Bruce Schneier on the nature of dishonest Internet influence operations ("they're surprisingly inexpensive to run", "they will increasingly be seen as how the game of politics is played in the information age") and how to kill them, point by point.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/influence_opera.html

Parts of Europe suffer a heatwave but you got to weigh in humidity to get closer to the real impact. Meteociel displays the Humidex readings all over Europe, taking humidity into account. Check chart below for guidance

Forecast for France and some surroundings https://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/gfs/humidex/3h.htm

Humidex measurements http://www.meteociel.fr/observations-meteo/humidex.php?region=eur2

Click to view full-size image…

There may well be better scales for assessing this, but Humidex has the distinct advantage of actually being reported for European weather.

I'm listening through a tinny laptop speaker, but here goes. The mic he is mainly testing, the VO 1-A is really good. It is better than the first mic he compares it too the CAD m179, and also edges out the Røde NT1 mic, although is has to be said that the Røde is good. I wonder if you ever can go wrong with a Røde mic. The Lewitt LCT 440 PURE in some ways better than the VO 1-A, I'd say maybe not as clear, but with a nice compression, that suits voiceover often I gather. The Neumann mics are better, but it makes you think by how much given the price. I am a bit interested in the Neumann KMS 105 BK  which is a cheaper version for stage use. 

Below is BoothJunkie's affiliate links for the different microphones. Haven't thought that much about the Sennheiser and the CAD e100s.

• VO 1-A: https://geni.us/bj-vo1a
• CAD m179: https://geni.us/bjcad179
• RODE NT1: https://geni.us/bjnt1
• Lewitt LCT 440 PURE: https://geni.us/bj-440
• CAD e100s: https://geni.us/bjcade100s
• Neumann TLM103: https://geni.us/bjtlm103
• Sennheiser MKH416: https://geni.us/bj416
• Neumann U87: https://geni.us/bju87

With headphones on

I have now listened with my Sony MDR-CD480 headphones,  and methinks VO 1-a still sounds better than the m179 and the NT1. The LC440 sounds a litlle bit better, less raw and less sibilant but otoh with more distortion. The e100s sounds better. The TLM103 sounds a lot (well maybe not a lot but in this context of listening intently) better.

Bandrew just tested a Neumann mic that costs $700. And I pretty much immediately recognised the sound of this mic as the sound of hosts and news announcers on Swedish high-end FM radio in the 1980s. I bet they had similar sounding Neumann mics. Now I want one. It's so much better sounding.

Here is a microphone in the "Ekot" news studio. Don't know what it is though:

Click to view full-size image…

Images can show up blank. In that case:
In about:config, Set

privacy.resistFingerprinting.autoDeclineNoUserInputCanvasPrompts

to

false

and allow WhatsApp access to canvas data.

It seems to be enough to toggle this,  confirm access for Whatsapp, and toogle it off again We'll see.

Web WhatsApp shows blank/white image : firefox

For whatever reason, this dance video has stuck with me, I like it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBWMOurhmpk

If the embed doesn't work, follow the link!

A random like on Twitter reminded me of this old tweet:

Click to view full-size image…

Tried 3 electric scooters (kickbikes) rentals in Stockholm: Tier (Austrian, I think), Lime (American) and Voi (Swedish). The scooters are everywhere! I think the way they look & work though will evolve rapidly, because commercial use sets a different set of constraints.

• Tier is the best scooter, but they become unavailable at late evenings
• Lime has jerky accelerator
• Voi is ok, with super availability and a stronger motor than Tier

Tier lacks external battery so I guess they have to collect all scooters every evening. Voi & Lime can just switch batteries. Hope Tier upgrades soon. It has smooth throttle & mechanical brake, & half the price/minute. These kind of vehicles the way they are designed today are front heavy & thus handle a bit weird.

Click to view full-size image…

Update 2019-06-27: As can be seen above, some of the Tier scooters now have been fitted with external batteries (the black bulb halfway down the back of the steering column) afaict. The competition goes on… However I also see Tier scooters without this modification. Update 2019-06-30: Tier still shuts down the entire network at around 22.00 every day. That is truly weird. Also, their bikes seem to dropped back in clumps of four to six, near metro stations. Unless then, tier travellers like to travel and abandon their bikes in packs of six…

Better scooters ahead

Once they start designing their own rental vehicles they could well place the battery further back to ge a better weight distribution methinks. Update: I think that is exactly what Lime-S Generation 3 does! They do not mention it but you can see the space under the floorboard. And as you can see demonstrated in the above video I just found, Voi does it too. Also bigger wheels. I have not seen these new ones in Stockholm. Anyone who has been skating on inlines on surfaces with cones or stones, knows how much every extra couple of millimeters at the wheels help (in inlines from e.g. 72mm to 80mm). Voi will also try a three-wheeler as can be seen in the background of the above video.

An electrical moped

Click to view full-size image…

Also tried the @blinkeecity (Polish company) moped. With a passenger I think it all weighed in at 218 kg! & you need to balance that with a wide stance due to the floorboard of what I'm fairly sure is a Viarelli Vincero. Good experience but this ain't no kick bike. Price/min not much higher than a kickbike though!

I think the moped itself weighs in at just below 90kg.

Firstly, it's interesting with a migration guide that starts with saying you should not migrate. What is meant afaict is that you should upgrade your brain to write for Riot 4, but keep old components on e.g. Riot3.

Migration Guide · Riot.js

A number of things have changed that I have not used, such as the observable pattern and referencing parents and children.

More verbose

Pretty much all changes will make you write more code inside of a web component. That is a minus I think.

Some good things

The general idea is to be more compatible with contemporary javascript syntax.

There is one thing that has changed that I think is for the better and that is that the "refs" way of referring to DOM elements is gone and instead replaced by the jquery-like selector "$". That makes more sense. I have never used the "yield" tag but it sounds like the new term "slot" is a better word for it.

Some things that add lines of code

Methods operating on the component now need to be wrapped inside an "export default" block, which adds code. I guess you could just put the method names in there and keep the rest outside of the export block. The inline logical statements of the form {truthyOrFalsyTing ? 'iftrue': 'iffalse'} seem to have been removed, and instead you are supposed to create or import functions and put them in the template.

Conclusion

I see no reason to upgrade now, which is inline with the recommendation in the upgrade guide. I'll look through a bit more later onto the new things and see if there is some cool stuff that I'd like to use.

Also

It is hard to find the old docs on the riot site for verison 3, I think they have been deleted, and hence many Google links are broken. I had to go to GitHub to find stuff. I now see that the new FAQ refers you to https://riot.js.org/v3, but that page does not exist.

sudo fallocate -l 12g /mnt/12GiB.swap

sudo chmod 600 /mnt/12GiB.swap

sudo mkswap /mnt/12GiB.swap

sudo swapon /mnt/12GiB.swap

echo '/mnt/12GiB.swap swap swap defaults 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Source: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#How_do_I_add_or_modify_a_swap_partition.3F