fedi)
- Mast: for Mastodon* v. 2.2.3 (PoeticBytes)
- Mastodon for iPhone and iPad v. 1.4.0 (121) (Mastodon)
- Mercury for Mastodon v. 2021.4(54) (Daniel Nitsikopoulos)
- Metatext* v. 1.5.1 (2) (Metabolist)
- tooot* v. 4.0.0 (Zhiyuan Zheng)
- Toot!* v. 16.0 (132) (Dag Ågren)
- Tootle for Mastodon* v. 1.11.6 (Moortz/Takashi Morioka)
*link to App Store
Skip to the end for a tl;dr summary. (This is a very long post.)
Initial considerationsHow much does it cost?First things first, you might want to consider how much you’re willing to spend. Fortunately, only Mast (£2.49, €2.99) and Toot! (£3.49, €3.99) will cost you actual money (so you could, like me, try all eight apps for £5.98). If you decide you like an app, and you want to (and have the wherewithal to) support the developer, the two paid apps along with Mercury and Tootle have in-app purchase options for tipping them (with a small amount of bonus functionality unlocked in the case of Mercury).
Will it still be around next year?Before getting too comfortable with an app, you might also want to consider how likely it is to continue being maintained. All these apps work on the latest iPhones, but the timeline below shows that some haven’t been updated for a while, including the venerable Tootle, which was the only one of these I had used until this month! (I first toyed with Mastodon in 2018, when none of the others were around – including the official Mastodon app, which is actually the baby of the bunch.) Having said that, if you do have to move from one app to another at some point in the future, it should be at most a minor irritation, as long as you don’t make heavy use of app-specific features that store data on your device (such as Mast’s saved hashtags, or draft toots in those apps that support them).
Timeline showing periods from the first version released on the App Store to the most recentAnd what about other platforms, btw?Although I’m talking about iOS (i.e. iPhone apps), all of these also work on iPad. (Mercury works in iPhone-emulation mode.) Beyond the Apple ecosystem, both the official Mastodon app and Fedi are available on Android – but other apps such as Tusky seem to be more popular there. On the desktop, there are a few apps available (including a macOS version of Mast, which felt unpolished and buggy when I tried it). The standard multi-column Mastodon web interface – perhaps tailored slightly by your chosen instance – is probably the nicest way to connect to the social network when you have the luxury of a large screen.
First impressionsNever judge a book by its cover, or an app by its icon. That doesn’t mean I’ll put up with ugliness! Fedi gives us a zero-effort, bland, corporate ‘productivity app’ icon, so it’s not winning any prizes here (disclaimer: there are no actual prizes), and nor is tooot, with its oops-I-forgot-to-replace-the-placeholder look. The icon for the official Mastodon app looks ok, perhaps a little too like the official Twitter app’s icon, using a flat white logo on a blue background, which would be the same colour as Twitter’s if it weren’t for the addition of a slight gradient. (And it’s obviously an elephant rather than a bird.) Mercury’s icon captures, um, the blobbiness of liquid metal. Ok, that’s a charitable guess. It is one of four apps, though, that allow you to choose variations on the theme, and this redeems it (slightly). Two of the others are Mast and Metatext, both of which are reasonably smart elephant logotypes. That leaves Tootle, whose cute little elephant looks a little weary, but then it is relatively long in the tusk. The winner for me, another one with the option of picking your own variant, is Toot!’s cheery cartoon mastodon! Social media should be fun – but if you’ve come from Twitter, you can be excused for having forgotten that!
Getting startedThat’s enough of a preamble. Although I’m going to focus mainly on what I think are the things you’ll want to do most of the time you’re using an app, it’s worth looking briefly at how easy it is to get started, including setting up an account on an instance, and connecting to an existing account.
(If I’d thought of this in advance, I’d have noted what it was like at the time. Now I’ve had to log out of both my Mastodon accounts on all eight apps to remind myself! It took me a while to work out that I had to do a firm press on an account to bring up the option to remove it in Mast. And I actually had to delete and reinstall both Mast and Toot! because they insisted – not so unreasonably in normal use – on remaining logged in to at least one account!)
On opening the apps for the first time, you’ll be greeted with varying levels of friendliness and/or intimidation.
FediMastMastodonMercuryMetatexttoootToot!Tootle Initial screens for the eight apps (following any splash screens)Metatext and Toot! both introduce the brand-new user to Mastodon. The first app, albeit after an unnecessarily laboured fade-in of the welcome screen, has a short embedded YouTube video (produced by Mastodon). The second app has a brief text introduction, as well as a link at the bottom of the screen that will pop you out of the app and take you to that very same video on YouTube.
Mercury’s ‘Find and join a mastodon instance’ link actually links to Mastodon’s home page – which slightly unfortunately also prompts you to open the official app if you have it installed! I suppose you will eventually find lists of instances once you’ve read or skimmed over the introductory blurb.
The official Mastodon app’s ‘Get Started’ button (the first of only two on that screen) will take you to a screen in which you can choose from lists of instances, sorted thematically, and there’s a little explanation there too.
Fedi appears to suggest the instance fedi.app, but if you accept that default, and tap any of the three buttons, you’ll get a horrible red error box at the top of the screen – with raw HTML code for the first two buttons! So don’t do that! (It does go away, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.) If you ask for help choosing an instance, the lack of polish continues to shine through (um, no, that’s not quite right). You’re landed on a GitHub documentation page! (GitHub is a website used by software developers.) When you select the text box, you do get a list of suggestions. The documentation reveals that the developers of Fedi favour Pleroma (an alternative to Mastodon), and the instances they recommend skew in that direction, including some very nasty ones you may have heard of, such as Gab and Spinster (which most instances in the Fediverse block, as indeed do some apps themselves).
The other apps – Mast, tooot and Tootle – don’t offer any explicit guidance on what to do, but assume you know you want to connect to an instance (you do, by the way!). tooot has some mystery boxes labeled ‘Name’, ‘Users’, ‘Toots’ and ‘Universes’, whose purpose will only become clear when you type an instance URL into the text field. It also slightly oddly offers app settings at this point. Worst for shaking confidence is the wonky English: ‘Logging in process uses system broswer [sic] that, your account information won’t be visible to tooot app. Read more privacy policy’.
A note on terminologyThere are a number of different names for things in the Mastodon world, and the apps vary in their choice of terms. (Some even have settings that let you choose the ones you prefer.) The instances that you can sign up to are also known as servers. Toots (the Mastodon equivalent of tweets on Twitter) are also known more prosaically as posts, and officially as statuses. Toots can be favourited or liked (with stars, hearts or neither). They can also be boosted, reposted or reblogged (the equivalent of retweeting). A stream of toots is either a timeline or a feed. As on Twitter, you can have a profile pic, but these are sometimes called avatars (a term I prefer to avoid because of its appropriation from Hinduism).
Screenreader accessibility (part 1)Before going any further, I should say that Toot! and Tootle are sadly likely to be unusable by low-vision users who rely on being able to increase the text size on their iPhones (rather than using screenreaders). Unfortunately, these apps don’t respect the settings on your phone, and don’t offer any way to change the font size within the app either. The developer of Toot! has known about this issue since 2018, but it clearly hasn’t been a priority to fix it.
I’m not a screenreader user, but I have done just enough playing around with VoiceOver (the iPhone’s built-in screenreader) to have at least some idea of what’s useful. Or at least I can spot when app developers have done things really badly! But I haven’t explored every aspect of these apps using VoiceOver, and I can only give a hint of how accessible these apps are.
The opening screens for Mercury, Metatext, Toot! and Tootle are all straightforwardly navigable from top to bottom using VoiceOver. Mastodon’s opening screen takes you straight to that ‘Get Started’ button. tooot’s opening screen works fine too, with the proviso that there’s no explanation of the mysterious labels beyond the ‘Login’ button (but these are as much of a mystery for those of us using the visual interface!).
Mast’s opening screen is navigable, but unfortunately highlights several user interface elements that are hidden visually and intended not to be seen or active at this point. You need to skip past no fewer than seven invisible and unusable elements – five buttons, a heading and a list – to get to the ‘Instance name’ text field. Not great.
Fedi’s VoiceOver support is haphazard from the start. On the opening screen, the label for that all-important instance text field is widely separated from the text field itself, and the app gives unnecessary description of a ‘screenshot’ before getting into the functionality. I did actually play with Fedi properly, using a couple of instances, but it didn’t have many redeeming qualities. I’m so unimpressed by the app that I don’t think it’s worth labouring descriptions of how well it behaves elsewhere. It is therefore eliminated at this stage. (I wasn’t planning to have elimination rounds, but the app forced my hand!)
Signing up or logging in to an instance An instance’s login pageI said a few paragraphs ago that I’d look briefly at this aspect, but it seems I don’t do briefly at the moment! Fortunately, all of the apps share the same sign-up/login process, as this is delegated to the instance’s login page (which generally looks more or less the same from instance to instance – I’ve only seen minor customisations like colour changes).
If you haven’t already created an account on your chosen instance, you can choose the ‘Sign-up’ link here, which takes you to joinmastodon.org. Otherwise, you just need to enter your email address and password, and you’ll be asked to authorise the app to access your account. If you’ve set up two-factor authentication on your instance of choice, there may be another step here. And depending on the instance, you may also have to agree to abide by the instance’s rules.
There are some app-dependent wrinkles (of course!).
The official Mastodon app offers an alternative sign-up route, which happens if you tap the ‘Getting started’ button instead of the ‘Login’ button – here you are presented with the instance’s rules, and supply your display name, chosen username, email address and password within the app.
In Metatext, after you’ve typed the name of an instance, the ‘Log in’ button may be joined by another button, depending on the instance: ‘Request an invite’, in the case of an instance that requires you to be invited; ‘Browse’, in the case of instance that allows public browsing of its Local timeline and users; or ‘Join’, in the case of instance you can’t browse publicly but can sign up to without being invited.
Tootle also allows you to browse publicly accessible instances, using it’s ‘Take a look’ link, though this is unfortunately always active, and just pops up an unhelpful ‘Oops, something is wrong’ error when you try to look at an instance that doesn’t allow public browsing.
Toot! is very helpful in some ways, but its sign-up/login process feels a little tortuous at first (or at least it works very differently from the other apps). When you pick an instance, you are shown the instance’s rules and have to say you agree with them before proceeding. If the instance you have chosen allows public browsing, you then see its Local timeline, and can switch to its Federated timeline. (I’ll explain these later.) If on the other hand the instance you have chosen doesn’t allow public browsing, you’ll see a screen labeled ‘Local timeline’, but with no toots and an unhelpful message about ‘errors when loading’. In either case, if you want to sign up or log in, you need to take an extra step: the simplest way is to tap the dimmed ‘Home’, ‘Toot’ or ‘Notifications’ button at the bottom of the screen.
More than one instance?All the apps reviewed support accounts on multiple instances. In four of them, to add an instance, you start with the same action used to switch between your instances. In Mastodon, Mercury or tooot, press and hold the ‘Profile’ button or profile picture at the bottom of the screen. In Tootle, tap the display name/instance name at the top of the screen.
In Metatext, you switch instances by pressing and holding the profile picture at the top, but to add a new one, you need to tap it instead and then choose ‘Accounts’. In Mast, you switch instances similarly by pressing and holding the ‘Profile’ button at the bottom, but adding a new one is a little more convoluted: tap the ‘Profile’ button, tap the cog at the top left, scroll down and choose ‘Accounts’.
Toot! is a little different. To add an instance, tap the ‘…’ at the top right, and choose ‘Servers’. But to switch instances, use the instance switcher button at the bottom right: either press and hold, or swipe left or right for a nice rotating transition between screens for different instances.
Both Metatext and Toot! allow you to treat a publicly browsable instance the same way as the instances you’re signed up to, as far as it makes sense to do that, which could be quite useful. Tootle doesn’t quite treat read-only instances on an equal footing, but allows you to add ‘tabs’ for such instances at the bottom of the screen. Mast also allows you to add what it calls ‘instance timelines’, hidden away under ‘Explore’.
Exploring the FediverseTimelinesThere are three basic timelines in Mastodon:
- Home. This is where you’ll see public toots (and possibly other kinds of posts) of all the people you follow, in the order that they’re posted. It’s more like Twitter’s ‘Latest tweets’ than its opaquely generated ‘Home’ view. (Note: the Home timeline doesn’t exist if you’re browsing a publicly browsable instance without logging in.)
- Local. Here you can see all the public toots on your instance, again in chronological order.
- Federated. This timeline is like the Local timeline except that instead of just the public toots on your instance, it includes the public toots on all instances that your instance is currently federated with. Unless you’ve chosen a very isolated instance, this is a fast-flowing stream of toots.
If you have just signed up on an instance, your Home timeline will be dispiritingly empty. No algorithmically suggested people to follow or anything like that. You’re in charge here! So you probably want to start by looking through your Local timeline – or the Federated timeline if you’re feeling brave!
In Mast, the three timelines are available under ‘Feed’, and are labelled with tabs across the top of the screen as ‘Home’, ‘Local’ and ‘All’ (i.e. Federated).
Metatext works similarly, except that the button at the bottom is labelled ‘Timelines’ rather than ‘Feed’, and the Federated tab is labelled ‘Federated’. It’s also nice that you can swipe left and right between the three timelines.
tooot devotes two buttons at the bottom to timelines: the house button is for the Home timeline, labelled ‘Following’, while the globe button is for a view with two tabs, ‘Federated’ and ‘Local’, and again you can swipe between them.
Toot! also reserves the house button for the Home timeline. To access the Local or Federated timeline, tap the instance switcher. You can choose between the two at the top of the screen.
Tootle has separate buttons on its configurable tab bar for the three timelines.
In Mercury, you switch between timelines by tapping on the ‘Timelines’ button, which reveals a slide-in menu, including the three timelines, and also a lot of other things that aren’t really timelines.
It may surprise you to find that there is no Federated timeline in the official Mastodon app, and even the Local timeline is hidden away under search, disguised as ‘Community’. Lead developer Eugen Rochko (who also runs the large instance mastodon.social) has tried to justify this decision, but I’m not at all convinced, and for me it counts as this app’s biggest negative point.
Direct message timelinesDirect messages are really just toots in Mastodon. So they appear in your Home timeline along with everything else. Their distinguishing feature is simply that they have their visibility set to direct (as opposed to public, unlisted or followers). This means they are visible only to people mentioned in them.
Nevertheless, most of the apps have a facility to show you just those toots with this property. Mast and Metatext have a ‘Messages’ button, Mercury has a ‘Conversations’ button, and Tootle has a ‘DM’ button. Toot! has a ‘Direct messages’ view accessible from the ‘…’ menu at the top of the screen.
Otherwise, direct messages are highlighted in various ways in your Home timeline: Mercury and tooot use an envelope icon, and change the boost button to a padlock and a subtly dimmed boost icon respectively (since you can’t boost direct messages). Metatext and Tootle show their envelope icon in place of the boost button. Toot!, by default, styles direct messages in conversation bubbles, and omits the boost button. It also notifies you of new direct messages using a little profile pic circle at the top right.
Mast uses a paper aeroplane icon for direct messages, but Mastodon doesn’t distinguish them from toots with other visibilities at all. Both these apps confusingly retain an active boost button. In Mastodon, this appears to work momentarily and is then immediately undone, but since you can’t tell otherwise that the toot is a direct message, this could be very frustrating. In Mast, it also seems to work, and updates the number of boosts to 1. But this is only a display bug (and unboosting straightaway leads to the number of boosts being −1). If you go to a different view and return, everything is fine.
By the way, Mast gets completely hung up if you send a direct message without any mentions – though why you’d do that only I can guess!
Screenreader accessibility (part 2)Now, I have to concede ignorance about how people actually use screenreaders to navigate complex structures like Mastodon (or Twitter) timelines. So I may have approached this somewhat idiosyncratically! For one thing, I only tried the flat navigation style, whereas I can imagine grouped navigation being better in some situations. I did switch to the container rotor to move between major elements of the user interface with vertical swipes. Before I tried this, I had a lot of difficulty getting around parts of all the apps.
