Your work is beautiful. I’d heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it’s blowing me away. I’m looking at the explore page right now:

https://pixelfed.social/web/explore

I’m a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.

That should do the trick. Good luck.

Will a factory reset get rid of the firmware update(s) on your model? It’s not guaranteed but sometimes that will get you back to where you started.

If it does, all that’s left to do is to completely close down any automatic update path (network access to internet, cable access to internet-connected PC, whatever applies to your situation). Yes, you can turn off automatic updates in settings, but on newer models especially that’s not the guarantee it once was, esp on Windows machines with bidirectional printing features enabled: Windows will force update the printer itself. Anymore I set all my printers to wireless and then block them by MAC address at the firewall.

There are dozens that have their new energy infrastructure costs and even their power usage shared among all the residents of that utility district. They’re hard to find out about because the contracts are often secretive – can’t imagine why – but this was going on for a while before people started to put up a stink about data centers.

This is a good article from about a year ago, and Benn Jordan has also talked about it on his channel, among others.

Yes. Yes, they do.

That is mostly correct. Most states have the governor appoint replacements to vacant seats, but McConnell himself got that law changed in Kentucky in 2024. Now, in Kentucky, a vacancy triggers a special election UNLESS it is within three months of a general election, which in Kentucky is the first Tuesday in August, which is why there is now suspicion that Republicans will try to hide the true nature of McConnell’s condition until after the August deadline.

I just wrote a longer comment elsewhere more fully explaining the situation: it’s complex, and the Kentucky law is itself badly written apparently, so no one is even very certain if it’s (state) constitutionally valid.

Another old fart here. Yeah, I remember it too. That motherfucker. If it involved human rights of any kind, he was fully against it. And I’m still fucking salty about all that hateful “AIDS quarantine” shit that rolled out of his mouth.

But I temporarily lived in his district for a time right before his retirement, when he was visibly going downhill, and even then local people revered him. This is not an exaggeration. I didn’t get it until somebody explained it to me.

Simply put, Jesse Helms – and Strom Thurmond too, come to think of it – took constituent services to a very quietly insane level. The number of people I personally met who were like, “Yeah, so-and-so had this problem, Senator Helms took care of it, we’ll always be grateful,” would blow your mind. EVERYBODY had either had his office help them personally, or knew someone who had.

That’s why the rural folks who literally believe that someone like Trump personally cares about them can still think that: this is what they’ve lived with. Someone like Jesse Helms who was a snake in a skin suit but if you called his office, he took care of you and you gave him your undying, eternal allegiance.

That actually gives me a tiny bit of hope, because it’s only the much older legislators that do anything like that kind of constituent services now. The new ones are just riding on their fumes, and even those are running out.

When the news came out last week about him being in cardiac arrest and having EMS administer CPR, the source I read had John Thune saying he’d talked to McConnell the following morning and McConnell “sounded good,” all that shit.

No, lol. 84-year-olds who have had EMS pounding on their frail ribcages do NOT in fact “sound good” after that, as a rule. That’s when I knew McConnell was dead or dying.

shitting on someone else just for being unlike you and having different standards for yourself

Isn’t that exactly what you yourself are doing?

And aren’t you lying about it now, as you insist on trying to imply that “boomer” – your term – is not an explicit age-related insult?

In the same way that being trans is not a choice but comes with the human experience of being that person and living in that body, being of a certain age is also just not a choice. Getting randomly bitchslapped for it as I skim through comments is unpleasant, which was clearly your intent.

I’d expect someone who knows what it is to be othered as a matter of rote to also refrain from using othering terms, rather than selfishly offloading the same exact casually offensive shit unnecessarily onto those they in turn consider to be easy targets.

Guess I expected wrong.

I legit believe you. There is literally no story about him that could ever come out and surprise me, unless it was a tale of genuine humanity and conscience.

Behind the human siding, there is definitely a certain unknown about him that can only be described as “not right.” Whatever was dark in him to start with, his riches and privilege have only magnified.

I see someone remembers the 2005 rootkit debacle. Such assholes.

The anthropomorphization in this article is nauseating:

If Teams AI feels the meeting needs certain information and there’s a gap in the conversation, it’ll jump in through the meeting chat.

Yeah, no. Nice try. But it’s not human. It’s not even an animated teddy bear. There is no friendly presence there waiting to help. It doesn’t feel jack shit. It doesn’t jump. It’s not there for you, or your meeting, or your boss, or your company.

