Spent a good chunk of time last night & this morning (post-windstorm) trying to fix …

Spent a good chunk of time last night & this morning (post-windstorm) trying to fix a broken boot loader on my desktop. (Pro-tip: when power’s flaky, make sure the computer is *off*, not just asleep.)

I figured out pretty quickly that UEFI was missing an entry for the Linux install, but since manually creating boot entries in UEFI isn’t something you do very often, it took me forever to find the right steps to fix it.

Blog post for future troubleshooting: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2021/01/fix-uefi/

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Windstorm kicked up overnight. Power has been flaky all freaking day. I’ve been able to …

Windstorm kicked up overnight. Power has been flaky all freaking day. I’ve been able to get work done on the laptop because I only need intermittent internet access.

But between losing power & losing internet, the desktop’s not available for gaming, and the kid is getting seriously restless.

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Plus we forgot to do laundry yesterday and can’t rely on the washer to stay on through a whole cycle.

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Hmm, maybe if there’s no reliable computer access tonight we can get the kid to actually go to bed at a reasonable hour?

Yeah, right, who am I kidding?

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I saw this squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

I saw this squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

I saw this #squirrel from about 20 feet away. It slowly moved toward me, pausing to pose every few feet. I think it was hoping I would feed it.

#animals #nature

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Project Loon is being shut down because Google couldn’t find a working business model for …

Project Loon is being shut down because Google couldn’t find a working business model for internet balloons.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/loons-bubble-bursts-alphabet-shuts-down-internet-balloon-company/

When I first read about the idea (aimed at places where cell towers would be hard to set up, or during disaster recovery) I immediately thought of the aerostats in Robert Charles Wilson’s SF novel, “Spin.” In that case it was a solution to replace satellite communications because a mysterious barrier had blocked off access to Earth orbit.

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The weirdest migraine aura I’ve had added several hours of aphasia to the usual (for me) flashing zigzag lines and blind spots. I understood all the scans they did at the ER, but I could barely string a sentence together. I was back to normal the next morning.

@theavandiepen @TeamPumfy @StructuredSucc The weirdest migraine aura I’ve had added several hours of aphasia to the usual (for me) flashing zigzag lines and blind spots. I understood all the scans they did at the ER, but I could barely string a sentence together. I was back to normal the next morning.

Westerners who reached China overland by way of the silk road picked up the name Cathay…

Related: Westerners who reached China overland by way of the silk road picked up the name Cathay from central Asia, and westerners who reached China by sea picked up the name China from southeast Asia, and they didn’t realize both names referred to the same country until the late 1500s, when a group of Jesuits living in China started comparing Marco Polo’s account to their own travels and couldn’t find anyone in China who had heard of this “Cathay” place to the north.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay

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The point where they met up with some Saracens in Beijing and asked them if they’d heard of “Cathay”, and they said, “We’re in Cathay right now” basically clinched it, though it took a while for them to convince everyone back in Europe.

Portuguese Jesuits in India sent someone overland to Cathay to check, and along the way he met a returning caravan who told him about the Jesuits they’d met in Beijing a while back.

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Wiki-walking, found this article collecting “Early World Maps” from antiquity through around 1800. I’ve always …

Wiki-walking, found this article collecting “Early World Maps” from antiquity through around 1800. I’ve always found it interesting to look at maps where they got the coastlines right, because they needed to be for sailing, but the proportions are all wrong. And it’s fascinating to compare the older Chinese maps that sort-of include Europe to the older European maps that sort-of include China, based on what little was known of each other at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps

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