As a baseline, I compared the apps’ behaviour when selecting a toot in a timeline and letting VoiceOver ‘read all’ (default: two-finger swipe down), without considering how easy it was to select that first toot. Mastodon, Metatext and tooot all did a good job, with about the right amount of detail for an overview. Toot! felt ever-so-slightly verbose at times, but was basically fine. Mercury gave slightly more information than appeared on screen, and didn’t quite keep its visual and audible timelines in sync in some minor respects. Mast would have been ok, except that content warnings were completely ignored, which feels like a major failing. Tootle was fine with content warnings, which it just read as labelled buttons, but unfortunately it read everything else on the screen as well, which made browsing the timeline in this way very tedious.
Navigating through the timeline, element by element, Toot!, tooot and Tootle (from best to worst) all fared poorly. The container rotor didn’t often help, as the heading, timeline and button bar are not properly connected in the apps, and I couldn’t say how easy they would be to use at all for someone who relies on a screenreader. (I couldn’t access the button bar in any of these apps without actually tapping on it.)
Mast had one or two peculiarities. Saying how old a toot was, the ‘h’ for hours was read as ‘aitch’, the ‘m’ for minutes as ‘metres’, and the ‘s’ for seconds as a plural ending! Content warnings, as noted before, were not treated correctly, with VoiceOver simply diving in and reading the visually hidden content.
In Mastodon, content warnings did at least kept stuff hidden – just a little too well though!
Mercury was really awkward to navigate consistently – I couldn’t really work out the logic at all, which was very frustrating. Sensitive content was sometimes read out, while content warnings clung onto their secrets a little too tenaciously.
Some useful pieces of information, such as indications that toots are direct messages or have some other non-public visibility, seem to be omitted from VoiceOver support in most apps. Metatext fared better than most here.
Multilingual support is frankly appalling across all the apps here, and I suspect this is a longstanding problem with VoiceOver on iOS that simply hasn’t been addressed. What is frustrating is that the other screen-reading tool in iOS (‘Speak Selection’/‘Speak Screen’ in the ‘Spoken Content’ accessibility options) does a pretty good job of identifying languages and reading toots in a timeline accordingly. That tool, however, isn’t interactive, and simply reads until you tell it to stop. This isn’t just an issue with Mastodon apps, but equally with the Twitter app, and indeed any app that doesn’t have content explicitly marked for language (which would be normal good practice on the web).
In summary, VoiceOver accessibility isn’t great, with all the apps having failings in this area. I hope the developers will pay more attention to accessibility in future releases. I was going to say that the web interface is probably a better bet in the meantime, but I just tried it and it seems even worse! 🙁
Searching and browsingBesides connecting with others on your instance’s Local and Federated timelines (which, of course, you can’t do if you’re using Mastodon!), you’ll probably want to explore further afield, at least at first.
All the apps have a search function, accessed in most cases using the familiar magnifying glass button (except in Toot!, where you need to tap ‘…’ and choose ‘Search’). If you enter a search term, you’ll usually get matches of people (the term is found in profiles in federated instances), hashtags (the term is found in hashtags that have been used at some point) and toots (the term is found in toots in the Federated timeline). You can choose between these using tabs in Mastodon, Mercury and Metatext. (In Mercury, you need to tap ‘search’ separately for each tab, which is slightly irritating.) Mastodon and Metatext also have an ‘All’ tab, which shows a selection of search results from each category, and this is essentially what tooot and Toot! show in their tab-free search results screens.
For hashtag results, Metatext and Toot! display little recent-usage graphs alongside each hashtag found.
In Mast, the search function in the current release is almost completely broken: after tapping the second magnifying glass, or pressing and holding the first, you get to the search field. It has tabs for ‘Toots’ and ‘Users’, but only manages to display two or three toots in an unscrollable list. If you tap ‘Users’, the search closes!
Tootle’s search is a little different, with no ‘All’ tab, but tabs (across the bottom) labelled ‘MyToot’, ‘Hashtag’, ‘Account’ and ‘Instance’. The middle two are self-explanatory, as is the last (though this addition doesn’t seem very useful). As far as I can tell ‘MyToot’ finds the search term in toots that you have posted, boosted or favourited.
Besides search functionality on their ‘Explore’ screens, Mast and Metatext let you browse profile directories for your instance – and in Mast, for instances federated to it too. This is the place to find the Local timeline in Mastodon too (‘Communities’).
Mastodon, Mast and Mercury also have some slightly opaque additional features on their ‘Explore’ screens, including what seem to me to be un-Fediverse-like suggestions of accounts to follow and news items. I haven’t explored these further.
ProfilesThere’s not a huge amount of difference in the usability of user profiles (and if you’re anything like me, you’ll spend a lot more time focusing on toots and threads than on people’s profiles). Coming from Twitter, most of the apps’ profile views will look fairly familiar, with a header image at the top, and a profile pic in a little frame beside the user’s display name and username. All the apps except Mercury, tooot and Tootle will enlarge the profile pic or header image if you tap on it, just as in the Twitter app. Mercury doesn’t show a header image when you’re viewing your own profile (but you can still edit it).
Some of the apps use a square frame rather than the Twitter-like round frame for the profile pic, and the header image varies from app to app in how it is cropped, so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that will work here. Tootle breaks the mould visually here (or perhaps it’s fairer to say that it predates the mould!), with (a variable part of) the header image used as a background for the profile pic and the entire bio. This does unfortunately render some bios extremely hard to read. (Note that bios can be up to 500 characters in length, compared to Twitter’s 160.)
Profile informationBesides the bio, there may be a table of up to four rows containing user-defined information, possibly including links to websites, which can be ‘verified’ if they point back at the Mastodon account. This table usually appears just above or below the bio. But Mastodon hides it under an ‘About’ tab alongside ‘Posts’, ‘Posts and replies’ and ‘Media’). And Mast hides the individual rows of the table under its ‘Links’ menu item. Tootle doesn’t display this information at all. Of the apps that do, all but Mast and Mastodon indicate the ‘verified’ status of any web links. Only Toot! tells you when the link was verified.
All the apps have some way of showing you if you’re following or requesting to follow the person, usually doubling up as the button to follow or request to follow them. Toot! is the exception: it states separately whether you’re following the person, being followed by them, or following each other, which is actually quite helpful. Mastodon and Mercury don’t show you whether or not the person is following you (though if they are, they will appear in your list of followers). Metatext only tells you if a person is following you, not if they aren’t.
All the apps display the number of accounts the person follows, and the number of people following the account. All but Metatext and Toot! also display the total number of toots.
Only three of the apps – Mast, Metatext and tooot – show the date the person signed up to the instance. Mast is slightly overzealous in reporting the time as well, which isn’t actually recorded and always comes out as 00:00:00 UTC (GMT)!
If you have endorsed/featured a user (something you can only do in Mast or Toot!), you can see the endorsement status in their profile in Toot! This seems of limited use!
Most of the apps use a very similar layout for your own profile and other people’s profiles (apart from things which only make sense in one context or the other). tooot is the odd one out here: for your own profile, instead of the bio and other information, it gives access to various lists/timelines and settings.
Beneath the profile information, the apps display the user’s toots, most recent first (except in Mercury, where you have to tap on the ‘Toots’ option to view them on a separate screen). Any pinned tweets come before other tweets, except in Mast, Mastodon and Mercury. In Mast, there is a ‘Pinned’ menu item you can use to see these, which does feel a little awkward and counter to the idea of pinning things for everyone to notice.
Mastodon, Metatext and Toot by default omit toots that are replies to other toots, and have a separate toots-and-replies tab for all toots. Mastodon and Metatext also have a tab for toots containing media. Mast and Mercury have separate galleries of recent media below the basic profile information, with links to the toots containing them.
Interacting with a profileThe thing you’re most likely to want to do after checking out someone’s profile is follow them. And all the apps have some kind of follow button (which may request a follow if the account is set to require approval of followers). Tootle’s follow button disappears after use. To unfollow, you need to use a menu item instead. In all the other apps, the follow button turns into an unfollow button.
Although mentions are just toots that include a person’s username (beginning with @), and direct messages are just mentions with visibility set to direct, all the apps conveniently offer some means of doing one or both of these from either a button or menu item on a person’s profile. Offering both feels like overkill though, as you can easily convert either into the other by changing the visibility – public or direct – while composing the toot.
Profiles in Mercury and Metatext have a notification bell that you can tap presumably to be notified whenever that person toots, though I haven’t tested this.
Almost all the apps offer menu access to items that will be familiar from Twitter, principally mute, block, report and share. (Mercury doesn’t include block or report. Tootle doesn’t include report.) Reports go to the administrator of the instance the user’s account is on. Hopefully you won’t need to report or block users very often.
If you use an instance’s web interface, you can add your own private notes to other people’s profiles. Unfortunately, such notes can be neither created nor viewed in any of the apps here. That’s a shame, as you could use private notes to remind yourself why you followed – or blocked – someone, say.
Toots (and other posts)Interacting with timelinesI’ll use the word timeline loosely here to include not only the chronologically ordered Home, Local and Federated timelines, but also lists of favourites and bookmarks, and lists of toots returned as the result of a search, or those under a profile. (But for now I’m only talking about lists of toots, so I’m not counting lists of notifications, hashtags etc.)
MastMastodonMercuryMetatexttoootToot!Tootle The seven apps showing part of my personal timeline of tootsAll the apps display timelines in a way that will feel familiar to Twitter users, with newer toots above older ones. Tootle, however, also (consistently, but confusingly) carries this over to its display of threads, with replies above original toots. The remaining apps follow the convention used in Twitter, and have replies in chronological order below original toots in the display of conversations/threads.
Mast and Mercury reduce visual clutter a little by eliminating the action buttons beneath the toots in this view. In Mast, these become visible in the ‘Detail’ view shown when you tap on a toot. In Mercury, they pop up beneath the toot when you tap on it. Toot!, as elsewhere in its interface, uses small caps text rather than icons, which looks quite stylish in my opinion.
Moving through a timeline is completely intuitive, with scrolling just as you’d expect in an iPhone app. Tootle is slightly frustrating though, as the timeline comes to a disappointingly abrupt halt when you flick-scroll up or down. It feels as though it could do with an oil!
As in the Twitter app, a timeline can sometimes have gaps in it, which you can fill in using a load-missing-toots button that sits in the gap. This button in Metatext or Toot! shows, by way of little arrows that rotate as you scroll the timeline, where the missing toots will be placed – either above the toot that is below the gap, or below the toot that is above the gap. This is incredibly helpful in reducing disorientation.
A Toot! convoIn most of the apps, tapping on an otherwise inactive part of a toot takes you to a detail view where you can see how the toot is connected to other toots – what it is in reply to, if anything, and any replies to it. Here is where toots with unlisted visibility show up, when they would be hidden from the Local timeline for instance.
Mercury is the exception: as just noted, tapping on a toot brings up the hidden action buttons for the toot. You can then tap the conversation button to see the detail view (which has ‘replies’ and ‘thread’ subviews). As an alternative to using these buttons, in Mercury you can use swipe gestures: a short swipe to the left is the equivalent to tapping the conversation button; a long swipe to the left is equivalent to tapping on the favourite button; a short swipe to the right is equivalent to tapping on the reply button; and a long swipe to the right is equivalent to tapping on the boost button.
These swipe gestures felt quite handy when I first came across them, but in many ways I’d rather see swipe to the right used as an equivalent to the back button, as it is in the Twitter app for instance. None of the apps do this.
The way connections between toots are indicated in the detail view for a toot varies from app to app. Toot!’s indication of a conversation is particularly innovative, using (by default coloured) vertical connecting lines linking the profile pics beside the toots. Fragments of these lines are also visible above and below profile pics in a timeline, to indicate that the toot is in reply to something or has replies. Not quite sure yet if it’s just a gimmick, or something that’s actually useful. But there’s much about Toot! that feels playful, and makes using it feel comfortable and enjoyable.
Viewing and listening to mediaThere can be up to four images in a toot. Alternatively, there can be audio (with an optional thumbnail image), video with audio, or silent video (such as an animated GIF).
Images, as shown in the screenshots, are dealt with in different ways by the apps, especially when there is more than one in a toot, and I’m not sure I could argue that any approach is better than the others. In Mercury, Metatext, Toot! and Tootle, alt text is displayed beneath (or sometimes partly overlaying) an image when it is enlarged. In Mast, you can only see the alt text by long-pressing on an image in the context of a toot (not when it is enlarged). As far as I can tell, Mastodon and tooot don’t display alt text.
Audio in toots can be played by all the apps except Mastodon and Tootle. Tootle does, however, show the thumbnail image! Only tooot shows the image and plays the audio. In Mast and Mercury, note that there is no sound when your iPhone is in silent mode. (The same applies to videos with audio in those two apps.) Mast and Metatext have standard controls for moving to different parts of the audio in their full-screen audio plays. Mercury lets you play audio within the timeline, and has a slidable bar showing how far through the audio you are.
Silent videos in a timeline play automatically on a loop in all the apps except Mast and Tootle. Tapping on a silent video in any of the apps enlarges it to the full screen width. Mast and Tootle use the standard iOS player for this, these two apps alone giving you controls for moving backwards and forwards through a silent video.
Only Metatext has silent auto-play in the timeline for video with audio, and it moves particularly smoothly between full screen and in-timeline views for both kinds of video. Toot! also has fluid transitions for video, but doesn’t keep the place between different views. All the apps except Toot! use the standard iOS player for video with audio.
Support for alt text with audio and video is patchier than for images (but I haven’t checked whether it is available in VoiceOver in either case). Metatext displays alt text for silent video only. Tootle shows the alt text for audio (for which it only displays the thumbnail!). Only Toot! displays alt text (in full screen) for audio and both kinds of video.
Mastodon allows media to be marked as sensitive, so that it is hidden or (in the case of images) blurred by default. And it also allows toots to be flagged with a content warning, hiding the main text. In Mast, a toot with a content warning takes up as much screen space as it would if the whole toot were there: it is effectively covered by a labelled black rectangle. (This probably explains why the screenreader reads the covered text anyway.) A similar approach (but without screenreader issues as far as I’m aware) is taken by Mastodon, Mercury and Toot!, but the other apps use a variable amount of screen space for a toot depending on whether the content is shown or hidden. Metatext’s buttons for content warnings feel very intrusive, dominating the timeline. All the apps except Mast allow you to hide material again after revealing it if you wish.
Interacting with tootsSometimes you’ll come across toots in languages that you don’t understand. Only Mast offers anything like the convenience of Twitter’s machine-translation option. I’m not sure what it uses behind the scenes, but it seems effective, and readily copes with toots that switch languages. (It can also translate bios in profiles.) Mercury offers a translate option for toots, but this opens a web page in Safari, with the text being provided to Russian search engine Yandex, which typically tries to translate the text into Russian in the first place! If the text contains an apostrophe, only the text before this is copied to the translation site. In Mastodon, Metatext and Tootle, you can select some text (e.g. in a toot in detail view) and use the iOS translate option. This is a little clunky, but better than nothing. tooot and Toot! only allow you to copy the whole text of a toot, which you could then paste into the translation tool of your choice. Not exactly handy though.
All the apps have reply, boost and favourite buttons, which work pretty much as you’d expect. Metatext, Toot! and Tootle’s buttons have a bonus feature: if you long-press them, you get a menu asking which account you’d like to use to reply, boost or favourite. This is extremely convenient if you have more than one account. And in Toot!, you get the same menu when you tap on a button if you’re viewing an instance that you’re not logged in to.
