He wrote a rather infamous screed on the topic. The thing with the bombs was to force the newspapers to publish it.

Helicon Focus. Some of the errors may be due to the thing moving in between exposures, partly due to my doing this without a tripod and also what with the flower waving around in the wind.

For science!

I'd doubt that would work. You'd also be changing the distance to the subject, and in so doing changing its size in the frame each shot.

You could probably do a burst and twist your focus ring manually throughout, though.

VLC relies on open source media decoding libraries and projects. Thanks to the mechanisms and math behind many video/audio encoding schemes being public knowledge due to whitepapers on the topics in question being available and so forth, these can be reverse engineered by dedicated nerds who are way better at this sort of thing than me. As long as you're not explicitly circumventing DRM there's nothing the owners of proprietary codecs can do to anyone making a compatible decoding library in a clean room fashion, especially as mentioned elsewhere nobody is charging any money in the process. You're licensing the code, not the method.

I imagine this is at least partially why the Jean-Baptiste Kempf is so adamantly against selling, monetizing, or allowing the VLC project to be bought out in any way whatsoever.

Looking good!

Your hauberk is quite a bit longer than mine. I should extend it one of these years, but I also have a pair of totally anachronistic chain pantaloons (complete with some rather beefy webbing strap suspenders...) so thus far I haven't bothered.

I'm going to give a non-answer here, but spend some words pointing out that there is an entire TV Trope explicitly named after the phenomenon contributing to much of the current-day Seinfeld hate, namely that it feels trite and predictable only when viewed through the lens of modernity. Seinfeld is unfunny as we decry that it's all been done before, forgetting that it's only been done before because Seinfeld did it first and lots of others imitated in the wake of its popularity. In its era it was actually truly groundbreaking, in a way that Friends definitely was not.

Seinfeld (along with Married... With Children) was the original raunchy sitcom that broke the genre free from bland family friendly predictability and opened up the possibility of one being entertainment aimed squarely and indeed only at adults. The core cast of Seinfeld are all terrible people, in retrospect probably because Jerry Seinfeld himself was writing from what he knew, where nobody learns the important lesson at the end of the episode on purpose. Sex, relationships, and even failed relationships were openly discussed. There is no central family unit, and every family we are shown in any detail (mainly Jerry's and especially George's) are highly dysfunctional. Before it, the concept of an episode having A and B plotlines that intersect and eventually entangle with each other hadn't been done, even though this is such a staple that it's outright expected of any show today. It had a deliberately misanthropic sense of humor that was the perfect fit for the cynical point in history in which it occupied.

In a way Friends is aspirational, an idealized imagining of a hypothetical urban lifestyle that the viewer may hope to achieve even if they don't personally identify with it. Seinfeld, conversely, is an outright freakshow. You are on the outside looking in at these vain and deceitful people much like a jar full of scorpions someone's just shaken so they'll fight. And you're glad to be on the outside of it, because you really don't want to be them. But there is a certain bile attraction to it nevertheless, a sort of twisted catharsis in that despite how horrible and selfish as the core cast may be they are also somehow able to live without remorse, speak without filters, and act out without consequences in ways that we only wish we could get away with. (The fact that they spout so many zingers and precipitate so many quotable moments probably also helps.)

Raymond Chen on reply all.

"But my cousin told me the fox fire is used by hackers or something, and the Google one said it was faster."

You used AI to make this, yes? That's rather against the sentiment on Lemmy.

Probably, if they wanted to. The historical writing is on the wall that they don't want to, though, as part of whatever their business strategy is. Fear of legal complications due to overtly being a for-profit commercial enterprise might also have something to do with it.

Microsoft is already quite infamous for e.g. going so far as to license third party .zip decompressing code to build into Windows Explorer rather than develop their own, code which apparently nobody in Redmond could be bothered to understand and thus to this very day the .zip archive handling capabilities of Explorer remain frozen and time from the XP era and so rinky-dink that they pale in comparison to commandline tools from the '90s. That's let alone compared to something like 7-Zip.

This also raises the issue of having to maintain said code over subsequent releases and continually update it to support evolving standards, etc., which not only isn't free but presents no obvious mechanism for extracting any revenue from anybody to offset that cost. The current plan of simply outsourcing the entire problem to its rightsholders and passing the licensing cost directly to the consumer allows Microsoft to handily wash their hands of the entire affair, enabling them to devote more resources to trying to shoehorn Copilot AI into the character map or the registry editor, or whatever the fuck.

