I was feeling unwell this morning but was stern with myself and went out to get on with a little work in the wood, measuring up the frame for my new workshop. But I slipped and fell my length into a pile of fallen timber covered in brambles... I'm not really hurt, but I'm sore and bloody, and I'm going back to bed.

One click sends a command
from the Home Assistant app
on my mobile phone
via WiFi
to the WiFi Router
to a Satellite
to a ground station in Germany
to my VPN endpoint in Iceland
to London
to Amsterdam
to Frankfurt
to Zurich
to Winterthur
to my router
to my reverse proxy
to my Home Assistant server
to my access point
to the WiFi
to the WiFi-Bridge
to the door lock
*click* *motor whirring* *door…

Nothing in this article will be a surprise to those working in Scottish Higher Education, but it does make clear the scale of the challenge facing universities. The government crackdown on international students has been particularly hard hitting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0lr8rp…

Scotland's universities face 'bleak' future as £200m funding gap revealed
A new report paints a 'bleak' picture of falling income from Scottish students and an over-reliance on international tuition fees.

recent-ish reading/rereading. #books

Semi-subtoot: there's a certain kind of anti-genocide narrative that draws comparisons between the Gaza genocide and the genocide of Jews, queer, and disabled people during WW2, with an incredulous overtone, the subtext of which is: if the good nations invaded Germany to stop the Nazis' evil in WW2, it's hypocritical for this nations not to take action to protect Gazan civilians now. There are a couple of problems with this line of reasoning, but the most obvious from an anarchist perspective (which sees "good nation" for the oxymoron it is) is that it's ahistorical. The reasons for the various allies' entrance into WW2 are varied, but they weren't about good and evil, and in fact the full depth of the evils of the Holocaust *was not known* in allied countries until after the war. Nations never really do things to "fight evil" like some humans might; they always act out of a kind of (imperfect) self-interest. The motivations for many of the allies were simply "we don't want Germany to conquer and destroy us" (and the imperfection in that motive is amply evident in the appeasement that preceded the war). America was of course not swayed by that motive, and it was the Japanese that (thinking the issue would have to come to a head eventually and that a surprise attack was worth speeding it up) put America in a situation where it joined for similar reasons.
Why is this extra relevant right now? Because neither the US nor any European country is existentially threatened by Israel (or threatened at all in fact, quite the opposite they're all benefiting economically from the situation in Gaza). The lesson of history isn't "brave, good nations will stand up to fight against anyone who commits genocide or other major evils", it's "nations act in their narrow and twisted and often mistaken self-interest (the interest of the national entity, which is often counter to the interest of it's citizens), and they always mythologize their actions after the fact as having been a fight against evil, which sometimes by luck is partially true."
To double down on this point: in the European theater the U.S. war actions were pretty good overall, defeating an evil opponent through military force and being a fairly gracious victor to the civilian populations there. In contrast, in the Pacific theater the U.S. was one of two evil empires duking it out for global dominance at the expense of civilians on both sides. The Japanese empire was a vile regime and perpetrated horrors in China, Korea, and across southeast Asia. The U.S. was barely better, between Japanese internment camps at home, and mass targeting of civilians on Japan, both with the firebombing of Tokyo and especially the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So if your model of how we stop genocide is "convince the good guys to invade (or exert political pressure) and save the day", your model is wrong. That's not what happened in WW2. I'm not confident I know the perfect solution, but I do think it involves a mass of people making increasingly disruptive protest so that the cost *to rich companies and thus politicians* of falling to intervene is too high to stomach. That's a large part of what succeeded in South Africa, for example. Thankfully, there is already a vibrant protest movement to end the genocide in Gaza, and even though they haven't been fully successful yet, I'm optimistic that as things naturally (and through hard work) fall apart for various fascists politically, that movement will be able to succeed.
#gaza #genocide

Donno what’s worse, the verse itself or DuckDuckGo’s generated explanation of it. @… https://partyon.xyz/@nando161/116925119988965039