Composing toots and threadsThe toot buttons in tooot, Toot! and Tootle sit a little incongruously on the bar at the bottom of the screen (the other buttons there being for different views within the app rather than actions). Toot!’s button uniquely pops up a menu asking if you’d like to start with text, an existing image, or a photo taken using your phone’s camera. Given that most of us probably start with text most of the time, this feels like an unneeded extra step on the way to composing a toot. A minor quibble though. Mast, Mastodon and Mercury all have their toot buttons in the top right corner, while Metatext’s hovers over the bottom right corner, but not right at the bottom.
Whether you are launching a completely fresh toot out of the blue or replying to an existing one makes little difference at this stage, except that replies are usually pre-filled with mentions of the person or people you’re replying to (not in Mast). All the apps have a box for you to type, paste or speak into. They all show either the number of characters you’ve used so far or the number remaining of the maximum 500. (I believe some instances allow 1000 characters here.) And all except Tootle have some way of indicating when you’ve gone over the limit. That’s because in Tootle, you simply can’t exceed the limit. If you’re typing, it won’t accept another character beyond the 500th. If pasting or dictating text would take you over the limit, none of what you’ve pasted or dictated is included.
Tootle also counts characters a little differently: like Twitter, it treats emojis as two characters long (because their Unicode representations do in fact take more space to store). All the other apps (correctly for Mastodon) treat emojis as single characters. Tootle is joined by tooot in erroneously counting other Unicode characters according to their storage requirements.
Emojos are instance-specific custom emojis, some animated, which are represented in toots by names between a pair of colons. These appear to take up whatever space their name takes up, and you can use them either by choosing them from an emojo picker, or by typing their name. Metatext handily offers visual autocompletion suggestions as you type, which can make finding the right emojo that much easier.
Regardless of their actual length, all URLs in Mastodon are treated as if they were 23 characters long (and use of URL shorteners is officially discouraged). Mast, Mercury and Tootle all fail to count URLs correctly.
Finally, on the topic of counting, only the local part of a username (e.g. the ‘@transponderings’ of ‘@[email protected]’) is supposed to count towards your character allowance. Only Mercury, tooot and Toot! get this right. All the apps, incidentally, offer completion suggestions as you type usernames. Tootle’s seems to have less coverage than the others though.
While all the apps allow you to reply to toots you have written, only Metatext and Toot! let you write a thread of toots to be tooted more or less simultaneously. Writing long threads is arguably less useful on Mastodon than on Twitter, given that single toots can be much longer than tweets, but there may be times when it will be convenient. Unlike Twitter’s threads, a thread of your own toots can occur even in reply to someone else’s toot. Threads aren’t treated in a special way by Mastodon though: this is simply a convenience feature in these two apps.
Adding media to tootsOnly Mast, Metatext and Toot! allow you to paste images in from elsewhere, but in all seven apps you can choose an image from your photo library. And when it comes to videos, only Toot! lets you paste a copied video into your toot. And none of the apps seem to let you paste audio!
In fact, only Mast and Metatext support inclusion of audio in toots. And only Metatext lets you add alt text to audio, or mark audio as sensitive media. Neither app supports the full range of audio formats that Mastodon supports.
Mast, Mastodon and Metatext allow you to browse for files containing images and video, whereas the other apps limit you to the Photos library on your iPhone.
When it comes to video, Mercury, tooot and Toot! all work well. But I had trouble posting videos from both Mast (which was taking forever) and Mastodon (which didn’t seem to want me to toot while there was video attached). I didn’t investigate this any further. Mastodon (if only it worked!), Mercury and Toot! let you add alt text to video. Only tooot and Toot! let you mark video as sensitive media.
Tooting miscellanyMastodon’s delete-and-redraft capability (introduced in June 2019) will be the envy of many people stuck on Twitter, as it’s very much like the oft-requested edit button. All the apps except Mastodon and Tootle support this.
In most apps, you can set the visibility of a toot to public, unlisted, followers or direct. However, thanks to the developer’s stance on Local and Federated timelines, you can’t create unlisted toots in Mastodon. This is a pity, particularly as I have seen a number of people recommending that toots in a thread after the first should be unlisted, as a courtesy, so as not to clutter up other people’s timelines.
All the apps allow you to add content warnings to toots (called spoilers in Mercury and tooot – and I suppose it makes sense to use them for both purposes).
All the apps apart from Tootle also allow you to include polls in your toots. Unlike Twitter’s polls, these can be set up so respondents can pick more than one of the two to four options. However, the official Mastodon app only allows single-choice polls.
Toots can be scheduled for later publication – they are uploaded to your instance immediately, but held back until a specified date/time. Of the apps reviewed, only Mast and Mercury support this.
Cautionary notesWhen you are composing a toot (or a thread of toots) and tap elsewhere in the app, Mast, Mercury, tooot and Tootle all do what you’d expect if you’ve come from Twitter: they ask if you want to save your draft. In Mast, tooot and Tootle, there are buttons in the compose window to allow you to pick a draft from where you left off. In Mercury, you need to open the draft from the drafts ‘timeline’.
None of the remaining apps have a draft facility. At least Mastodon warns you that you’re about to discard your draft. Metatext and Toot! unceremoniously discard whatever you’ve been writing, whether a single toot or perhaps even a lengthy thread! Be very careful!
Mercury allows you to select video alongside other media from the Photos library. It will attempt to toot and erroneously state that it has succeeded. Mastodon also allows you to do select an untootable selection of media items, but it fails to make sense of the video in that case, before you toot. This is the only case I’ve come across where one of the apps has crashed though.
NotificationsJust two of the apps, as far as I can tell, show announcements from your instance admin. Because these are pretty rare, I’m not sure if they appear elsewhere in other apps. In Metatext, announcements are available at the top right of the main ‘Timelines’ view. In tooot, you can find them under your profile.
Aside from these announcements and the special highlighting of new direct messages in Toot! that was noted earlier, each of the apps maintains a running list of notifications including mentions, follows (and follow requests), boosts, favourites and poll updates – yes, unlike in Twitter, you can be notified when a poll you’ve participated in ends!
In all but one of the apps, you can see your notifications by tapping the bell icon at the bottom of the screen. In Mercury, the notifications view is found among the timelines that you select from in the list that slides in from the left.
Mercury and Toot! have app settings to choose which kinds of notifications to receive. I presume (though I haven’t had the chance to test it) that these don’t only affect the notifications view, but also the live notifications that pop up if you’ve enabled them in your iPhone settings.
In tooot, if you tap on the filter button, you can choose to view or not view each of six types of notification. Mast also has a filter button for six types of notification, but you can only choose to few one type or all.
Mastodon, Metatext and Tootle offer a simple tabbed view giving a choice between all notifications and just mentions (also just follows, and ‘others’, in Tootle). Settings in each of these apps also offer finer control over the kinds of notifications you receive.
Only Tootle takes things to the next level in terms of interaction between the in-app notifications and iPhone notifications, with independent control over how mentions, boosts, favourites and follows are brought to your attention both inside and outside the app.
Neither the apps here nor the Twitter app do a particularly good job of showing you which notifications you have not yet seen. But one thing I miss from Twitter is the consolidation of notifications. It would be really good to know that 11 people had favourited a toot rather than knowing separately that A, B, C, … and K had favourited it. (On the flip side, the detail in Mastodon does mean that each favourite and boost has a time stamp, so you can tell when they all happened, which I suppose might be nice to know sometimes.)
Privacy considerationsAccording to the App Store, Mastodon, Metatext, Mercury and Toot! do not collect any data from app users. Zhiyuan Zheng, the developer of tooot, claims to collect ‘user content’, ‘identifiers’, ‘usage data’ and ‘diagnostics’ from app users, but ‘not linked to your identity’. (Oddly enough, tooot is also the only app to display a ‘privacy protection’ notice if you take a screenshot.) The developers of Mast and Tootle have not yet submitted privacy/data-handling policies to Apple.
Other bits and bobsFive of the apps – Mast, Mercury, Metatext, tooot and Toot! – work in landscape orientation, though I’m unsure whether that’s ever going to be the best way to view Mastodon timelines. Still, if that’s your preference, it’s worth knowing.
There are other (non-screenreader-related) accessibility options in the apps’ settings, which I haven’t had time to explore here.
Three of the apps – Mast, Mastodon and Mercury – have additional menu items available from their icons on your iPhone’s home screen. From all three you can compose a toot, while two can take you straight to different timelines or other views. I’m not sure how useful this is.
All the apps feature in the ubiquitous iOS share menu, and their built-in share functionality is adequate for occasional use. If you frequently find yourself wanting to share things with your followers when you’re in other apps though, you might want to consider Linky for Twitter and Mastodon (£3.49). This allows you to use the iOS share menu to share text, photos etc. on Mastodon or Twitter, with markup options and various other features, and posting to multiple accounts simultaneously if required. (It doesn’t currently allow you to provide alt text for images, so you need to use the delete-and-redraft option subsequently to add this.)
Mast and Mercury both have iPhone widgets, but the former doesn’t really work, and the latter isn’t really particularly useful.
Tootle has a little play/pause button, which lets you see toots scrolling in continuously or else leave the timeline where you put it. The difference may only be noticeable on the Federated timeline!
Mastodon has an option to turn off animated emojis (there are a lot of instance-specific custom emojis in Mastodon), but it doesn’t work.
Mast and Tootle displays dates and times in US format regardless of the settings on your iPhone.
If you get fed up with looking at toots, Toot! has a couple of Easter eggs tucked away at the bottom of menus to keep you amused!
Summary – tl;drFor various reasons, Fedi was eliminated from consideration at the Getting started stage (although I had also used it for a bit with my accounts, and didn’t find that it redeemed itself later on).
Mast’s search functionality is completely broken at this point, and many other aspects of the app are buggy. The app developer appears to have left it to rust, which is disappointing, as it does have one or two nice touches, notably the inclusion of in-app translation of bios and toots. But I can’t really recommend using this app at present.
The other six apps are all fairly straightforward to set up with accounts on one or more instances, most working in pretty much the same way. Metatext, Toot! and Tootle additionally let you have read-only access to publicly browsable instances alongside the instances you’ve signed up to.
Mercury has the clunkiest timeline support, while Toot!’s is definitely the coolest (and Toot! generally feels most fun to use of all the apps in general, with some delightful transitions). The official Mastodon app bizarrely doesn’t have a Federated timeline view at all.
While all apps support direct messages in your Home timeline, Mercury, Metatext, Toot! and Tootle also have filtered timelines that show just your direct messages.
All the apps have issues with VoiceOver accessibility, but Mastodon and Metatext probably fared better than the others (with the proviso that I’m not a regular screenreader user).
Scrolling through timelines of toots feels fairly comfortable in all apps, although Tootle can feel a little sluggish. Mercury has some nice swipe gestures, which reduce visual clutter in the timeline. Toot! shows conversation threading using (optionally colour-coded) connecting lines between toots.
Media support varies greatly among the apps. Metatext and Toot! probably come out on top, on balance, with Toot! being the only app to show alt text for all media types, and Metatext being the only app that allows you to compose toots with audio attachments.
Toot! and Tootle both make working with multiple instances easier, as you can reply, boost or favourite from another instance without leaving the instance you’re looking at.
Toot! is the only app that counts characters in toots correctly according to Mastodon’s rules when you’re composing a toot.
Both Metatext and Toot! have support for composing threads of toots. But beware: neither Metatext nor Toot will offer you any warning if you close a toot or thread you’re in the middle of composing. If you do that, it’s gone!
All the apps except Mastodon and Tootle support the delete-and-redraft feature, basically an edit button. (It preserves text, attachments, alt text, polls, visibility settings – everything except any replies, favourites or boosts.)
I’m not going to try to condense all this into a simple star rating, but I’ve personally found myself being most comfortable using Toot! and Metatext. Sadly, none of the apps do everything just right, and you may find the combination of features (and omissions and bugs) tips the balance in favour of one of the other apps. Some of the apps at least are being actively developed, so App Store reviews pointing out problems you’ve had might actually lead to changes being made.
CorrectionsThanks to Heinz Skunk for pointing out that Metatext also has long-press reply, boost and favourite buttons for using an alternative instance.
Thanks to Avi for pointing out that Metatext does in fact indicate in their profile when someone is following you.
Thanks to Anna e só for pointing out that Toot! is problematic for low-vision users, as it doesn’t respect the iPhone text-size settings. I found that Tootle has the same issue.
Thanks to Camille for making me aware that Android’s Tusky app supports private notes on profiles. I had claimed before that none of the iOS apps did so because the Mastodon API didn’t support this. But I checked again and saw that it had been in the API since v3.2.0. (At the time of writing this review, Mastodon was at v3.5.2.)
Behind the scenes: the making of this blog postAs well as obtaining the eight apps (for the princely sum of £5.98, as noted), and tipping £0.89 for bonus functionality in one, I had to spend a fair bit of time researching the differences between the apps. I also invested in one or two additional tools to make the job of writing this a little easier. I used a 24-hour licence of Time.Graphics (£4.09) to make creating the timeline as hassle-free as possible – twice, in fact, because two of the apps were updated while I was writing it. And after a lot of searching (and skipping lots of web articles saying what I wanted to do wasn’t possible), I discovered KeyPad, a Mac app (£2.49 in-app purchase required) that lets me use the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook to control my iPhone, meaning that, with a touch accessibility option turned on, videos could show where I’m tapping on the screen (but I didn’t actually use this in the end!).
I don’t mind spending a little less than £15 on this post. To be honest, it’s the time and the spoons involved that are more valuable to me. I don’t write blog posts for money, but in the hope that someone at least will find what I’ve written to be of value to them. If you have found this helpful, please like it if you’re able to, and if you can share it more widely, whether by tooting or tweeting a link, or by reblogging if you have a WordPress account, I’d really appreciate that. And if you do have a bit of spare cash, I’ll be extremely grateful for any tips received on my Ko-fi page! 😊
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https://transponderings.blog/2022/05/21/eight-mastodon-apps-for-iphone/
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One UI 8 Full Changelogs (Final) (Galaxy S25)
Samsung has rolled out One UI 8.0 for the Galaxy S25 series devices, including the Galaxy S25 Edge, in Korea today and it will expand the availability to other countries and models in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, Samsung has finally published the official changelogs for the Galaxy S25 series’ One UI 8.0 update.
Here’s the final changelogs:
Please note that the below changelogs are machine-translated from Korean to English, so inaccuracies can show up. In case European countries or any other country gets the update, we’ll update the changelogs to the official English version.
