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Galaxy Gals

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The queen of suspense: how Ann Radcliffe inspired Dickens and Austen – then got written out of the canon - "She was all but forgotten. Now the 18th-century author's republished novels reveal why she made such an extraordinary contribution to literature."

"She offers us a heroine-centred narrative where a young, unprotected, often orphaned heroine is thrown into really dangerous situations where somebody is trying to force her into marriage and take her property rights." The heroines are often imprisoned in remote, atmospheric locations where supernatural events appear to take place. "That gives us a real sense of terror," said Wright. "It's quite psychological, before psychology was invented. She uses the image of the decayed castle or crumbling convent to explore the precarious and outmoded issue of marriage laws in England, where coverture meant a woman's legal identity and her property effectively disappeared when she married. So she shows young women in distress, in really exciting, action-packed narratives, with the aim of showing the precarious nature of a young female's existence who has no protection in society." By empowering her heroines with the strength and resilience they need to escape and marry the men they choose, Radcliffe is "very staunchly" showing that women can successfully resist domination, Wright said. "There is a sense of Radcliffe critiquing patriarchy and men who think they can dictate to women precisely what we should do and what we should give to them in marriage. So in many ways it is feminist literature, on a par with what Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing in A Vindication of the Rights of Women." At one point, a Radcliffe villain tells his victim: "You speak like a heroine, let us see if you can suffer like one." Wright added: "There's always a happy ending and a good resolution. But there's a sense of a heroine being able to manoeuvre that resolution."
also btw...
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. We will need writers who can remember freedom, the realists of a larger reality.
--Ursula K. Le Guin
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jepler
21 hours ago
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FEMA Adds Misinformation To Its List of Disasters To Clean Up

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is fighting misinformation on top of a major storm cleanup in Florida as Hurricane Milton rapidly intensifies just after Hurricane Helene rocked the state. From a report: FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters on a call Tuesday that misinformation around the storms is "absolutely the worst I have ever seen," according to Politico. FEMA posted a rumor response page about the hurricane, and though it's not the first time it's taken that kind of approach, Criswell said, "I anticipated some of this, but not to the extent that we're seeing."

FEMA's rumor response page includes fact-checks to claims made by former President Donald Trump, like that the agency will only provide $750 to disaster survivors. FEMA says that's just the amount provided quickly through "Serious Needs Assistance" for food and emergency supplies, but survivors could still be eligible for other types of funds, too. Other fact-checks include debunking the false claim that FEMA disaster response resources were diverted to border issues. FEMA says "Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts."

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jepler
1 day ago
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Entire states could be designated as "misinformation superfund sites"
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Salt Showdown: Diamond Crystal vs Morton’s, Table, & Sea Salt

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From: Helen Rennie
Duration: 11:04

Salt Showdown: Diamond Crystal, Morton’s, Table, & Sea Salt

00:00 Intro
01:12 Salts and Prices
01:56 Crystal Structure
02:35 Diamond Crystal Kosher vs Morton’s Kosher
03:45 Water Test
05:18 Chicken Test
07:09 Cucumber Test
07:30 Leafy Salad Test
08:47 Hard Boiled Egg Test
09:13 Salt Shakers vs Hands
10:05 Takeaway

Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt on Amazon (affiliate link that helps support my channel):
https://amzn.to/3UpYj15

Support my channel
https://www.patreon.com/helenrennie

My cooking classes in the Boston area:
http://www.helenrennie.com

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/HelensKitchenCooking/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/helen.rennie

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jepler
1 day ago
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Me, I use table salt .. but even at the crazy-sounding $14/3lbs the cost of a teaspoon of DCS is only around 9 cents US, so use the salt you're familiar with and don't sweat it.
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fxer
1 day ago
DCS used to be under fivebux…it’s just faakin salt after all
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FeatherWing of the Day: Adafruit 2.13″ HD Tri-Color eInk / ePaper Display FeatherWing – 250×122 RW Panel with SSD1680 #WingOfTheDay

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The Adafruit Feather ecosystem is so rich with hardware diversity, we wanted to share them, one each day. Today is the Adafruit 2.13″ HD Tri-Color eInk / ePaper Display FeatherWing – 250×122 RW Panel with SSD1680!

Easy e-paper comes to your Feather, with this breakout that’s designed to make it a breeze to add a tri-color eInk display. Chances are you’ve seen one of those new-fangled ‘e-readers’ like the Kindle or Nook. They have gigantic electronic paper ‘static’ displays – that means the image stays on the display even when power is completely disconnected. The image is also high contrast and very daylight readable. It really does look just like printed paper!