It simply performs a constant ongoing analysis and issues a prediction of the next words based on the preceding words.

That, and it lets MS and its partners monetize every goddamn thing it can snatch from you, your meeting, your machine, and everything else it can digitally force access to.

This is certainly a 70s interior, but not the most 70s interior.

In the same way that the Mariana Trench remains mostly undiscovered, I don’t know that anyone will ever truly plumb the depths of 70s interior design, but I can offer this as a counterpoint.

Shag carpeted walls, even all the way onto and across the ceiling.

Even Graceland has it, though these days they claim it was installed for “acoustic shielding” lol. This is the entrance to the Jungle Room at Graceland:

No, it was the style, like conversation pits and unmatched plaids and avocado or harvest green appliances.

And carpeted walls weren’t in every house, but they weren’t uncommon in the US as far as I know. At one point in my misspent youth, I lived in a house that had a den lined with lime green shag not just on the floor, but up and across the entirety of the far wall, while the other walls had matching green palm frond wallpaper with a chrome/mirrored background. This wallpaper visually delivered the carpet wall to you on the ricochet: even if you weren’t looking at the carpet up the wall, you were looking at the carpet up the wall. It was, mercifully, a dimly lit room that did not get much light anyway.

My spouse remembers similar. It was a thing. There is a reason there are so few pictures of it left.

https://archive.is/ki4vM

The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)

Just one more reason why Bill Pulte has been pushed into this position as “acting” DNI by Trump past unusually strong bipartisan opposition, to the point of canceling the nomination hearing for the real candidate.

This office is really what people should be paying attention to in the coming months, because it’s all about the midterms.

For those who are unaware, Bill Pulte is a MAGA loyalist that goes after Trump opponents, and has ZERO knowledge of or experience in national security. As the head of Federal Housing Finance Agency, he is the guy who has been accusing those legitimately investigating Trump (Letitia James, Adam Schiff, etc) of unsubstantiated mortgage fraud.

Expect him to do the same with the ODNI.

When Tulsi Gabbard resigned (or was fired, who knows) another candidate to replace her as DNI was put forward, the Rs and the Ds agreed on him for the most part, and that confirmation hearing was supposed to have happened on Wednesday. It did not. It was canceled at the last second by Trump, allowing Pulte to become “acting” DNI.

While an “acting” DNI has time limits on how long they can “act” without confirmation, that legal end to the “acting” role of DNI comes after the midterms, so this essentially puts Trump’s personal bully in the office for the duration of the election season.

Even the Republicans don’t want Pulte, and with the Dems they also refused to renew a part of FISA in objection, because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has access to all the surveillance tools and output this country ever got its hands on.

The consensus is that Bill Pulte is being chosen as DNI for the sole reason of being able to leverage that surveillance against non-favored candidates in the midterms.

Think about that for a hot second. All the surveillance powers of the Five Eyes leveraged against US political candidates that the orange administration doesn’t like.

And now we see there’s actually a second reason for Pulte’s installation: to suppress facts gathered about our voting machines.

EDITED for clarity

That’s possible, but does not seem likely. First, it wasn’t just the two towns, and hits came back from Buncombe County as well.

Also, the results exclude Madison County altogether, though there are cameras in the county, and presumably queries were made in regard to Madison County residents and plates, which is the supposed reason Madison County has Flock to begin with.

The way I read the HaveIbeenFlocked site was that the query itself was answered from that specific town or group of towns linked to the response, which would not be possible if the query itself had NO response from the HaveIbeenFlocked database.

Also, those two towns were just the most frequently listed, but others across the country have come up as I noted, as well as Buncombe County, which is where you’d think the vast majority of responses should be coming from, but they’re not.

Buncombe County (Asheville) is the source for multiple queries, but not anywhere near a majority. And someone involved in the HaveIbeenFlocked flow of information is very aware of the Buncombe County responses, because on all the Buncombe County hits I saw, the reason for the query was redacted: that didn’t just happen, someone chose to do that.

But if all this is legit, you know what source I never saw linked to a query? Madison County itself.

Now how is it possible, when cameras are in Madison County – iow, Madison County is itself a valid source on HaveIbeenFlocked – and the law enforcement requests are coming from Madison County, presumably pursuant to a valid Madison County law enforcement need for information, but the cameras in the county are not the source of any information requested? (Or very little, and I just missed them time after time.)