One UI 8.0 (Android 16)
Galaxy AI
Call subtitles
With call captioning, your conversation with the other person is displayed on screen in real time during a call. You can follow along with the on-screen content and carefully check to make sure you don’t miss anything.Create animal photos in various styles
Apply AI effects to transform your pet’s photos into something special. Now, in Portrait Studio, you can apply a variety of styles, such as fish-eye and oil painting, to your dog and cat photos to make them truly special.Clean audio
Apply the audio eraser to automatically reduce background noises, such as wind, when someone speaks. This feature is available in the Gallery, Video Player, Samsung Notes, Voice Recorder, and Phone.Smarter everyday life with Now Brief
Receive concise briefings of essential information tailored to your interests and daily timeline. Access Now Brief via the Edge panel, home screen widget, and Now bar notifications.Disaster Text Translation
Even if you receive disaster alerts in a different language, you can still see important information without missing anything. Galaxy AI will automatically translate emergency alerts in languages other than your system language.Faster AI Select
After running AI Select, you can select the desired area right away without waiting any longer.View AI results more easily
When using apps that support summary and translation in landscape mode, you can summarize or translate content and then view the original and translated content side by side at once.Stay safe from voice phishing
Calls from unknown callers are analyzed by AI based on data from the National Police Agency. If conversations suspected of being voice phishing are detected, you will be notified to avoid damage. Call analysis is processed only on your device, and call details are not shared.Customization
New clock style for lock screen
Discover a stylish new clock that will make your lock screen stand out. It blends seamlessly with your wallpaper, and the font size and position flexibly change based on the shape of your portrait or animal image, allowing you to create your own perfect style.Newly designed wallpaper
The range of wallpaper options has been expanded. Gradient wallpapers and dynamic wallpapers that change color over time have been added.Set my photo as wallpaper
Get recommended wallpapers and set them. Choose from a variety of categories from your gallery, including landscapes, cities, flowers, pets, and people.Productivity
Check stock prices without unlocking
If there’s a significant price change in a stock you’ve added to your watchlist in Google Finance, it will appear in the Now bar at the end of the trading day.File sharing made easier
Sending and receiving files is easier than ever. Tap the Quick Share button in the Quick Settings panel. Easily receive new files while the Quick Share screen is open, or select and share files directly from Quick Share.Add a sticky note
Samsung Notes now features Sticky Notes. You can add and delete ideas at any time without altering the original note. Add unlimited Sticky Notes on top of your notes.Quickly find downloaded files
You can now filter files by downloaded apps. This feature is available in the Downloads and Recent Files sections of the My Files app.The new Samsung Internet
We’ve improved the menu screen to allow you to access frequently used functions more quickly. Easily find frequently used features and configure the screen to your liking.Supports engineering calculator in portrait mode
You can now use the scientific calculator without having to rotate the screen horizontally. The scientific calculator now supports both landscape and portrait modes.Multitasking
DeX usage has become more convenient
When connected to an external display, use DeX more conveniently with a mouse and on-screen keyboard. You can also add widgets to your home screen.More diverse display settings
The new Samsung DeX offers more options when connecting to an external monitor or TV. You can choose an optimized display resolution up to WQHD, and you can also rotate the screen 90, 180, or 270 degrees.Split screen made more convenient
When you open two apps in split screen mode, you can slide one app to the edge of the screen to focus on the current app. When you want to use another app, simply tap the app you’ve just pushed. The app will instantly switch between them, making it convenient to use.Reminder
Redesigned Reminder
The Reminder app’s screen layout has been revamped. You can now easily see how many reminders you have in each category at the top of the screen. Custom categories can be easily collapsed and expanded, allowing you to customize the Reminder main screen to your liking.Add useful reminder templates
We provide a variety of templates to help you make the most of your reminders. You won’t have to worry about how to set reminders for important tasks.Add reminders easily
To add a reminder, simply type it in the input field at the bottom of the screen. Based on your input, templates and previously used reminders will be recommended. Using the buttons below the input field, you can easily create checklists, set locations, attach images, and more. You can also create a reminder by voice by pressing the microphone icon instead of typing.Skip notifications on holidays
When adding a reminder, you can set it so that the event notification does not sound on weekends and public holidays.Calendar
Manage reminders in your calendar
Now you can add reminders directly from the Calendar app without opening the Reminders app. Simply tap the + button on the calendar to easily add events or reminders. To change a reminder time, simply drag it to the desired date or time.Add a schedule quickly
When creating a schedule using the Quick Add menu, you’ll receive recommendations for schedule names and times based on existing schedules. Selecting a recommendation will immediately add the schedule without any additional input.View lunar dates together
You can set the lunar date to always be displayed on the monthly calendar. Go to Calendar Settings and set it to Always display lunar dates.Skip notifications on holidays
When creating a schedule, you can set it so that schedule notifications do not sound on weekends and public holidays.Samsung Health
Your own personalized running coach
Run farther and faster without worrying about injury with Samsung Health’s new Running Coach. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, you’ll find training programs and practical tips tailored to your needs. This feature is available on the Galaxy Watch8 and Galaxy Watch Ultra.Bedtime Guide for Tomorrow
Get recommendations for your optimal bedtime and start the next day feeling refreshed. The new Bedtime Guide analyzes your sleep data to recommend the optimal bedtime each night.Add a running challenge to Together
In addition to walking challenges, a running event has been added, allowing you to challenge your friends to a run. Compete to see who can run a set distance faster. For example, you can set a goal of 50 km and see who can reach it first.Antioxidant index for aging management
Anti-aging starts with managing your diet. The watch’s Antioxidant Index (Lab) feature detects the levels of carotenoids in fruits and vegetables, helping you manage your antioxidant status and slow down the aging process. This feature is available on the Galaxy Watch8 and Galaxy Watch Ultra.Keep track of your meals with meal logs and reminders
Set meal log reminders to help you consistently reach your calorie goals. Samsung Health will send you notifications at set times.Vascular stress measurement
Easily measure your vascular stress (the degree of strain on your blood vessels) with the Galaxy Watch. First, wear the watch for three or more nights while you sleep to establish a baseline, allowing you to directly monitor changes in your vascular stress. This feature is available on the Galaxy Watch8 and Galaxy Watch Ultra.Check your medical records easily and securely
You can collect, store, and view medical records from multiple hospitals and clinics in one place in Samsung Health.Share your health data with family and friends
You can now share your health data not only with your family group but also with friends. Now, manage your health records with more people.Photos and videos
Swipe up and down to open quick controls
Usability has been improved by allowing you to quickly access quick controls by swiping up or down anywhere on the camera screen. Try changing the Swipe up or down setting in the camera settings to Open Quick Controls.Capture the perfect brightness with the exposure monitor
Try the Exposure Monitor feature in Pro and Pro Video modes. It helps you capture photos and videos with the right amount of brightness. It displays overexposed areas with a zebra pattern, and provides false color, which displays different colors depending on the exposure value.Professional-level editing experience with Log videos
You can shoot video in Log format and then professionally edit it. Simply turn on Log in the camera settings and shooting screen to instantly record in Log format. This feature is available in both Video and Pro Video modes.Audio
Quickly set up your Galaxy Buds
You can now easily control your Galaxy Buds from your phone’s settings—no need to open the Galaxy Wearable app separately.Oracast, Connecting Easier
Oracast lets you simultaneously transmit audio from one device to multiple devices. Simply scan a QR code to easily connect to the audio you’re playing, or you can generate your own QR code so others can connect to your audio.Communication
Profile card improvements
The layout of the profile card editing screen has been improved to make it easier to create and edit profile cards. You can now share your created profile cards so that callers can see who you are.Check call recordings in Contacts
You can easily review previous calls. If a call with the other party is recorded, it will appear on the contact’s history screen.Security and Privacy
Upgraded Secure Folder
You can keep your important apps and data even more secure. When the Secure Folder is locked, all apps within it will be closed and notifications will be muted. For even greater security, you can completely hide the Secure Folder and encrypt all apps and data within it.Enhanced device security
Knox Matrix periodically checks all devices logged into your Samsung account for security risks. If a security risk is detected on a device, it is automatically logged out of your Samsung account to prevent the risk from spreading to other devices. You can check the security status of your device in the Security & Privacy settings.Set whether to display notifications when the screen is locked
On the main screen of the Notifications settings, you can choose to show or hide notifications when your phone is locked. Select Always show notifications to view them when your phone is locked, or Hide notifications when locked to prevent others from seeing them.Accessibility
Added screen zoom option to the submenu
A new way to easily zoom in and out has been added to the submenu. You can zoom in and out by dragging with one finger, or adjust the zoom level by pressing the on-screen zoom level button.Use mouse gestures with your keyboard
You can now use your keyboard to perform mouse actions. By enabling the Mouse Keys option in Accessibility settings, you can conveniently use your keyboard to perform mouse functions, such as moving the mouse pointer, clicking, long-pressing, and scrolling.Enlarge the keyboard on the screen as well
The keyboard has been improved to enlarge when the screen is zoomed in, making it easier to type. Try enabling the Zoom Keyboard When Typing option in the Zoom settings.Easily connect your Bluetooth hearing aids
You can register and connect your Bluetooth hearing aid directly from the Hearing Aid Support screen in Accessibility Settings.Modes and Routines
Easily set up routines with new templates
New routine templates are available, utilizing weather and various detailed conditions. You can use the templates as is, or customize the settings to your liking.Detailed configurable routines
By importing data from various apps, including Watch, Calendar, and Samsung Notes, you can now configure a wider range of actions in your routines. Imported data can be used as conditions or actions.Other enhanced features
Improved alarm groups
Usability has been improved by allowing you to directly add existing alarms to a group by pressing the + button on the Alarm Groups screen. You can also add an Alarm Group widget to the home screen to turn multiple alarms on and off at once.More convenient app notification settings
You can manage various notification options at once, such as how notifications are displayed and whether they are displayed on the lock screen, from the notification settings screen of each app.Get quick support
You can receive more convenient support with a quick check-in at a Samsung Service Center. By using NFC or scanning a QR code, you can avoid manually entering information like your name and phone number. Your data is encrypted and only accessible by Samsung service representatives.Intuitive weather expression
The Weather app has been improved to provide an intuitive view of the weather. Appropriate animations are applied to the app’s main background based on current weather conditions.Change weather data provider
The Weather Channel has changed its weather information provider. Some registered location names may change.To update to One UI 8.0, you’ll need to have an eligible device, such as the Galaxy S25, Z Fold/Flip 6, and Tab S10, before you can continue. Afterwards, go to Settings > Software update > Download and install.
#Android #Android16 #AndroidB #AndroidBaklava #GalaxyS25 #GalaxyS25Edge #GalaxyS25Ultra #GalaxyS25_ #news #oneUi #OneUI8 #OneUI80 #S25 #S25Edge #S25Ultra #S25_ #Samsung #SamsungGalaxyS25 #SamsungGalaxyS25Edge #SamsungGalaxyS25Ultra #SamsungGalaxyS25_ #smartphone #Tech #Technology #update
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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Gallery Assistant Showcase
This is an article meant to showcase the Gallery Assistant beta that was released for the Korean Galaxy devices before the APK was revealed to the public. Since then, we’ve managed to get our hands on the Gallery Assistant application that we will showcase.
You’ll have to turn off the Auto Blocker feature on your device before you’ll be able to install the APK to your device. Once done, you can turn the feature back on when needed. Please note that Gallery Assistant doesn’t support landscape display rotation yet on tablets, but you can open it in a pop up then add it to the multi window.
Gallery Assistant runs on One UI 6 and higher, and this means that you are required to have a phone or a tablet that’s running at least One UI 6 in order to be able to use this application.
When you open the landing page for the Gallery Assistant, this is what you first see:
You’ll have the following options:
- Reduce size
- Rotate and flip
- Image clipper
- Add watermark
- Compare images
- Save as PDF
Some of those features already exist in the built-in Gallery app, but the Gallery Assistant offers further options.
Of course, you’ll have to select images and/or videos before every operation, such as reducing the image/video size. You can do this by pressing the plus sign at the top of the screen.
Fitst, let’s introduce you to Reduce Size. It allows you to shrink selected images and videos in bulk. You can also select specific pictures to reduce their size, and you can adjust the slider up to ten levels:
Of course, the size that the slider tells you is estimated, and the actual size differs. When you save the picture, the size has been reduced as in below:
Let’s try again with the significant reduction in size, with the slider adjusted to 20%, which means 0.42 MB estimated.
You can notice that the resolution has dropped as part of the resize process. Not only that, but the sharpness of the image has been reduced. You can notice this by the texture of the hair. The original resolution of the picture was in 3456×2304 (2.1 MB), but it has been reduced to 3382×2255 (1.57 MB) and 1590×1060 (402 KB), respectively.
Here are the two comparisons where we showcase the detail loss:
Reduced to 1.57 MB Reduced to 402 KBSecond, the Rotate and Flip feature allows you to rotate and flip images in bulk. You can, for example, straighten, rotate and flip more than one image at once.
The Straighten button automatically detects the subject and tries to straighten the shot, if necessary.
The rotate and flip buttons are trigger switches, and the images that you select are affected when you save them.
Let’s compare the images, one by one:
NormalRotatedFlippedFlipped and RotatedAs for the image clipper, the result is best when you choose a picture that has a clear subject, such as a picture of an object or a person.
In this case, the subject (an old vintage laptop running Windows 95) has been chosen here, and you can either copy the clipped image or save it. The result is:
Fourth, you can add a watermark to an image using either text or a smaller image, such as your name or your logo. You can also repeat the watermark across the whole image.
You can edit the watermark settings in the Info to show screen. You can select either an image or a text. You can customize the font, the color, the size, and the transparency if you want to show text. Else, you can resize the image and change its transparency to give it a more branded look.
In the Repeat screen, you can manipulate with the watermark by either letting it repeat across the whole image, or by adjusting its direction if it’s not repeated.
Once done, you can save the image as a copy or over the original. After that, you can see the new image with the watermark applied.
The fifth tool that Gallery Assistant provides is the Compare Images feature, where you can compare between two, three, or four images. To achieve the best results, you can choose pictures that look identical, but differ in small or large details, as long as both of them are the same subject.
Sixth, you can save images to a single PDF file.
In the hamburger menu, you can change the page size (A3, A4, or Letter), the layout (Portrait or Landscape), and the image quality (Original, Medium, or Low). You can either save the PDF or share it to someone. The only issue is that the banding in the original images that we’ve used is visible.
Finally, you can print the images. Not only that, but you can also print video thumbnails!
After that, the resultant PDF is saved at the folder that you choose.
Again, the banding issues are here.
While we are very excited to have this app handy, this version of the application has room for improvements. Once the global rollout of the final version starts, we’ll inform you.
Image by drobotdean on Freepik
#Android #Android14 #Android15 #Android16 #AndroidB #AndroidBaklava #AndroidU #AndroidV #news #oneUi #OneUI6 #OneUI60 #OneUI61 #OneUI611 #OneUI70 #OneUI80 #Samsung #smartphone #Tech #Technology #update
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Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided – Fortune
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI. courtesy of OthersideAISomething big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided
By Matt Shumer, February 11, 2026, 9:22 AM ET
Matt Shumer is the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, an applied AI company building the most advanced autocomplete tools in the world, powered by large-scale AI systems like GPT-3. OthersideAI is the company behind HyperWrite, the leading AI autocomplete Chrome extension for consumers. Previously, while in high school, Matt founded Visos, a startup developing next-generation Virtual Reality software designed for medical use, and FURI, a company aiming to disrupt the sporting goods industry by creating high-performance products and selling them for fair prices.
Think back to February 2020.
A few people were talking about a virus spreading overseas. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t. I keep giving them the polite, cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, and a few others.
Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.
But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.
I know this is real because it happened to me first
Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: we’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.
For years, AI had been improving steadily. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. This year, something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.
I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.
I’ve always been early to adopt AI tools. But the last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.
The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in 10 years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. The market was spooked enough this month that it wiped out $1 trillion worth of software value in just a week. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I see more disruption, and soon.
“But I tried AI and it wasn’t that good”
If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought “this makes stuff up” or “this isn’t that impressive”, you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.
The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.
Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what’s coming.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Think about what that means for your work.
What this means for your job
I’m going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.
Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.
I think the honest answer is that nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. If your job happens on a screen (if the core of what you do is reading, writing, analyzing, deciding, communicating through a keyboard) then AI is coming for significant parts of it. The timeline isn’t “someday.” It’s already started.
Eventually, robots will handle physical work too. They’re not quite there yet. But “not quite there yet” in AI terms has a way of becoming “here” faster than anyone expects.
What you should actually do
I’m not writing this to make you feel helpless. I’m writing this because I think the single biggest advantage you can have right now is simply being early. Early to understand it. Early to use it. Early to adapt.
Editor’s Note: Read more online. This is a general AI-supportive post by Matt. And there are many others similar “heads up” posts about AI right now. Keep an eye out for further posts on the AI changes coming. Whatever your views, I recommend keeping up with AI over your own work, or job, society changes, regulations, world impacts, and more. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune
Tags: AI, AI Future, artificial intelligence, Big Changes, Fortune, Heads Up, Jobs Changing, Matt Shumer, Newer Models, OthersideAI, Rapid Developments in AI, Social Impacts, Technology
#AI #AIFuture #artificialIntelligence #BigChanges #Fortune #HeadsUp #JobsChanging #MattShumer #NewerModels #OthersideAI #RapidDevelopmentsInAI #SocialImpacts #Technology -
Filling The Gaps: The ’72MP, 4K Ultra HD’ Digital Scamera
This always happens to me: I had this urge (again) to try some circuit bending. This involves getting a cheap digital camera, taking it apart and poking some wires into the connectors on the sensor, which if done right can produce some lovely glitchy images, but if done wrong can wreck the camera, so it has to be a device that you don’t mind possibly losing.