📝 Droning on about drones

September 29, 2026
Three years ago I got a DJI Mini 3 Pro for my birthday. Flying it around and getting aerial pictures is great fun. Lately, though, it mostly stays in its bag. This is about why.
It's tiny. The camera is decent: a 1/1.3-inch sensor behind an f/1.7 lens, which is a big sensor for something this size. It has 48 megapixels through the magic of marketing, which means it's 12 megapixels that get upscaled. It does RAW, and 4K video. It has a fancy gimbal head that is surprisingly competent at keeping the camera stable. The drone can autonomously follow a subject, circle a point, or fly preset moves. Handy if you're a narcissist or just not as comfortable with the controls yet.
DJI promises 34 minutes in the air, probably in a vacuum. Real flights, with actual air and wind resistance are around 20 minutes. Range is 8 kilometres, which sounds unrealistic, but probably refers to the antenna. Anyway in the Netherlands you are obliged to keep the drone in your line of sight. Obstacle sensors look forward, back and down, and freak out whenever I get close to Big Hard Things.
And it weighs under 249 grams, which is the whole point of the Mini line. Under 250 grams it flies in the A1 subcategory, the most relaxed one in the EU. You can fly near and even over people, as long as it isn't a crowd. No exam either, just an operator number from the RDW, the Dutch vehicle authority, stuck on the drone. On paper, it's about as free as flying gets. Except all the restrictions that apply anyway because it has a camera. 
It looks easy. It isn't. The Mini holds its position on GPS, so hovering takes no effort at all. Everything else takes practice. Two sticks: the left one handles height and turning, the right one moves you forward, back and sideways. A wheel tilts the camera. A smooth shot usually means using three of those at once, gently, while the drone drifts in the wind. At 249 grams it doesn't take much wind to destabilize it.
Then there's orientation. When the drone faces you, everything is mirrored: left is right, forward is back. At a hundred metres it's a dot, and you can't tell whether it's clearing that tree or about to hit it. The obstacle sensors don't look sideways, so sideways is your problem. And you're supposed to keep your eyes on the drone, while the shot you're making is on the screen in your hands.
Practice is exactly what I'm not getting, and the reason starts at my own front door. 
My home is squeezed in between three no-fly zones. De Horsten, the royal estate, lies in prohibited area EHP-26, the same rectangle of closed airspace that covers Huis ten Bosch, Noordeinde and the Binnenhof. It runs from the ground to about 600 metres, and no drone gets an exemption, whatever it weighs. The King moved out in 2019; the no-fly zone didn't. The other one is Valkenburg, the old naval air base. It closed back in 2006, and the province turned part of it into a test airport for professional drones, called Unmanned Valley. Whether there's still a restricted circle around it depends on which map you ask. Since at least 2022, the official aviation chart has shown one and the official drone map hasn't.
The drone map around Wassenaar. The pink rectangle is EHP-26, with De Horsten at the bottom. The dunes are on the left, and the dots mark the old airfield at Valkenburg.
That's the real problem: nobody can tell you exactly where the lines are. The government points you to two maps, and both say you can't derive any rights from them. The borders don't follow a street or a fence, either. It's a line on a map, and you're standing in a field trying to work out which side of it you're on. And where the air is free, the ground may not be: Dunea, the water company that runs the water extraction in the dunes, simply bans drones in Meijendel.
Then there's the mood. Last year drones turned up over airports and air bases across Europe. Russia is the usual suspect, though whose they are hardly matters. Do you really want to have your drone shot out of the sky and have an inspiring conversation with an arrest team?
Probably not. The police don't publish how many drone fines they hand out, and an investigation counted thousands of illegal flights over The Hague every year. Nobody patrols the Wassenaar wastelands looking for a 249-gram drone.
Then again, nobody has to. Drones under 250 grams are exempt from the EU's Remote ID. But on my generation of drones, DJI's own signal broadcasts the drone's position and the pilot's, unencrypted.
The fines themselves aren't dramatic: €250 for flying in a no-fly zone, €300 over a crowd, €350 near vital infrastructure and €500 for getting in the way of emergency services. They stack, though, and the drone usually gets seized as well.
In a village like Wassenaar, the likeliest detection system is the neighbour. Most people are uneasy about drones, mainly because of privacy. One of my colleagues, who lives in a big city, proudly claims to shoot illegal drones out of the sky with a slingshot.
Even a perfectly legal flight comes with a fair chance that someone walks over to argue about it. That's an argument I'd rather not have. It's supposed to be fun.
The obvious way out is to take it on holiday. I mostly go to Germany, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and surely somewhere out there is a field with room for 249 grams of drone. My Dutch registration is valid everywhere in the EU, so how hard can it be?
Quite hard, it turns out. The EU only sets the basics, and every country adds its own layer on top. Zones, its own map app, its own list of special permissions. Nature parks, castles and towns add theirs. And the rules move: the Czech Republic introduced a whole new zone system only last year. 
Germany wants proof of insurance in your pocket, which I don't need in the Netherlands. The Czech Republic wants a flight plan in its app before almost any flight near a town, road or railway. Slovakia doesn't ask for insurance, but most of its mountain areas are off limits on principle, so that actually limits what there is to take pictures of in the first place.
Read all that back and you'd think I should sell it. I won't. Because when it does go up, it's still awesome. A few seconds after take-off the ground turns into a map, and places you walk past every day look like somewhere you've never been. None of my other cameras can do that. So hopefully I will be more successful at motivating myself to keep trying in the near future. 
Please feel free to add any tips for drone photography you might have, and I may use them to rekindle my interest in the hobby.
#Blog #Article #Drones #Gear #Photography #Travel #Wassenaar

i live in a small apartment without a lot of storage space. for LPs, i have two three-foot shelves, one for jazz, the other for everything else. last week, i made a new resolution to play at least one non-jazz record every day. here's how it's going.
#vinyl #OldVinyl

Smoke Gets In Your...Hole Where Your Soul Should Be
MAGA may have a set a new mark for belligerent stupidity
BILL MCKIBBEN
JUL 20
...wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.
Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, reveali…

40 years ago this weekend, jerry garcia falls into a diabetic coma & nearly dies. in the hospital, his heart stops following an allergic reaction when doctors give him valium. the dead will cancel 30 dates through fall. he relearns to play guitar & is performing again by october.