We’ve liked these displays for a long time, and they’re just about Feather sized, so wouldn’t a custom e-paper FeatherWing make a ton of sense? This ‘Wing is tested to work with all of our Feathers, from the ESP8266 to the M0. It has built-in memory buffering so it can work with chips as small as the ’32u4 and ‘328. It does use a lot of pins: the 3 SPI pins, and up to 4 control pins to manage the SD card slot and SRAM.

The FeatherWing sports a 2.13″ tri-color (red, black, and white) display. It has 250×122 black and red ink pixels and a white-ish background. We used to stock a version of a 2.13″ tricolor E-Ink with a lower-resolution display, this version is 250×122 pixels instead of 212×104 pixels and uses a different chipset (SSD1680) so code will need to be recompiled.

Using our CircuitPython or Arduino libraries, you can create a ‘frame buffer’ with what pixels you want to have activated and then write that out to the display. Most simple breakouts leave it at that. But if you do the math, 250 x 122 pixels x 2 colors = 7.5 KBytes. Which won’t fit into many microcontroller memories. Heck, even if you do have 32KB of RAM, why waste 8KB?

So we did you a favor and tossed a small SRAM chip on the back. This chip shares the SPI port the eInk display uses, so you only need one extra pin. And, no more frame-buffering! You can use the SRAM to set up whatever you want to display, then shuffle data from SRAM to eInk when you’re ready. The library we wrote does all the work for you, you can just interface with it as if it were an Adafruit_GFX compatible display.

We even tossed on a MicroSD socket so you can store images, text files, whatever you like to display. Comes assembled and tested with socket headers that you can plug your Feather right into, no soldering required!

USE

The Adafruit 2.9″ eInk Display Breakouts and FeatherWings Guide provides details and use examples.

Video:

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jepler
3 days ago
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I recently used the monochrome version of this in a project and it looks great
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Google's AI Search Summaries Officially Have Ads

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Google is rolling out ads in AI Overviews, which means you'll now start seeing products in some of the search engine's AI-generated summaries. From a report: Let's say you're searching for ways to get a grass stain out of your pants. If you ask Google, its AI-generated response will offer some tips, along with suggestions for products to purchase that could help you remove the stain. The products will appear beneath a "sponsored" header, and Google spokesperson Craig Ewer told The Verge they'll only show up if a question has a "commercial angle."
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jepler
8 days ago
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Here is some AI-generated ad copy that has high cosine-similarity to your search terms: ...
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Laptop GPU Upgrade With Just A Little Reballing

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Modern gaming laptops are in an uncomfortable spot – often too underpowered for newest titles, but too bulky to be genuinely portable. It doesn’t help they’re not often upgradeable, so you’re stuck with what you’ve bought – unless, say, you’re a hacker equipped some tools for PCB reflow? If that’s the case, welcome to [TechModLab]’s video showing you the process of upgrading a laptop’s soldered-on NVIDIA GPU, replacing the 3070 chip with a 3080.

You don’t need much – the most exotic tool is a BGA rework station, holding the mainboard steady&stiff and heating a specific large chip on the board with an infrared lamp from above. This one is definitely a specialty tool, but we’ve seen hackers build their own. From there, some general soldering tools like flux and solder wick, a stencil for your chip, BGA balls, and a $20 USB-C hotplate are instrumental for reballing chips – tools you ought to have.

Reballing was perhaps the hardest step of the journey – instrumental for preparing the GPU before the transplant. Afterwards, only a few steps were needed – poking a BGA ball that didn’t connect, changing board straps to adjust for the new VRAM our enterprising hacker added alongside the upgrade, and playing with the driver process install a little. Use this method to upgrade from a lower-end binned GPU you’re stuck with, or perhaps to repair your laptop if artifacts start appearing – it’s a worthwhile reminder about methods that laptop repair shops use on the daily.

Itching to learn more about BGAs? You absolutely should read this article series by our own [Robin Kearey]. We’ve mostly seen reballing used for upgrading RAM on laptop and Raspberry Pi boards, but seeing it being used for an entire laptop is nice – it’s the same technique, just scaled up, and you always can start by practicing at a smaller scale. Now, it might feel like we’ve left the era of upgradable GPUs on laptops, and today’s project might not necessarily help your worries – but the Framework 16 definitely bucks the trend.

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jepler
8 days ago
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when you say you're a baller
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