The second-hand electrical discount store CEX (Computer Exchange) is an excellent source for cheap digicams. In addition to specific models, quite often they offer ‘generic’ digital cameras for just a few Euros, and whenever one of these appears on the website I am tempted to get it. The thing is, you don’t know what you’re going to get. It might be a no-name brand camera fit for the bin, or sometimes an absolute classic, like the mint condition Canon Powershot G5 that arrived for just 3€. The point being, although I always intend to get one of these cameras for circuit bending I always end up ‘falling in love’ with it, and not having the nerve to potentially destroy it.
Anyhow. Last weekend a 12MP ‘generic’ digital camera appeared on the CEX website for 10€. Normally, I would be reluctant to pay so much for a digicam, but this time I wanted some decent resolution and this seemed to fit the bill. When the package arrived, it was quite heavy, and I wondered if it might be a decent camera again, like something from the Canon Powershot range. Instead it was something even better; a ’72MP 4K Ultra HD’ Chinese made scamera.
It’s a real vlogging camera. See, it has a rotating screen and a cold shoe for the microphone (no input for it, though).I first noticed these appearing on reputable websites in Portugal like Worten and Fnac when I was looking for a decent resolution digital camera for myself a couple of years ago. At the time they were priced at well over 100€, although often as not were heavily discounted. It was obvious it was a scamera, though not as blatant as those 35mm ‘Cannon’ cameras that were around a while ago, cheap plastic fixed lens ‘SLRs’ with a lead weight in the bottom that made them heavier.
Advertised as a, ‘4K Digital Camera for Photography, 72MP Autofocus Vlogging Cameras for YouTube with 64GB SD Card and Battery, 18X Digital Zoom 2.8″ 270° Flip Screen Compact Travel Camera for Teens’, they would pop up in the ‘marketplace’ of these websites. When I can, I generally avoid the marketplace, since they’re often Chinese sites offloading tat at vastly inflated prices. And this was no different. It’s a terrible sounding description. That entry was from Amazon, where it’s on sale for $36, but I’m certainly not going to provide a link for it. No one deserves that.
That toggle switch does nothing apart from reduce the resolution even further.In the hand the ’72M MEGA PIXELS’ scamera feels ‘plasticky’ and looks nothing like a quality camera should look. The camera can be turned on just by flipping the back open or, if the LCD screen is revealed, with an on/off button on the top. Incidentally, the red circled button is not the power button, that’s to record video. The shutter button is the big button on the top front, with the ‘zoom’ toggle. That does nothing, apart from digitally zoom the image. The ‘welcome’ screen is the tackiest opening screen I’ve ever seen, and the switch off screen is the same (‘bye bye’). The scamera beeps and chirps with a cheap-sounding tune, and the shutter sound is hopelessly synthetic.
Look at the built-in flash. It’s not got one flash symbol, but three. That flash must have the power of a thousand suns.Unfortunately, this 72MP camera doesn’t have interchangeable lenses. Or nearly any lens at all.The lens is amazing, and not in a good way. Described as, ‘5-axis stabilizer, 5K ultra HD, 3.95mm f1.8’, this lens looks like it’s a simple lens that projects straight onto a small sensor, like you’d get on a toy camera. Which I’m pretty sure it is. Although it says 5K on the lens, on the body the video resolution is described as 4K. I’ve not tested the video, or the sound quality, but I’m sure that it’s not either, at least not without a whole package of electronic jiggery-pokery. Which brings me to the claim of 72MP resolution. Is it? I suspect not.
Photograph of a garden globe light at the highest resolution of 72MP.If you take a typical 72MP image, the file size is 9856×7,392, or 72,855,552 pixels. But when you zoom in to that image it’s full of artifacts, so there’s certainly something going on there. I took a full frame image at 72MP, and a second at the lowest resolution offered by the scamera of 8MP. I zoomed each image to roughly the same size, and compared them. At 8MP, the zoomed image is ‘sharp-ish’, with details in the plaster and glass pieces in the globe. It’s still full of ‘rubbish’, mind you. At 72MP, which from a true 72MP you would expect to be filled with detail, it’s a mess. I suspect there’s been a lot of ‘upsampling’ going on here, where the software in the scamera interpolates and creates new pixels based on existing ones. This adds more pixels to make a much larger image but does not add any further resolution. So by my rough reckoning, this is at best an 8MP sensor. Truly, a scamera.
Photograph of the globe at 8MP resolution. The image was enlarged to show detail. This image is quite sharp.When the 72MP image is enlarged to the same magnification, clearly there is the loss of a lot of information.I took the scamera out and about during a trip to Oiã on a lovely sunny day, and here are the results. The images here have been resized to 1366 pixels at the longest edge, so there’s no 72MP here (not that there ever was, anyhow). The colours came out quite delightfully, actually, and I really liked how it appeared. I was very confused with the one image of the water tower, mind. This was taken in daytime but it looks like night. I did actually try to check out the infrared response of the scamera, and there was a horrible ‘hot spot’ in the middle of the image, so this may well be light reflecting in the lens.
An image of my favourite trees and well. Taken at 72MP resolution with a 720nm infrared filter.In conclusion, I finally got my hands on the 72MP digital scamera, a device I had been interested in learning about for a while. At 10€, it was still overpriced, and the scamera is truly a horrendous beast with absolutely zero appeal. Will I use it for circuit bending? Well, actually, although I was reluctant at first to do this, now I’m thinking that it might be a worthy contender. One of these days, I’m going to open it up, just to see what it’s like inside, and we’ll go from there.
If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow my WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline on Mastodon.
#cameraslscams #circuitbending #digicam #experimental #glitch #infrared #lofi2 #retro #scamera #toycamera #trashcam #upsampling
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A Deep Dive into OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its Plugins
ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, is known for its ability to produce complex and eloquent texts. However, despite this performance, the generated texts can sometimes be incorrect or misleading in content. The chatbot’s processing is based on the probability distribution of words, without any real knowledge or understanding of the content. Its main function is limited to writing.
Since the introduction of ChatGPT, there has been a demand for plugins and extensions that could make the bot more versatile. For example, a connection to a computer algebra system like Wolfram Alpha could fix the occasional weaknesses in mathematical calculations. Furthermore, additional plugins could expand the application scope of ChatGPT, enabling it to take on tasks such as reserving a table in a restaurant.
In March 2023, OpenAI introduced plugins for its chatbot that cover exactly these functions. This article will introduce some useful plugins and explain how to use these extensions.
Plugins
The number of extensions available for ChatGPT is growing rapidly. As of mid-July 2023, there were already more than 700 such plugins. It appears that many service providers are interested in linking their websites to the chatbot, aiming to establish their presence early on this new platform. This interest could also be fueled by the ongoing enthusiasm surrounding language models and plugins.
At the present time, however, the plugins are notable for a series of initial difficulties and an interface concept that still needs optimization. Appropriately, OpenAI labels them as beta features that need to be activated first. To activate these, users need to go to the “Beta features” section of the settings and toggle the switch for “Plugins”.
However, this does not mean that users can immediately start using the plugins. In fact, OpenAI makes accessing the extensions somewhat complicated. They are initially only available for the GPT-4 language model, the use of which OpenAI limits to 25 responses per three hours. If users want to interact with GPT-4, they need to make a choice: “Default” (the bare language model) or “with Plugins”. The additional option of a connection with Bing has been deactivated by OpenAI, as users were able to bypass the paywalls of news sites via this route.
The third option is to use GPT-4 in combination with OpenAI’s Python generator “Code Interpreter”. However, this must be activated in the settings and does not work with external plugins.
To test the plugins and the code interpreter, the respective functions must first be activated in the settings. Once you have chosen ChatGPT with GPT-4 and plugins, an additional dropdown menu appears with potentially already installed extensions and a link to the plugin store. Before you can use the individual plugins, you must install them. Clicking on “Plugin Store” opens a window with the available extensions.
This store displays a maximum of eight plugins per page. Those who want a complete overview have to scroll through many pages. The plugin store also displays a selection of the 15 most popular extensions and searches their short descriptions in full text. However, the short descriptions often do not provide detailed information about what the plugin does exactly, with which data or additions it works, or who created it.
In view of the limited user interface of the plugin store, users can use alternative platforms like pugin.ai or whatplugin.ai for information. These sites provide thematically sorted directories and provide more information than the plugin store of OpenAI.
The description pages for individual plugins at whatplug-in.ai provide detailed information about the purpose of the extension and its application. However, these texts come from ChatGPT, so users should consider this information with caution. pugin.ai offers its own ChatGPT plugin. After installing this extension, users can ask ChatGPT directly for plugins for specific use cases. However, it appears that neither these sites nor OpenAI itself provide detailed information about the originators of the plugins or check their potential risks.
Getting Started with Plugins
To employ the tools at your disposal, the next course of action is to hit the ‘activate’ button for those installed extensions. Navigate through the handy drop-down menu I mentioned earlier, and put a checkmark next to your chosen plug-in. One quirk of ChatGPT you’ll need to keep in mind – it has a cap on how many plugins you can have up and running simultaneously: a maximum of three. This self-imposed limit ostensibly makes it easier for ChatGPT to decide which one to call upon in a given context. Once the plugin feature has been toggled on, your weapon of choice selected, and plugins activated, you’re all set to dive in.
Now, here’s the thing. ChatGPT operates like an autonomous agent in this world. It determines on its own whether to utilize a plugin or to rely on its inherent knowledge to generate a response. For instance, a basic math or science question will usually be answered sans plugin. However, you, as the user, can give the model a gentle nudge towards using a plugin – all you have to do is ask it explicitly.
The plugin marketplace is a vibrant ecosystem brimming with a variety of extensions. ChatGPT plugins typically do a bang-up job when given a clearly defined task, like whipping up a Spotify playlist. The PlaylistAI, for instance, can link up with the user’s Spotify account and conjure up a personalized playlist. Cool, right? Yet, Spotify’s own features designed for this purpose, along with other introduced tools, go far beyond this. If you’ve ever dabbled with the AI image generator, Midjourney, you’ll find the Photorealistic plugin to be a handy aide.
But what if there are hiccups in the communication between ChatGPT and the plugin, or the results are less than satisfactory? Fear not, for taking a peek into the data traffic might hold the solution. The NewsPilot plugin, for example, didn’t produce meticulously curated overviews, potentially due to our request being rather simplistically converted into a single keyword.
The savvier users among us swear by the Prompt Perfect extension for refining their prompts. And here’s a pro tip: if a plugin isn’t playing ball, you can at least verify how ChatGPT interpreted your input and passed it along to the plugin.
Fact-Checking Against Fabrications
The Wolfram-Alpha platform is a great supplement to ChatGPT. It serves as a repository of centuries of knowledge and development, grounded in a well-curated database and comprehensive rule system. It spans everything from elementary to advanced formulas to complex algorithms that pull from a wealth of knowledge across a myriad of subjects, including math, physics, chemistry, socioeconomics, geology, biology, or history. You can retrieve facts or perform calculations traditionally through a sort of programming language known as Wolfram Language, or through language instructions in the form of bullet points or simple sentences. Recently, you can also engage in a dialogue via the ChatGPT plugin.
For instance, Wolfram Alpha can calculate how much your monthly loan payments would be, or the shortest travel route if you plan to visit a selection of European cities. In doing so, Wolfram Alpha collates all the information that aids understanding: formulas, key properties of the chemical element, examples of other elements for comparison, and so forth. It determines the air travel route using a solution algorithm for the Travelling Salesman Problem and even produces neat tables and visualizations to illustrate relationships.
In this context, the ChatGPT plugin serves merely as a mediator, translating the user’s everyday language queries into Wolfram-Alpha-Language and embellishing the results received from Wolfram Alpha with a bit of explanatory text. What’s nifty about the ChatGPT interface is that it also displays the generated Wolfram prompt. This not only allows you to verify if the query was correctly understood and translated, but you also get to learn Wolfram Language on the fly. If you’d like, you can get ChatGPT to help interpret the graphics. It did a fair job explaining simple debt repayment diagrams and decay processes.
Wolfram Alpha is the go-to destination for all kinds of calculations and conversions. This gives the chatbot access to a vast collection of natural, social, and engineering scientific facts and formulas. However, you have to really coax this Wolfram-Alpha knowledge out of the chatbot, through pointed questioning and prodding. We mostly had to explicitly ask for tables and diagrams. The thing is, if you’re not aware of the possibilities, you might not know what to ask for, or might not even bother. In contrast, Wolfram’s own web interface presented all relevant information in a well-structured manner, complete with tables, formulas, and diagrams.
Also, it’s worth noting that Wolfram Alpha might not always be up-to-date in every area, and hence may not necessarily be superior to ChatGPT. Thus, it’s best to turn to Wikipedia and verify the information provided there. This ensures you get current data, while ChatGPT/Wolfram Alpha might take a while to research, yet still fall short of knowing about the latest high towers. By the way, there’s now a plugin that directly queries Wikipedia, although its origin is a mystery.
Plunging into Code and Data
It seems like yesterday when data scientists was the profession of the century, only to become obsolete in a few years. At least that’s the chant of the devout ChatGPT disciples ever since OpenAI unveiled the Python-spawning plugin, the Code Interpreter. Flip it on in the ‘Settings’, pick it from the aforementioned dropdown menu, and this inbuilt no-code playground translates user inquiries into Python code, setting its sights primarily on data analysis and visualization.
ChatGPT is a pro at loading tables or transmuting clipboard data into tables in the text box. To swiftly get a handle on things, you can request the bot for a concise rundown of the embedded information, then let it pitch suitable diagrams. When you pick one of these propositions or charge the bot with a concept of your own, the Code Interpreter springs to life: ChatGPT transmutes the user guidelines into Python code, spewing out both this code and the matching graphic as a response.
The OpenAI addon, Code Interpreter, morphs wishes into Python scripts. For instance, ChatGPT uses this to visually represent data but in our tests, it pooled some categories a tad generously and inconsistently implemented alterations.
An interface that’s novice-friendly and stripped down to the bare bones, like the one fashioned in the data journalism tool Datawrapper, propels you ahead more swiftly. Another considerable hitch with OpenAI’s Code Interpreter is that due to security precautions, the Python environment, exiled to its own sandbox, cannot pull in libraries, which is a lifeline for developers. This roadblock ultimately foiled our attempt to tease out a flashy map representation from the duo.
Owing to the Code Interpreter being confined to a sandbox and its inability to load libraries, the scope for creativity remains confined.
For a holistic environment that can also summon (map) libraries, Noteable taps into ChatGPT. This visualization gizmo churns out Python notebooks post-free registration and also shines in comprehensive data analyses and machine learning endeavors. As with Wolfram Alpha, ChatGPT dons the role of a translator, converting human directives into API commands for the external service. Here as well, you nab a preliminary glimpse with ChatGPT, but the visualization proposals within the Noteable platform are more enticing and practical, given their immediate graphic appearance.
Office Management Tools
There are various plugins available that can summarise PDFs and other document types, and answer specific questions about the content. Initial experiments involving a study on AI benchmarks indicated that AI PDF performed better than ChatWithPDF. The latter included an incorrect figure in its summary. The text compressors do not seem to understand the structure and layout of the documents well. A query about the authors, which are typically mentioned on the first page, initially resulted in no response and was only answered by AI PDF when we wanted to know the title of the study. All plugins reference the page number and do not interact with the PDF due to a lack of a user interface. As fact-checking is always necessary, the absence of a simple, interactive view similar to the one offered by the online service ChatPDF is notable.
