Tootfinder

In 2025, several books saw audiobook sales outperform hardcovers, even as digital audiobook growth slowed to 1% through October after 2024's ~24% jump to $1.1B (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/lis

I've only just learned of the death of our former colleague Chris Gathercole last April. I knew him as an advocate for learning disabled people, taking their place, with support, in the life of the community. He had a profound influence on provision in the North West, where with Tom Mclean, who died the previous year, and others, he steered into being a radical policy framework that shaped the pattern of de-institutionalisation in the region.

Zocks, which offers an AI assistant for financial advisers, raised a $45M Series B co-led by Lightspeed and QED Investors, taking its total funding to $65M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/fintech/zocks-raises-seriesb-ai…

Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers
Zocks, a builder of an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively.

Until January, Patrick J. Schiltz,
the chief judge of the District of Minnesota,
had steadily managed one of the federal court system’s heavier workloads with little fanfare.
He was more widely known in the legal community for penning a revered law journal article 27 years ago that advised young lawyers how to become ethical members of an “unhappy, unhealthy and unethical profession.”
But starting this year, as federal agents surged into Minnesota, hundreds of immigr…

Patrick Schiltz, an Ethicist, Is the Minnesota Judge Blasting ICE
Judge Patrick Schiltz, an appointee of George W. Bush, became an unlikely critic of the Trump administration’s tactics in Minnesota.

Trump Advisers Consider Las Vegas for Rare Midterm Political Convention (Alex Leary/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/trump-republican-midterm-convention-las-vegas-8a0efb11
http://www.memeorandum.com/251029/p139#a251029p139

Friday was an adventure in tech futility. Started with a gifted laptop, Dell Latitude, and the simple task of wiping its poor excuse for an OS and installing something sensible.
#Ubuntu wasn't it. OMG Ubuntu, what HAVE you done?! Tried first #UbuntuStudio then stock Ubuntu, 24.04, 25.04, 25.11, all the installers simply hung, no log, no journalctl, CPU chugging but nada detectable action, even hours later, just "Preparing…"
Net advice is old, of course, but points to the snap bootstrap service, fix has no effect but Kee-riced look at the mount table?! Snaps crackle and pop all over! Wtf, why? 🤯
And it is tedious. These 'DVD' iso files are 7GB, so, after 6 hours frustration, I thought, let's try something smaller to cut the turnaround time. #Debian13 simple bare-bones net-install seemed a good candidate …
And it was. Seemless install. 😊

#OTD in 1993 I recall I caught Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys with the BarnStompers from Holland at an after hours warehouse party decorated with haybales at 21st an Harrison in SF. I recall the door man was a sketchy white supremacist redneck, who objected to letting in a person of color I came with.... The more things change, the more things do stay the same in this country.

I've spent the past year learning Morse code, and it's ended up being a great deal of fun. I've had a lot of questions. I've tried to share what I've learned with others as I've gone along.
To celebrate the end of the year, I wrote a combination of information, story, and advice. How to get started, mobile apps and websites, books, getting on the air, learning to send, POTA, SST, keys and keyers. I'm not fluent or expert yet, but that means that I still remember what's hard!

It's official.
The Honduran president-elect is an imperialist stooge.
"Secretary Rubio commended President-Elect Asfura for his advocacy of US strategic objectives.."
Marco Rubio congratulates Honduran President-elect Nasry Asfura | Elections News | Al Jazeera

Marco Rubio congratulates Honduran President-elect Nasry Asfura
Washington’s top diplomat says he thanked Asfura, who was backed by Trump, for ‘advocacy of US strategic objectives’.