I don’t use this often, but when I do, I love it. PB Swiss “coin driver” it’s a dedicated tools for things that are designed to be opened with a coin (like a quarter) which no one has in their pockets anymore and sucked at providing torque anyway.
Some might call this ridiculous or overkill. To those people I say: yes and I love it.
50 Light-years to 51 Pegasi
Image Credit & Copyright: José Rodrigues
Explanation: It's only 50 light-years to 51 Pegasi. That star's position is indicated in this snapshot from August 2025, taken on a night with mostly brighter stars visible above the dome at Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France. Thirty years ago, in October of 1995, astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced a profound discovery made at the observatory. Using a precise spectrograph, they had detected a planet orbiting 51 Peg, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star. Mayor and Queloz had used the spectrograph to measure changes in the star's radial velocity, a regular wobble caused by the gravitational tug of the orbiting planet. Designated 51 Pegasi b, the planet was determined to have a mass at least half of Jupiter's mass and an orbital period of 4.2 days. That made the exoplanet much closer to its parent star than Mercury is to the Sun. Their discovery was quickly confirmed and Mayor and Queloz were ultimately awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 2019. Now recognized as the prototype for the class of exoplanets fondly known as hot Jupiters, 51 Pegasi b was formally named Dimidium, Latin for half, in 2015. Since its discovery 30 years ago, over 6,000 exoplanets have been found.
Another way to think of the Framework fiasco, perhaps:
I'm not naive. I don't think that when, say, I bought my XPS 13, Dell didn't send some percentage of that to the Koch brothers or whatever fascist du jour. But I live in a society, and I needed a laptop.
Framework's whole *thing*, their competitive advantage, was being better. For the most part, that came from upholding political values like repairability and OSS, but still.
They just blew up their entire competitive advantage.
I don’t think #Framework understands that they _are_ a political brand. They don’t have the best products, and they don’t have the cheapest products. They have products that appeal to _political positions_. By trying to keep “politics” out of their decisions, what they’re saying is that the **literal only selling point** of their machines is no longer valid.
It’s incredibly sad to see, because I was a fan of Framework until I saw this atrocious response.
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986/2
“A new study shows that receiving an updated COVID vaccine reduced people’s risk of severe disease and death in all age groups, regardless of immunity from prior infection or vaccination”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-study-finds-annual-covid-vaccines-protect-people-against-severe-disease/
If you are a progressive talking about immigration, please try to frame your messaging as follows:
Immigration is, according to a load of studies, an overall benefit to the economy. But we all know from personal experience that ‘good for the economy’ is not always good for individuals. Immigration can suppress wages, at least in the short term and in local areas, because immigrants are easier to exploit than a lot of other groups. They’re unplugged from any support networks they had growing up, they may not be aware of all of their rights (they may have fewer legal rights), they may miss nuances of language, and so on. And this means that unscrupulous businesses can under pay, over work, and otherwise take advantage of them.
This is even more true of refugees (who literally don’t have anywhere else to go) and people on work visas sponsored by their employers (and so are dependent on their employer’s good will to remain). Work visas that allow partners to come over but not work places more pressure on the single wage earner and makes them even more dependent on their employer.
By creating a class of people that are easy to exploit, unscrupulous businesses can make you directly compete in the labour market with people who have no choice but to accept conditions that you would find unacceptable.
If you’re worried about immigrants taking your jobs, the solution to this is to provide stronger worker rights for immigrants and big penalties for any employer who is found to have violated minimum wage laws. It’s to end loopholes where people act as employees but have the rights of self-employed workers. It’s to make sure that people on high-skills visas can easily move jobs and must be paid a fair market wage.
When someone is demonising immigrants, it’s because they benefit from having an exploitable underclass. The more afraid immigrants are, the easier it is for employers to take advantage of them. And it’s hard for you to compete in the job market against people who have no choice except to accept whatever terms their employer offers.
EDIT: Some people are die-hard racists. Nothing you say will change their minds. But a lot more people have been directly affected by wage suppression. The only people listening to their concerns about the things that directly impact their livelihood are populists who are deflecting blame towards immigrants. If you tell them ‘don’t worry, immigration is great for the economy’ they don’t care. The economy is an abstract concept that doesn’t resonate. If you say ‘immigration is a human right’ then you have the same problem: it’s not a right that the people you’re talking to expect to ever exercise and a right that only other people exercise feels like a privilege. Both messages come across as tone deaf. You are ignoring the problems that they are experiencing and telling them that the downsides for them matter less than the positive aspects for other people. And you’re saying that to a load of people who are right on the edge of the poverty line.