In conjunction with the automation service Zapier, the chatbot becomes a diligent personal assistant, initiating various administrative and communication workflows at human command. Zapier itself is a hub that connects various services from Gmail and Google Calendar to multiple social media accounts. For this, users must grant the service access to their accounts. ChatGPT acts as an additional interface, interpreting the user’s voice commands and creating corresponding automation scripts (Zaps) in Zapier or calling up existing ones. This can save manual effort, but can also lead to serious mistakes if not all details are meticulously checked. Fortunately, Zapier has built in a verification and confirmation step.
Conclusion
It is becoming increasingly clear that a smooth-talking chatbot is not a universal solution. Facts and relationships that have been codified need to be fed in from external sources, which is where plugins come in. The plugin from Wolfram Alpha is particularly noteworthy. However, the results cannot be trusted blindly. Even though external platforms supply the facts, the chatbot’s interpretation of the instructions can lead to errors and inaccuracies because it does not fully understand the subject matter.
There are also fundamental concerns: On the one hand, the plugin interface could be abused as an entry point for malware and spyware, especially since OpenAI does not verify their integrity. On the other hand, ChatGPT could develop into a gatekeeper for the Internet, which is undesirable for several reasons: competition suffers, and a purely dialogue-based user interface is slow and inefficient. With its rapidly built plugin platform, OpenAI ignores decades of achievements in UX design. While the plugin extensions can be experimented with, they are not yet suitable for productive use.
Sources:
https://openai.com/waitlist/plugins
https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/introduction
#AICapabilities #AIPersonalAssistant #Automation #chatGPT #CodeInterpreter #DataAnalysis #dataScience #OpenAI #PlugIns #PythonCode #WolframAlpha #Zapier
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Mini Listening Post
One of the most fascinating pieces of electronic artwork I’ve seen is Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s Listening Post when it was on display at the Science Museum, London.
Designed in the early 2000s it was on display from around 2008 for a number of years, but unfortunately it has been packed away in storage amongst the museum’s collections now for some time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzfnndd9fCk
You can read about it on the following links:
- https://www.earstudio.com/projects/project-page/listening-post
- https://archive.org/details/markhansenbenrub1624hans
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listening_Post_(artwork)
- https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8091687/listening-post
The original has 3 PCs, a Mac and 231 (11 rows of 21) embedded modules each with a four-line text display. As well as the visuals there is a complex surround audio experience of sound and synthesized speech coming out of 10 or more speakers. Each embedded module also has a clicking relay which can create the impression of an older flip display working.
The videos that can be found online really don’t do it justice. There is nothing quite like sitting in front of it with the sound coming at you from all sides.
By the way, it is called Listening Post as it taps into live forums and IRC and pulls out text for the display. It is literally showing a snapshot of the global conversations as they happen – swearing and all. In fact, I recall a “parental controls” warning prior to going into the display, to that effect.
I’ve often wondered if a small part of it could be reproduced in a simpler form, so have started a series of blog posts listing some experiments working towards that idea.
The original is pretty amazing and a serious implementation, with a huge does of imagination and creativity. It would take an awful lot of effort to get anywhere close to something similar, so I’m not aiming for anything even close to that. But I’m going to keep fiddling around on and off to see if I can get something a lot more limited going at a smaller scale that might at least be considered to be in the spirit of the original somehow.
Warning! I strongly recommend using old or second hand equipment for your experiments. I am not responsible for any damage to expensive instruments!
If you are new to microcontrollers, see the Getting Started pages.
The Display Modules
My starting point is my Waveshare Zero Multi Display PCB Design and Expander Board.
The original has 231 small embedded modules, each with a Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) that displays the text. There are two modes for the text: a four-line smaller display, and a large character scrolling display. Each of these options seems to be a function of the type of display in use, which I believe to be a VFD 420.
There is a data sheet and programmers guide for the VFD 420 here:
The VFD 420’s normal display mode looks like this:
The programmers guide describes the “big character” mode as follows:
“VFD-420’s “Big-character” mode can generate full-screen-height numbers and letters (uppercase only)—up to four letters/digits per screen. Big-mode symbols—consisting of dot/decimal point (.), hyphen/minus sign (-), colon (:) and space—take up one-half the width of other “big” characters.”
It does seem possible to buy similar displays today, but what I have seen so far are very, very expensive! I did temporarily wonder about the 4-line version of the HD44780 20×2 character displays. I might still come back to that at some point.
But for now, the trick for me is to attempt to reproduce the look and feel of the VFD big character display with my ST7789 SPI displays used with my Waveshare Zero Multi Display.
I spent a bit of time studying various videos of the Listening Post in action and started to sketch out the main characters that I’d require to rebuild the big character font.
It looks like the originals have a 4×4 matrix of small characters per big character. And each small character is a 8×5 grid and of course there are 20 of these for each of the four lines of the display.
I decided I could probably get away with 10 characters in total.
The Code
I’ve opted for a class that implements the “large text LCD” that effectively drives the TFT display. There are functions for each of the 10 character patterns shown above. Each of these uses the primitives from the Adafruit GFX library to construct the 10 glyphs using filled rectangles or sequences of lines. For example:
// "bottom left triangle"
void CLCD2004::botLTri (uint16_t x, uint16_t y, uint16_t colour) {
uint16_t xlen = 0;
for (int i=1; i<CHAR_H; i++) {
m_pdisplay->drawFastHLine(1+x*CHAR_W, i+y*CHAR_H, xlen/10, colour);
xlen = xlen + (CHAR_W*10-1)/CHAR_H;
}
}From there, I’ve built a set of functions that look up which characters are required for each bt character and gets them on the display one row at a time.
void CLCD2004::printbigchar (char c, uint16_t x, uint16_t colour) {
c = c - LCD2004FONT_START;
printglyph (lcd2004font[c][0], x*BIGCHAR_X, 0, colour);
printglyph (lcd2004font[c][1], x*BIGCHAR_X, 1, colour);
printglyph (lcd2004font[c][2], x*BIGCHAR_X, 2, colour);
printglyph (lcd2004font[c][3], x*BIGCHAR_X, 3, colour);
}
void CLCD2004::printglyph (uint16_t g, uint16_t x, uint16_t y, uint16_t colour) {
if (g & 0xF000) {
printchar('0' + (g>>12 & 0xF), x, y, colour);
}
if (g & 0x0F00) {
printchar('0' + (g>>8 & 0xF), x+1, y, colour);
}
if (g & 0x00F0) {
printchar('0' + (g>>4 & 0xF), x+2, y, colour);
}
if (g & 0x000F) {
printchar('0' + (g & 0xF), x+3, y, colour);
}
}
void CLCD2004::printchar (char c, uint16_t x, uint16_t y, uint16_t colour) {
switch (c) {
... case '0' to '5' ...
case '6':
botLTri(x, y, colour);
break;
... case '7' to '9' ...
}
}There is a font definition that has each block of four characters stored as a 32-bit value for all ASCII characters from 0 through to Z.
Everywhere a 6 occurs in the table, that will trigger the above botLTri() function to draw a “bottom, left, triangle”.
const uint16_t lcd2004font[LCD2004FONT_SIZE][4] = {
{0x7446,0x1001,0x1001,0x9558}, // 0
{0x0720,0x0320,0x0320,0x0110}, // 1
{0x7446,0x0078,0x0780,0x7111}, // 2
...
{0x0760,0x7896,0x1441,0x1001}, // A
{0x1446,0x1558,0x1446,0x1558}, // B
{0x7446,0x1000,0x1000,0x9558}, // C
...
{0x4441,0x0078,0x7800,0x1555}, // Z
};Finally I can now wrap this all up in a general print routine.
void CLCD2004::print (char *c) {
uint16_t xc = 0;
while ((c[xc] != 0) && (xc < MAX_BIGCHAR_X)) {
printbigchar (' ', xc, m_bg);
printbigchar (c[xc], xc, m_fg);
xc++;
}
}Using this class is now a case of setting up the TFT display and LCD objects for each screen.
SPIClass MySPI(FSPI);
Adafruit_ST7735 tft1 = Adafruit_ST7735(&MySPI, TFT_CS1, TFT_DC, TFT_RST);
CLCD2004 lcd((Adafruit_ST77xx*)&tft1, ST_WHITE, ST_BLACK);
void setup() {
MySPI.begin(SPI_SCLK, SPI_MISO, SPI_MOSI, SPI_SS);
tft1.initR(TFT_TYPE);
tft1.setSPISpeed(SPI_SPEED);
tft1.setRotation(3);
tft1.fillScreen(ST_BLACK);
}
void loop() {
lcd.setColour(ST_CYAN, ST_BLACK);
lcd.printclr();
lcd.print("ABCD");
}To create the scrolling is a bit more complex. To do that I decided to add the following:
- A “scrolled” parameter to the display.
- Use a GFX canvas to maintain a pixel bitmap in memory and write to that.
- Add an update() function to draw the bitmap over to the display.
- Expand the print functions to accept a longer string that is stored in a buffer ready to be printed to the canvas.
- Add a scroll function that determines where in the string the updating/printing starts.
There were a few things I had to sort out to get this working.
- The writing of an RGB bitmap to the display was really slow. This is because the provided function has additional SPI writes per pixel that could actually be done just one. This resulting in my writing my own more optimised version of drawRGBBitmap.
- It turns out that setting the SPI speed has to be performed after the initialisation of the display object (i.e. call setSPISpeed() after calling initR()).
- Getting the correct “windowing” to allow the scrolling effect was quite tricky.
- As the display shows four big characters, I always print five on the canvas and let the scroll work, via the windowing, for a whole character. Then a new set of five characters gets printed, and the scroll position resets again.
- The fastest supported SPI speed for the ESP32S3 is 80MHz and it often works at that speed. But occasionally one of the displays will be a bit glitchy, so a slower speed is advisable. I’ve been using 60MHz. I don’t know if that translates to a legitimate SPI speed or not, so the driver may be rounding that to something more sensible – I don’t know!
The basic operation is now:
Set up SPI, TFT and the LCD.
Print a character string to the LCD.
Calling update() will put the first part of the string on the display.
Calling scroll() will shift it as required.The scroll() function has an option to wrap back to the first character in the string if required.
The Results so far
It has taken a bit of tweaking but I believe I can get useful performance out of a single ESP32S3 driving eight SPI displays.
The original has many display modes, so I went with starting to model one of the simpler modes – it searches for the phrase “I am” and then displays what follows. This mode can be seen in action in the video at the end of this post.
For now, to show the display as potential, I’m just printing the two words “I AM”. This video shows the hard-coded “I AM” display in action with a randomised start time and scroll speed for each display.
https://makertube.net/w/hnxY9deqZm1CWCufjS6A4Z
Closing Thoughts
As I say, the original has many display modes, but there is something quite hypnotic about the “I AM” mode that I like. It would be nice to find a way to hook this up to Mastodon searching for uses of the phrase.
So this is starting small, but getting the font in an acceptable format is quite a key part of this project doing anything useful for me. I think this is a really useful start.
Kevin
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Sweating to shivering: Study finds rapid swings in temperature have increased
Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.
By Christina Kelso | The New York Times
| April 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m."A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.
"Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.
"The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said #WeiZhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.
" 'The impact could really be cascading on a different level,' he said.
"The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural #environments, including destruction of #crops, harm to #ecosystems and strains on #PowerInfrastructure. And #LowIncomeCountries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.
"The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2023 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60% of regions they surveyed.
"The largest increases in frequency were observed in South America, West Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Some areas, including the polar regions, showed different behavior and experienced fewer events.
"While the climate mechanisms driving changes to these temperature-flip events are not yet fully understood, Zhang said, there is a significant trend showing that these events are becoming more frequent, stronger and quicker in many areas of the globe."
Read more:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/04/26/utah-state-university-study-finds/#ClimateChange #TemperatureExtremes #WeatherWeirding #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeWeather #ClimateDiary #ClimateChangeWeatherWheel
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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@doriane After 3 years on KaiOS with a Gigaset GL7, my feedback is detailed here https://www.reddit.com/r/KaiOS/comments/yv4fbp/comment/j6aep43/
I liked: No instagram nor toxic apps. Real relief. I also ended up making some custom web-based apps to satisfy some very precise needs. Battery life.
I didn’t like: KaiOS is unmaintained and very cheep the phone itself was as well.Now I run Android on a TTfone TT970. I am happy!
I like : I can run Nextcloud which is very cool. I use it 70% music listening 20% calls and texting 10% other random stuff. I feel honestly detoxicated (at least phonewise). The hardware is ok/good and I like the flip screen. I still use my custom-made web apps through the web browser. That makes me super happy!
I don’t like : There is a default launcher designed for old persons, It is both cool and very frustrating, because the app order can’t be changed: my music app requires 3 screen changes! I also don’t like the text input / keyboard behavior because it doesn’t have any memory, so I always need to switch to T9 for *every time* I enter a text, and it makes me kookoo.I also posted that, maybe that can help. https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/comments/1hotk13/we_need_a_new_dumb_phone_os/
#dumbphone #nextcloud #kaios -
Sweating to shivering: Study finds rapid swings in temperature have increased
Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.
By Christina Kelso | The New York Times
| April 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m."A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.
"Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.
"The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said #WeiZhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.
" 'The impact could really be cascading on a different level,' he said.
"The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural #environments, including destruction of #crops, harm to #ecosystems and strains on #PowerInfrastructure. And #LowIncomeCountries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.
"The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2023 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60% of regions they surveyed.
"The largest increases in frequency were observed in South America, West Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Some areas, including the polar regions, showed different behavior and experienced fewer events.
"While the climate mechanisms driving changes to these temperature-flip events are not yet fully understood, Zhang said, there is a significant trend showing that these events are becoming more frequent, stronger and quicker in many areas of the globe."
Read more:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/04/26/utah-state-university-study-finds/#ClimateChange #TemperatureExtremes #WeatherWeirding #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeWeather #ClimateDiary #ClimateChangeWeatherWheel
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Sweating to shivering: Study finds rapid swings in temperature have increased
Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.
By Christina Kelso | The New York Times
| April 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m."A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.
"Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.
"The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said #WeiZhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.
" 'The impact could really be cascading on a different level,' he said.
"The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural #environments, including destruction of #crops, harm to #ecosystems and strains on #PowerInfrastructure. And #LowIncomeCountries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.
"The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2023 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60% of regions they surveyed.
"The largest increases in frequency were observed in South America, West Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Some areas, including the polar regions, showed different behavior and experienced fewer events.
"While the climate mechanisms driving changes to these temperature-flip events are not yet fully understood, Zhang said, there is a significant trend showing that these events are becoming more frequent, stronger and quicker in many areas of the globe."
Read more:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/04/26/utah-state-university-study-finds/#ClimateChange #TemperatureExtremes #WeatherWeirding #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeWeather #ClimateDiary #ClimateChangeWeatherWheel
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Sweating to shivering: Study finds rapid swings in temperature have increased
Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.
By Christina Kelso | The New York Times
| April 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m."A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.
"Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.
"The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said #WeiZhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.
" 'The impact could really be cascading on a different level,' he said.
"The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural #environments, including destruction of #crops, harm to #ecosystems and strains on #PowerInfrastructure. And #LowIncomeCountries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.
"The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2023 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60% of regions they surveyed.
"The largest increases in frequency were observed in South America, West Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Some areas, including the polar regions, showed different behavior and experienced fewer events.
"While the climate mechanisms driving changes to these temperature-flip events are not yet fully understood, Zhang said, there is a significant trend showing that these events are becoming more frequent, stronger and quicker in many areas of the globe."
Read more:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/04/26/utah-state-university-study-finds/#ClimateChange #TemperatureExtremes #WeatherWeirding #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeWeather #ClimateDiary #ClimateChangeWeatherWheel
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Sweating to shivering: Study finds rapid swings in temperature have increased
Flips between warm temperatures to cold and vice versa have become quicker, more frequent and more intense in recent decades, a new study shows.
By Christina Kelso | The New York Times
| April 26, 2025, 8:00 a.m."A September heat wave switching into a snowstorm over one day in the Rocky Mountains. Winter snowfall suddenly melting and saturating fields of dormant crops, before refreezing and encasing them in damaging ice. Early spring warmth prompting plants to blossom followed by a cold snap that freezes and drops their petals.