In my case this is literally true, because the IoT editions of Windows don't even come with a bundled media player (nor a bundled photo viewer other than classic Paint, for what it's worth).

Insofar as I can determine, a parts diagram from one of the myriad of models your gun is cloned from, or vise-versa, is available in this manual here. Here's the relevant excerpt if you don't want to load a .pdf:

Alas, the part numbers on that diagram don't seem to go anywhere. Allegedly the sear from the Tokyo Marui L96 fits these, including the various aftermarket upgrade options for the same. The actual sear is in position 08-3 in the lowermost assembly on that diagram, dead center along the top right edge.

It is unlikely you will be able to reshape or grind the sear such that it works correctly again. The problem will undoubtedly be that the surface on it that matters has been worn away. It's similarly unlikely you'll be able to add any material back to it. It's also probably cast out of potmetal, so it's not like you could weld on it or anything. You can get a new steel aftermarket upgrade sear for around $30 online, which is probably the simplest option.

Manufacturing your own for this would be a fraught undertaking for somebody who didn't already have the equipment and experience. I'm sure it's possible, but don't hold your breath on results if it's your first time making a precision mechanical component from scratch. However, if you have access to a 3D printer it should be reasonably simple to print a very temporary replacement (printed plastics are unlikely to last more than a couple of shots) to verify that the sear was indeed the problem.

But it probably is.

Without the large amount of material and monetary support America provides to keep Israel's military the strongest in the region, they would get steamrolled by their neighbors. Probably not immediately, but it would be inevitable. Note that I'm not saying anything about whether this is right or wrong from any ethical point of view in any direction, simply that it absolutely would happen. For whatever reason it has consistently been the policy of the American government not to let this happen.

Israel's very existence as a modern state has been, shall we say, deeply unpopular with its Arab neighbors literally since day one.

PLA itself absolutely is food safe, and a significant plurality of plastic disposable forks and spoons are made from it these days. (To be clear [edit], this is the material itself typically in an injection moulded final product. FDM 3D printed objects made out of it are not food safe, at least not more than once, because of the layer lines in which bacteria and other cooties can hide.)

Yes, complete with the colors of the ships' laser fire correlating with the colors of tracers used by the US and Eastern Bloc forces, respectively. This is also why all the X-Wing battles are dogfights in space; they are literally thematic recreations of terrestrial fighter plane dogfights as Lucas saw them depicted on TV and in movies.

A further delay will be incurred because on one section of the line we have encountered a brief spot of the wrong sort of rain. We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience.

This has always been an option, but up until now has required changing a setting in group policy (pro/enterprise) or making a registry tweak (home). I would wager that they're simply exposing this policy setting to end users within the regular UI.

In the local group policy editor, it's located in:

Local Computer Policy \ Computer Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Search

Do Not Allow Web Search → Enabled 
Don’t search the web or display web results in search → Enabled

This also works with Windows 10, despite the article focusing on Windows 11.

There are corresponding registry entries for these but I don't know where off the top of my head since I run the Enterprise IoT version and can just use the group policy editor. (Pretty much all local policies simply twiddle the relevant registry bits for you.)

You could always crop it if you wanted to center more on the kitty. I suspect you have the pixels available; If you went out on a safari to even be able to take this excellent photo in the first place, I'll bet you didn't do it with a wind up disposable point-and-shoot!

I don't see that this requires any edits at all, really. There are no technical deficiencies with the photograph. Everything that needs to be in focus is in focus. The composition does a good job of conveying the scale of the tree against the cat, and provides context for the nap in question. It avoids being another subject-spang-in-the-middle photo.

So, what are you trying to accomplish with the final result? If it is to imitate the hyperartificial punchy look of the magazine photographs you see, wind up the contrast and saturation a bunch, and either use your channel mixer or lasso mask tools or what have to you to bring down the brightness of the sky in the background to make it bluer. If you really wanted to chase trends, the internet seems to think you should have used an ND filter and taken this at ƒ/0.8 or whatever to ensure that all objects more than one molecule behind the cat wound up wildly out of focus with exaggerated bokeh.

But personally I wouldn't bother. The world is already full of punters cranking out fake images. Why go through the trouble to make a genuine image look more fake?

If needs must, here's what I did with it:

This was:

• Brightness -5
• Contrast +10
• Global Saturation +10
• Cyan Pseudochannel Lightness -15
• Cyan Pseudochannel Saturation +5

That's all. (Using Corel, not Darktable. Big hammer, world full of nails, you know how it is.)