But don’t take my word for it: the links are in my post. Look for yourself. Click on anything you find, as randomly as you like, and see what you see.

Funny thing about American voting: for all the ways that people insist voting doesn’t matter, the one place in America where one vote travels the absolute farthest is in a small town election, and right next to that are county elections, for positions like these.

County sheriffs are often elected, as are county commissioners; who gets elected and who gets appointed depends entirely on applicable state and local law. But even if both of these positions are appointed in Madison County, North Carolina, where this debacle took place, the appointer will almost always be an elected official, like a mayor.

In other words, there is in fact a place where the buck stops in local politics, whether it’s with the mayor or the commissioner or the sheriff or all of the above, and everyone who lives there already knows exactly where it does, especially in a back wood county in the hills like this one.

Add the fact that the meeting was already full of angry people, people who cared enough about the whole thing to make the drive into the county seat and attend, only to be shut up once they arrived.

So while they were silenced at this meeting, it’s not over. None of them want Flock cameras, and nobody wants to take the time and trouble to come to a goddamn podunk county commission meeting only to be told to shut up and sit down.

Come election season, any neighbors with short memories will absolutely be reminded of this, in the kind of local election where often every single vote counts.

The article quotes a Madison County privacy org directly:

“The Sheriff Office claims they are only using this technology for serious crimes, yet published audit logs tell a different story,” a website called Madison for Privacy says. “Madison County has searched the nationwide database over 1,200 times over just a 60 day period. In a county over only 20,000 residents, its hard to understand what could warrant this many searches.”

Holy shit, they’re not wrong. Follow that haveibeenflocked.com link to the Madison County sheriff’s office Flock searches, and the accompanying note:

These are some of the searches performed by Madison County NC SO. We have seen a total of 1,216 searches for this agency, performed by 1 person over 62 days between 3/11/2026 and 5/11/2026 (1 user was active in the most recent six months) The most recent import of records for this agency happened on 5/17/2026.

Madison County is southwest of Asheville on the state line between NC and TN, comprised mostly of unincorporated communities, which is a polite way of saying most residents live in the hills, not in the towns. The entire county has a population of roughly 21,000, and the largest town, Mars Hill, has only 2,000 residents. It doesn’t get much more rural than this on the East Coast.

So given the population and its distribution, and the fact that the sheriff’s office only serves the unincorporated communities because the three towns have their own municipal police, where the fuck does the sheriff’s office get cause or even time for what averages out to 600 Flock searches in a month?

But it gets even stranger. I clicked on a few searches, just to see what I could see, and every single one I clicked on with an unredacted reason* was associated with the same two or three other non-local police departments as the source of the information retrieved, two of which were the exact same ones every time: Forest Park Ohio PD, Tifton Georgia PD, and occasionally the Douglas County Nevada SO. There were a couple others, but always at least one of those three. (If you go to the little i next to the other PDs, it tells you, “This audit record appears in [n] different public record files.”)

This is true whether I clicked on a homicide, a non-DUI alcohol inquiry, a burglary, a car theft, or a sex offense. No matter what reason I chose, no matter how disparate the crime or the date, one if not all of those three law enforcement agencies came up as the source of the Flock information that inquiry pulled from. And this is the same of every search I clicked on, over and over and over again.

(*The sole exceptions to all this were where the crime itself was redacted, and then the associated source of information was Buncombe County, NC, which neighbors Madison County and could potentially be a valid law enforcement reason to search Flock data.)

And when I selected the Repeat Searches checkbox at the top, defined as “Display filter that hides likely duplicate searches (identical searches within 5 minutes). Does not affect server-side counts or downloads,” an even 800 of those 1,216 searches get loaded. So fully two thirds of those searches across two months qualify as duplicates executed within five minutes of each other, to Flock parameters at least. (Or maybe one third, if I’m understanding it wrong; I’m sure someone will be along to correct me shortly.) But that’s still a fuckton of duplicates executed within five minutes of each other.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand how it all works on the Flock side, but it almost seems like someone in the Madison County, NC sheriff’s office is just sitting on their ass keeping serious tabs on a short list of people living in other places.

This is not all they have to say, either. Their blog: https://deadeclipse666.blogspot.com/

As LBJ once noted of a detractor, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

The slop company should have just paid them.