"Rapid temperature change events like these have increased in frequency and intensity over recent decades, a new study found.
"The transition periods for these abrupt temperature shifts have also shortened, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
"Because the quick changes in temperature give communities and ecosystems little chance to respond, they may pose greater challenges than heat waves or cold snaps alone, said #WeiZhang, an assistant professor of climate science at Utah State University and one of the lead authors of the study.
" 'The impact could really be cascading on a different level,' he said.
"The researchers warned these temperature flips could have damaging effects on people and natural #environments, including destruction of #crops, harm to #ecosystems and strains on #PowerInfrastructure. And #LowIncomeCountries, where there is less access to weather forecasting and infrastructure is less resilient, are more vulnerable.
"The researchers examined temperature data from 1961 to 2023 to identify global patterns in sudden weather shifts, where temperatures in an area either jumped from cold temperatures to warm or plunged from warm to cold within five days. They found that instances of these flips increased in more than 60% of regions they surveyed.
"The largest increases in frequency were observed in South America, West Europe, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Some areas, including the polar regions, showed different behavior and experienced fewer events.
"While the climate mechanisms driving changes to these temperature-flip events are not yet fully understood, Zhang said, there is a significant trend showing that these events are becoming more frequent, stronger and quicker in many areas of the globe."
Read more:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/04/26/utah-state-university-study-finds/#ClimateChange #TemperatureExtremes #WeatherWeirding #ClimateCrisis #ExtremeWeather #ClimateDiary #ClimateChangeWeatherWheel
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City of Boston electronic poll books: they DO know what they’re doing!
Earlier this month, I wrote about the announcement from the City of Boston, Massachusetts that they are switching from paper to electronic poll books (KNOWiNK Poll Pads). I was worried about whether the city was prepared to handle the various ways the Poll Pads might fail. Otherwise, poll book failures on election day might prevent people people from voting or compromise the integrity of the elections.
Well, I’m please to report that from what I learned today at poll-worker training, my concerns were misplaced. Poll Pads have robust reliability measures, and the city has fallback plans in place which will allow people to vote, and only the right people to vote, even if the Poll Pads fail.
I do have a few remaining concerns, explained below. I also call out below one absolute banger feature of the Poll Pads which election workers and voters are going to love.
Why I’m no longer worried about people being unable to vote on election day
- Every Poll Pad has a complete copy of the city’s voter database stored locally on it, and it continues function even if the cellular network or the election department’s back-end server goes down.
- When multiple Poll Pads are in use at a precinct, they synchronize directly with each other in addition to synchronizing through the back-end server, so it’s not possible for someone to vote twice by checking in on two different Poll Pads, regardless of whether the back-end server is working. (It’s also not possible for people to vote twice because, as detailed below, although the Poll Pads are being used for check-in, a paper book is still being used for check-out.)
- The city has a robust plan in place, which I explain below, for how voting can continue at a precinct if the Poll Pads fail.
- Poll Pads are already in use in many localities and have been for years (Boston is a bit behind the curve in terms of election technology!), so they are stable, mature technology with most of the kinks worked out.
Boston’s plan for Poll Pad failures
Here a simplified explanation of how check-in and check-out at Boston precincts will work when the Poll Pads are working properly:
- A voter gives their name and address to an election worker at the check-in table.
- The election worker looks up the voter on the Poll Pad and confirms that they are eligible to vote.
- The Poll Pad prints out a voting receipt, and the election worker gives the receipt and a ballot to the voter.
- The voter takes the receipt and ballot to a booth and fills in their ballot.
- The voter takes the receipt and filled-in ballot to the check-out table and hands the receipt to an election worker stationed there.
- The election worker looks up the voter in a paper poll book, identical to the poll books that were in use before Poll Pads, marks them off as having voted, and puts the receipt into an envelope which is sealed and sent back to the election department at the end of the day.
- The voters feeds their vote into the tabulator, takes an “I Voted!” sticker, and goes on their merry way.
Here’s how the process changes if for any reason the Poll Pad stops being able to check in voters and can’t be fixed quickly:
- First and foremost, the precinct warden (head election worker) calls the election department and notifies them that the Poll Pad is malfunctioning so they can send someone out with a replacement as soon as possible. In the meantime…
- The paper poll book is moved from the check-out table to the check-in table and becomes a check-in book, just as we used a paper check-in book before Poll Pads.
- The precinct clerk (second in command election worker) moves to the check-out table with the clerk’s book, which has pages in it specifically dedicated to logging voters who could not be checked in on the Poll Pad.
- When a voter checks in, the election worker writes their name, address, and year of birth on a sticky note which serves as their receipt.
- When the voter checks out, they are recorded by the clerk in the clerk’s book, and their sticky-note receipt is put in the receipt envelope.
- Once the Poll Pad is working again, the precinct switches back to the process described above.
- After the polls close I suspect the clerk is going to need some assistance from the election department filling out all the tallies in the clerk’s books; it’ll be a bit of a pain, but it won’t be impossible.
- The election department will need to do some extra work verifying the precinct’s results; again, it’ll be a pain, but not impossible.
This process is definitely slower than the exclusively paper process we used before Poll Pads. However, it allows everyone to vote eventually and preserves the integrity of the election. It certainly won’t be pretty if a precinct has to use this process in a presidential election, but everybody who gets in line before 8pm will eventually be able to vote.
Great Poll Pad feature: helping people find their polling places
Because every Poll Pad has the entire Boston voter database in it, we will be able to look up voters who accidentally show up at the wrong precinct and tell them quickly and definitively where they need to go to vote. Previously we had to either suggest that they look it up on their phone, or call the election department for them and ask the election department folks to look it up for us.
But wait, there’s more… After we look someone up on the Poll Pad and it tells us they’re at the wrong precinct and where they need to go to vote instead, the Poll Pad can print out driving, public transit, or walking directions to their correct precinct or text a link to their phone. This will make the voting experience much better for people who come to the wrong precinct (and believe me, there are quite a few of them at every precinct in every election!).
Concerns
Any election worker can data-mine the entire Boston voter database
Before Poll Pads, the election workers in each precinct had access to a poll book showing all the registered voters in that precinct, along with their addresses. I don’t think the poll-book had voters’ birth-dates in it, but I could be remembering wrong. This was a minor privacy issue: bored election workers in a slow year could page through the poll-book looking for people in it, but there wasn’t a lot of time to do that, there was only data for one precinct, and paging through a paper book is not an efficient way to look for people.
The privacy profile for the Poll Pads is extremely different. Any election worker sitting in front of a Poll Pad can instantaneously search the entire Boston voter database by name, address, or date of birth. This is creepy and I don’t feel good about it.
Switching everyone from address first to name first
Election workers have spent years and years educating voters that the first thing they should tell us when they walk up to the check-in table is their address. Most people who have voted in Boston more than a few times know the drill and approach the table ready to give us their address.
Now, however, we will be searching for people by name, not address. We’re going to have to retrain every single voter to give us their name first. I can’t even imagine how many times over the next six to eight elections I’m going to have to say, “Actually, I need your name first, please.” It’s definitely not something I’m looking forward to!
How people spell their names is suddenly important
And there’s another, related issue that makes me nervous. Election workers pretty quickly memorize the names of all the streets in their precinct. We can quickly flip to the right page in the paper poll book, then scan the book looking for the specific address and name given to us by the voter. We almost never have to ask them to spell their name, because just hearing it spoken is enough for the amazing human brain to be able to quickly scan a printed list of names and find the right name in the book. Now, however, we will be asking people to spell their names all the freakin’ time, because if we can’t spell at least the first few letters of their first and last names properly, we can’t search for them quickly in the Poll Pads. I imagine this means that for people with obviously spelled names, the Poll Pads will provide a faster check-in experience, but for others the experience will be slower than with the paper book. I hope on average things will move faster, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
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TD4 4-bit DIY CPU – Part 8
Now that I’ve shown I could support more ROM if required using a microcontroller (see Part 6) I can start to ponder how that might be possible.
- Part 1 – Introduction, Discussion and Analysis
- Part 2 – Building and Hardware
- Part 3 – Programming and Simple Programs
- Part 4 – Some hardware enhancements
- Part 5 – My own PCB version
- Part 6 – Replacing the ROM with a microcontroller
- Part 7 – Creating an Arduino “assembler” for the TD4
- Part 8 – Extending the address space to 5-bits and an Arduino ROM PCB
There are several other expansions to consider too. Other things I’m pondering are:
- Can I find a way to add the two registers together?
- Are there options to add another register?
- Is 4-bit data still enough?
- Could any extensions be added in a way that is backwards compatible with the existing instructions and behaviours?
And probably a few other odds and ends as I go back and reconsider the schematic as it stands, but they can wait for a future post.
TD4 Simulation
Before I get stuck into the updates, I thought it would be useful to be able to simulate the TD4 to allow for quick turn-around experiments.
I’ve used the “Digital” logic simulator which can be found here: https://github.com/hneemann/Digital
I could have build the simulator from basic logic gates and that would perhaps have been more useful in helping to understand how the design works. But I wanted something that would be easy to fiddle about with to test enhancements, so I build it using the actual 74xx logic chips instead. This doesn’t make for such a readable simulation, as I’ve had to go with actual pinouts for chips rather than logical groupings of signals. But it does map more closely onto the final hardware which is handy for thinking in actual chip-usage rather than abstract logic.
I’ve not bothered simulating the clock circuit, I’ve just wired in a clock source. I’ve also not added the ROM DIP switches, instead adding a ROM element and wiring it into the address and data lines. By right-clicking and viewing the attributes, it is possible to define a 16-byte ROM (4 address, 8 data lines) and edit the contents.
The ROM element takes a multiplexed source and produces a multiplexed output, so I use a splitter/mixer function to turn that into D0-D7 as shown above. Similarly the output of the 74HC161 acting as the program counter (PC) has A0-A3 mixed into a single ADDR bus line.
I’ve added outputs to the two registers to show their contents during execution. I’ve also added a DIP switch on the /RESET line to allow me to start and stop the simulation.
The video below shows it running the above ROM contents, which is the same demo program I used in Part 6 with the microcontroller ROM.
https://makertube.net/w/5njzGmYvqXiU3DLCMMtwqp
Now I have an easier way of experimenting, onto the enhancements.
Increasing the Address Space
The address space is currently implemented as follows:
- A 4-bit counter register based on a HC161 4-bit synchronous binary counter.
- A HC154 4 to 16 line decoder/multiplexer for DIP switch selection.
- A HC540 octal buffer/line driver to buffer (and invert) the data outputs.
The counter auto increments on each clock pulse, thus moving through the address space, but it can also be a destination for the adder, allowing absolute jumps to specific addresses, thus implementing a JMP instruction.
To increase the address space, there are a few considerations:
- With more than 4 bits how should JMPs work? They will have remain 4-bits unless the data width is increased.
- Each additional bit of address space will double the number of DIP switches required.
- The next size of binary counter above 4-bits is typically 8-bits.
One idea is to use the RCO pin of the 161. This is the “ripple carry out” and can be used to cascade counters for greater than 4-bit counting. As I understand things, RCO will be HIGH once all outputs are also HIGH, for a single clock pulse. This can be used to enable a following counter for that pulse. This is shown below (taken from the datasheet).
And this is the sample application, again from the datasheet, showing how it would work, with extensions on to additional stages.
A simple way to add an additional bit of address space might be to feed RCO into a flip-flop acting as a toggle in the configuration shown below.
This can then be used to select between two HC154 4 to 16 decoders. As I already have an unused flip flop as part of the HC74 used for the CARRY, this could be quite an appealing solution and in simulation it does appear to work.
There is one slight complication. As show above, A5 will toggle with A0-A3 = 1111 not as they change back to 0000. This is because the flip-flop toggles on the rising edge of the provided clock signal, which in this case is RCO from the 74HC161. Adding a NOT gate means that the rising edge happens as the 161’s RCO signal drops when it resets back to 0000.
Whilst this solves the sequencing problem it does have the unfortunately side effect that the RESET state means that A5 is 1 on power up. That too could be solved with another NOT gate if required, or simply hanging A5 off the /Q output of the flip-flop rather than the Q output.
Here is the additional wiring, in simulator form, to allow this to work.
Note the addition of A4 which now comes from the spare flip-flop /1Q output, and the linking of RCO via a NOT gate to the flip-flop 1CP clock input. The rest of flip-flop 1 is configured in toggle mode, with /1RD and /1SD both tied high (inactive) and 1D linked to /1Q for the feedback. The non-inverting output 1Q is not used.
Whilst this seems to require an additional logic gate (for the NOT) it turns out that there is a spare Schmidt trigger inverter on the 74HC14 that supports the clock circuit, so that is pretty convenient.
The ROM has also been reconfigured for 5 address inputs with the same 8 data bits, creating a 32 x 8 bit ROM.
There are a few issues with this though:
- JMP/JNC only work within the same half of the memory, so JMP 4 in the first 16 locations will jump to location address 0x04, but JMP 4 in the second 16 locations will jump to location address 0x14.
- A JMP 0 in the last location of each half will carry forward into the next half, as the counter ticks over at the same time as the load happens. So JMP 0 in address 0x0F will jump to address 0x10 and JMP 0 in address 0x1F will jump to address 0x00.
But if one can program around those constraints this is quite a simple solution.
An Alternative Solution
There is a neat solution to adding a 5th address bit here: https://xyama.sakura.ne.jp/hp/4bitCPU_TD4.html#memory
This uses the duplicate JMP/JNC instructions to encode a JMP2/JNC2 that results in the 5th address bit being set, this enabling a jump to the second half of the memory.
In order to create the additional address line, there is a second PC register added – i.e. a 5th HC161 counter. As far as I can see the operation is as follows:
- When the first PC register carries over, the second PC register counts up.
- As only the first output of the second PC register is used, as it counts that output will simply alternate between 0 and 1.
- The second PC register can take 1 as an input when the decoded instructions match JMP2 or JNC2 (D5 low, D6 and D7 high, with either D4 or CARRY), forcing A4 on when the first PC register is loaded with the 4-bit jump value, creating a JMP to the second half of the address space.
- There is an A4 and /A4 signal which alternatively enable the two address decoders for the ROM.
- This specific circuit uses four HC138 chips rather than two HC154, but the principle of operation is the same – generate one of 32 signals for the ROM from 5 bits of address line.
The modifications to support this are fairly simple and it is neat how it uses redundancy in the instruction set to work, but it does require an additional 74HC161 chip.
Combine the two?
If additional logic can be used to address the second PC in the second solution above, then I’m wondering if that could also be used to deliberately set or reset the flip-flop in the first solution too.
The key will be overriding the flip-flop state to preset A4 if the logic sequence for the spare JNC/JMP instructions turn up. If the /1SD input is active (LOW) then the output will be HIGH. If the /1RD input is active (LOW) then the output will be LOW.
Here is the additional instruction decoding logic – I’m using NAND gates as the NOTs here, so I can just use a single quad NAND gate chip.
So, the truth table for this is as follows:
D4D5D6D7/C/LDPCENA400111011011X0101111001111X00XX00X10XX10X10XX01X10This corresponds to D7+D6 and either D4 or CARRY and NOT D5 causing the ENA4 signal to be true thus implementing the second JNC and JMP instructions (b1100 and b1101).
Unfortunately, so far, I’ve not been able to figure out an option for driving the flip-flop where the logic pans out to correctly set A0-A3 and A4 to successfully load the PC + flip-flop as required by the new instruction, so I might have to leave that for now.
TD4 Arduino 5-bit Address PCB
At this point I thought I had enough to warrant building a new PCB for a microcontroller memory version of the TD4 with the option to support a 5-bit address bus with the limitations described above.
I took the PCB from Part 5 as the starting point and replaced the ROM logic with an Arduino Nano and added in the flip-flop to create the 5-bit address bus.
The ROM section is replaced with the Arduino as shown below.
The CPU section now uses the spare NOT gate from the PWRCLK section and the spare flip-flop from the CPU section as shown below.
I believe these were the only parts to change. I have included the option to disable the RESET button by cutting a solder jumper and replacing it with a link to an Arduino IO pin.
I’ve also added headers to breakout the unused Arduino IO pins just in case that becomes useful at some point.
The complete Arduino Nano pinout is as follows:
TD4 SignalArduino Nano IOA0-A4A0-A4 (A4 optional)D0-D3D8-D11D4-D7D4-D7/RESETD12 (optional)The board can be powered either via the Arduinos USB port or via the PCB micro USB port.
The PCB will be found on Github here once I know it all works.
Conclusion
I was hopeful I could add a 5th address line just using the spare components in the circuit and not adding to the chip count, and that is kind of possible as long as I’m ok with the limitations of the JMPs.
Building all this onto a PCB will make further programming experiments quite a lot easier.
But the next step is to see if the instruction set can be expanded. I am still in search of that illusive two-register add.
Kevin
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TD4 4-bit DIY CPU
I was looking for DIY CPU projects, as I like kits that help me think at the lowest level of processing. It helps keep me grounded in how far technology has come over the years.
- Part 1 – Introduction, Discussion and Analysis
- Part 2 – Building and Hardware
- Part 3 – Programming and Simple Programs
- Part 4 – Some hardware enhancements
- Part 5 – My own PCB version
- Part 6 – Replacing the ROM with a microcontroller
- Part 7 – Creating an Arduino “assembler” for the TD4
- Part 8 – Extending the address space to 5-bits and an Arduino ROM PCB
Some of the options that I know about, that actually come as kits you can buy and are interesting for me for DIY computers are:
- RC2014 and compatible for Z80 based computers: https://rc2014.co.uk/
- Small Computer Central for a range of Z80, Z180, computers: https://smallcomputercentral.com/
- Ben Eater’s 6502 computer: https://eater.net/6502
- Nick Bild’s 6502 Vectron 64 computer: https://github.com/nickbild/vectron_64
But I wanted to go further down and actually find something that lets me build a simple CPU from gates. Here there are several options too:
- NAND to Tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ (only available via emulation)
- Ben Eater’s 8-bit computer: https://eater.net/8bit
- Gigatron 8-bit computer: https://www.tindie.com/products/johnson/gigatron-ttl-microcomputer-diy-kit/
- TD4 4-bit computer: https://github.com/wuxx/TD4-4BIT-CPU
- TD4 4-bit computer deluxe kit: https://www.budgetronics.eu/en/building-kits/td4-deluxe-kit-build-your-own-mini-cpu-with-ttl-logic/a-26091-20
- MiniMax 4-bit CPU: https://www.tindie.com/products/denjhang/minimax-4bit-cpu-td4-architecture-cpusbc/
Whilst I’d love to build Ben Eater’s 8-bit CPU, the kit as provided is too much of an outlay for me. It is ~$300 – I mean, good for what you get and all the knowledge, but it is a solderless breadboard kit and that isn’t really what I’m after. The Gigatron is a distinct possibility that I’ll come back to at some point I think.
NAND to Tetris is excellent, and I have their book, but it is all emulated or virtualised, which does allow for all the scaling required for an (arguably) actually useful device, but isn’t designed to be built in actual hardware.
But the TD4 is really interesting. It is available as a PCB and components for approx £25 on Aliexpress and based on an open source design that shows the basic operation of a 4-bit CPU.
The “deluxe” kit mentioned above is a lot more expensive ~£120 but has all signals broken out to LEDs which, whilst is an awful lot of soldering, does looks incredibly impressive! The MiniMax is an evolution of the TD4 and kits for that are around £120. In fact, searching on Tindie and Hackaday.io for “TD4” will surface a few other DIY projects and even kits to purchase.
The TD4 does seem to fit the bill for me as an inexpensive kit to try. The downside is that documentation for it (in English) is pretty sparse.
The TD4 project itself is by “wuxx” an embedded engineer from HangZhou and much of the documentation is in Chinese. It is based on a Japenese book by Kaoru Tonami called “how to build a CPU” which can be found for ~£50 online, but as I don’t know Japanese either is unlikely to help me very much.
There are some sources of information that others have put together though, so I’m going to be using those as a starting point along with whatever I can figure out myself:
- The original GitHub project (plus online translation): https://github.com/wuxx/TD4-4BIT-CPU
- Philip Zucker’s “Guide to the TD4 4-bit DIY CPU”: https://www.philipzucker.com/td4-4bit-cpu/
- Kevin Gibb’s “teardownit” “DIY 4-bit CPU”: https://teardownit.quora.com/DIY-4-bit-CPU-Have-you-ever-made-a-processor-I-did-Took-me-just-12-microchips-and-a-clock-generator-The-processor-c
- Minoru Yamamoto’s “How to create a CPU TD4”: https://xyama.sakura.ne.jp/hp/4bitCPU_TD4.html
This post is my own “thinking out loud” as I work through the various parts to see how they work.
Basic Architecture
This is a 4-bit computer, with a 4-bit data bus, 4-bit commands, and a 4-bit address bus.
There is a block diagram on GitHub:
The fundamental process is as follows. For each “tick” of the computer:
- An OpCode is read from the ROM using the current 4-bit address (0 to 15) from the program counter.
- Each ROM entry is an 8-bit word with 4-bits as a command and 4-bits as data for the command.
- The data selector determines a 4-bit INPUT value. This can come from one of the two registers (A or B); or a set of four switches for the IN register; or be set to zero.
- This goes to the adder which adds it with the immediate data from the ROM (which could of course be zero).
- The OUTPUT of the adder can go to either of the two registers (A or B), an OUT register which is hooked up to four LEDS, or the program counter register to create a “jump”.
I’ll pull apart the different parts of the CPU in the following sections.
ROM Format
Each 8-bit word in the 16-byte ROM has the following format:
- 4 command bits
- 4 immediate data bits
Instruction Decoding
The 4 command bits from each ROM instruction have to be turned into the various selection signals to activate different parts of the CPU.
There is a table from GitHub again:
The explanation in Japanese translates (apparently) to:
“Explanation: The SEL_B and SEL_A signals select the ALU data source, while #LOAD0-#LOAD3 select the ALU data destination. More formally, they control the source and destination operands of instructions, respectively.”
From this we can note the following:
- There is no instruction for 1000,1010,1100 or 1101.
- Instruction 1110 appears twice, and the selectors set are dependent on the state of the C (carry) flag.
- Some instructions act on immediate data, others assume it will be 0.
The LOAD# have the following meanings in the system:
- LOAD#0 – Register A (A)
- LOAD#1 – Register B (B)
- LOAD#2 – OUTPUT (OUT)
- LOAD#3 – Program counter (PC)
The actual decoding happens in two parts: input selection; and output selection.
Registers
The system has four registers, each formed from a 74HC161 “presettable, synchronous, 4-bit binary counter”. There are two general purpose registers: A and B. There is one output register, whose contents drive the state of four LEDs. And there is a program counter. Here is the schematic for register A:
P0-P3 come from the output of the adder directly. RST and CLK are hopefully self-explanatory. For the A and B registers, Q0-Q3 go into the INPUT selection section (see later). For the OUTPUT register, these go directly to LEDs. For the program counter, these go into the ROM address logic (again more on that later).
The relevant operation of the 161 is described in the datasheet:
“The outputs (Q0 to Q3) of the counters may be preset HIGH or LOW. A LOW at the parallel enable input (PE) disables the counting action and causes the data at the data inputs (D0 to D3) to be loaded into the counter on the positive-going edge of the clock… A LOW at the master reset input (MR) sets Q0 to Q3 LOW…”
So on reset the outputs are all 0. When PE goes LOW, on the next clock pulse, the value on the inputs (P0-P3) is loaded into the counter and reflected on Q0-Q3. However, because CET and CEP are LOW the counter won’t actually count any further.
The program counter is a bit special, in that it is actually allowed the count by having CET and CEP set HIGH. This allows it to step through the instructions on a clock pulse.
In this case Q0-Q3 go off to the ROM address decoding, which I’ll come to in a moment.
INPUT Selection
There are two SELECT lines select the INPUT data as follows:
SEL_BSEL_ASOURCE00Register A (A)01Register B (B)10INPUT (IN)11Zero value (0)Input selection is handled by two 74HC153 dual 4-input multiplexers. Two are required as there are four data lines to be switched, and they all have one of four options to switch between based on the SELECT lines above.
Here is the relevant part of the schematic.
On the left are the three sets of four data signals that come from the A, B and IN inputs. D0 from each of the inputs goes to U7/1Cn; D1 goes to U7/2Cn; D2 to U8/1Cn; and D3 to U8/2Cn. Notice that the fourth set of data signals (U7/1C3, 2C3 and U8 1C3, 2C3) are connected directly to GND for the “zero” INPUT state (SEL_A=1, SEL_B=1).
On the right, the two pairs of outputs make up the four data lines to feed into the adder section.
So where does the SEL_A and SEL_B signals come from? From the schematic, we can see:
- SEL_A = D4 OR D7 (via U10B – one of the 74HC32 2-input OR gates)
- SEL_B = D5
We can start to explain why some of the instruction combinations don’t exist (or at least, aren’t distinct) as we can see that SEL_A depends on either D4 or D7.
OUTPUT Selection
The OUTPUT selection is a little more complicated. As previously mentioned, there are four destinations: the two registers, the OUTPUT register, and the program counter.
Each register has a /PE (“parallel enable input”) signal which is active low. These are individually fed by the output of the LOAD# logic.
The three signals at the bottom are D6, D7 and D4. The lone signal top left is the carry (/C) flag, and the four outputs top right are the four LOAD# signals which feed directly into the /PE pins of the four registers.
So from this we deduce the following relationships:
- Reg A LOAD0 HIGH = D6 OR D7 – so LOAD0 is only active (LOW) when both D6 and D7 are LOW.
- Reg B LOAD1 HIGH = NOT D6 OR D7 – so LOAD1 is only active (LOW) when D6 is HIGH and D7 is LOW.
- OUT LOAD2 LOW = NOT D6 AND D7 – so LOAD2 is only active (LOW) when D6 is LOW and D7 is HIGH.
- PC LOAD3 LOW = D6 AND D7 AND (D4 OR /C) – so LOAD3 is only active (LOW) when both D6 and D7 are HIGH and either D4 is HIGH or the carry signal (/C) is LOW.
This effectively means that D6 is used to select between registers A and B when D7 is LOW; and between OUT and PC when D7 is HIGH (subject to either D4 or the /C signal too in the case of PC).
Once again, we can see that there is some redundancy in the system for certain combinations of D4 to D7.
ROM Address Decoding
The 4-bit output from the program counter is effectively a 4-bit address bus. This gets turned into a set of selection signals to select which “byte” of the ROM should be active.
This simply uses a 74HC154, 4 to 16 line decoder, meaning that a 4-bit number goes in and one of 16 corresponding outputs goes LOW whilst the rest remain HIGH. There is no memory address or matrix handling – there is literally one control line per “memory” location.
The ROM itself is a set of 16 8-way DIP switches and diodes, so once its control signal is active (LOW) then those DIP switches become relevant on the data bus. Here is the last location and data bus logic. Note that all data signals are pulled HIGH by default, so will only be read as LOW if the DIP switch connects it to LOW via the diode, and that is only possible if that DIP block is selected from the 4 to 16 line decoder.
The 74HC540 is an inverting line buffer, turning any active LOW DIP switch settings into HIGH signals on the command/data bus. Recall that D0-D3 represent immediate data and D4-D7 represent command logic.
The Adder (ALU)
The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) for this CPU is a simple adder. A 74HC283 is a 4-bit binary full adder. “full” in that it supports 4-bit add-with-carry functionality, although in this design, carry is only used on the output stage – it doesn’t form part of the input addition.
A0-A3 comes from the INPUT selection circuitry, so can represent either register A or B, the state of the IN switches, or a fixed zero (0) value. B0-B3 comes directly from D0-D3 from the ROM contents as selected by the ROM addressing logic.
The COUT (carry) flag goes into a flip-flop and the active LOW version of the output is used as the carry flag in the LOAD# decoding logic to support the “JUMP IF NOT CARRY” instruction. So returning to the logic of #LOAD3, we have:
COUT /C D4 D6 D7 LOAD3
0 1 X 1 1 0 -> Dst = PC
X X 1 1 1 0 -> Dst = PCHence a jump will only happen (i.e. the PC get loaded) either if D4, D6, D7 are all 1 (unconditional) or if D4 =0, D6, D7 are 1 (conditional) if the CARRY flag is NOT set by the adder, resulting in /C = 1.
Some of the ROM instructions require D0-D3 to be zero in which case the adder is effectively taking the input (A, B, IN, 0) and loading it into the destination register (A, B, OUT, PC).
Notice that the adder does not use the carry in (CIN). This is tied to zero. Apparently this was left floating on an earlier revision of the board, which caused spurious results!
Putting it all Together
The complete truth table for the SEL, D4-7 and LOAD signals is as follows.
SEL_BSEL_AD4D5D6D7LD0/ALD1/BLD2/OPLD3/PCADD A,i0000LL00000111MOV AB0001LH10000111IN A0010HL01000111MOV A,i0011HH11000111MOV BA0100LL00101011ADD B,i0101LH10101011IN B0110HL01101011MOV B,i0111HH111010111000LH00011101OUT B1001LH100111011010HH01011101OUT i1011HH110111011100LH0011111=C1101LH10111110JNC1110HH0111111=CJMP1111HH11111110Returning to our instruction table, we can see how the decoding of the D4-D7 lines leads to enacting the various commands. In particular, we can now expand the table to show how the SEL and LOAD logic results in selecting the source and destination registers as follows:
D7-D4D3-D0INPUTOUTPUTADD A, data0000dataAAMOV A, B00010000BAIN A00100000INAMOV A, data0011data0AMOV B, A01000000ABADD B, data0101dataBBIN B01100000INBMOV B, data0111data0BOUT B *10000000BOUTOUT B10010000BOUTOUT data *1010data0OUTOUT data1011data0OUTJNC B *1100dataB/CPC/noneJMP B *1101dataBPCJNC1110data0/CPC/noneJMP1111data0PCAs per the table, we can also now infer the missing, or duplicate, instructions (marked * above).
In this table, the output will always be the addition of the INPUT and D3-D0, so everywhere 0 is specified for D3-D0 then in reality a value could be placed here instead. But then the instruction would take on a different meaning.
For example, MOV A, B is really MOV A, B+data, which really only makes sense when data is set to 0 otherwise overflows are very likely to occur.
It is also worth noting that SEL_A depends on either D4 or D7, and when SEL_A is set to 1 the input can only be either register B or zero. However, to output to OUT or PC, D7 has to be set. This means that instructions that act on OUT or PC can only take an input from register B or zero.
The two JMP B instructions are going to be of limited use too. They are essentially JMP to B+data instructions. There are probably some creative uses of such instructions, but for simplicity, keeping to the “0” versions that just depend on the immediate data is probably best.
Utility Blocks
There is one section of the circuit that hasn’t been considered yet. There is a block that provides the clock and reset circuitry.
The clock is based on a Schmidt trigger oscillator and can run on automatic or on manual trigger. There are two selectable speeds: 1Hz or 10Hz.
Both the clock and reset signals feed into the four registers and the carry flip-flop.
The remaining block is the power. It has a micro-USB socket and has to be powered from 5V directly either via the USB socket or directly into a 2-pin jumper header.
Conclusion
I have one on order. I’m looking forward to building it and giving it a go!
I really like the LEDs on the deluxe version, but that is a bit too much for me just for some messing around, but I am wondering how difficult it would be to attempt my own version with a few extra LEDs.
Assuming I manage to get one built and working, I’ll have a poke about at some signals and see what the art of the possible might be.
Kevin