The end state you may want is that national borders are a purely historical curiosity and that free movement everywhere is a universal right. You don’t get to that by alienating a large proportion of voters, you get there by showing those voters that your ideal world is good for them.
The right has shown repeatedly that you can nudge the centre slightly in the direction you want and, after a while, positions that would have seemed extreme are mainstream. The left used to know that. Most of Attlee’s policies would have been far-left extreme policies a couple of decades earlier but the labour movement gradually normalised them.
Your goal isn’t to get everyone to agree with you immediately, it’s to nudge the consensus view towards your position. The approach of ‘moving to the centre’ has just moved the centre away from where you want it to be. You need to frame arguments that move the centre towards you, which resonate with the people that you’re trying to reach. When you split the world into ideologically pure people and everyone else, you discover that ‘everyone else’ keeps winning elections.
EDIT 2: I’m writing this because polling suggests that, in my country, Reform Ltd (a far-right kleptocratic company masquerading as a political party) is on track to win the next election. We have enormous wealth inequality and crumbling public services because decades of kleptocratic governments have looted the public sector. The majority of voters feel this, but the only people acknowledging it are Reform. They are largely the same people responsible for the current problems (not least, those caused by Brexit) but they’re deflecting the blame on immigrants. Their solutions are outright lies.
How is our Labour (a party that spun out from the Labour movement that is now more accurately named Capital, and isn’t even very competent at even that in their latest iteration) government responding? By agreeing that immigrants are the problem (which loses votes from people who know that this is a lie) and promoting watered-down Reform policies (which also don’t make people switch from Reform).
The Green Party (our actual left-of-centre party, which finally won more than one MP in the last election) has a good message on the social side. They point to how immigrants enrich our communities (which should be an easy sell in a country that literally voted ‘Chicken Tika Massala’ as the national dish back in the early ‘90s when we had a Tory government). But on the economic side, they fall back on ‘and they’re good for the economy’. And we’ve had decades of politicians doing things ‘for the economy’ that raise GDP, raise share prices, and just happen to have a negative impact on the most vulnerable.
You cannot be a company arguing about values (right to repair, autonomy) and then trample other people's rights. Shame on @frameworkcomputer.
https://bsd.network/@dch/115342549426557868
@frameworkcomputer i have also posted a discussion on your community forum, as it seems multiple federated posts here have not been able to bring your attention to this problem yet https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
I am somewhat surprised to see frame.work (user upgradable / fixable, if rather expensive, computer seller) setting out its stall in this way, in the face of the concerns raised.
> We deliberately create a big tent ... We don’t partner based on individuals’ or organizations’ beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.
Even if they were considering this solely from a business point of view, I'd have thought that this stance would alienate quite a lot of their target market.
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
Fox has been added into the game, and with this we're about ready to upload the new build for betatesting!
#babaisyou
for anyone in the UK looking to learn basic electronics and python coding
ThePiHut.com has 2 maker advent calendars, back again this year
The 12 Projects of Codemas - https://thepihut.com/products/maker-advent-calendar-includes-raspberry-pi-pico-h
AND
Let it Glow - https://thepihut.com/products/maker-advent-calendar-let-it-glow-inc-raspberry-pi-pico-h
there is a link to see the little projects and code so you can
everything is included, the Pi Pico, breadboard, wires and all components
Just when you thought Keir Starmer's Labour Party couldn't get more illiberal, or more like the Tories...
"Change", my left foot.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
Police to get new powers to cr...
US forces murdered 4 men on the high seas again today. That’s 21 for anyone keeping score. We have no fucking idea what they were actually doing or who they were.
The US has the technology to apprehend people at sea if we are concerned that they are committing crime. Simply blowing them up from afar is literally giving men a death sentence with no trial, no presentation of evidence, no chance at defense against charges, and no way for anyone to review it later. Abhorrent.
I want a repairable Linux laptop with a battery that will last 10h, and that will suspend reliably.
I want a repairable and reliable Linux phone that lets me phone, text, do banking, navigation, calendaring and email, without snooping on me.
Hardware innovation is dead for laptops and phones.
Now I want technology that won’t backstab me. I want tech that’s reasonably safe to use, that’s stable in time, that gives me a choice, and that adapts to how I want to use it.
I kind of want to start an online movement.
OFFLINE DAY.
Last day of every goddamn month, OFFLINE. We just go offline. Turn our fucking phones and smrt devices off, don't listen to music we don't own physical copies of. Go touch grass. Chat to neighbours. See friends. Shop for CDs. Be annoyed when our friends don't turn up to things on time and unlike now we can't find out via instant message that they're late because of public transport being broken. We might even briefly get a feeling of erroneous optimism about the future.
Basically, it's one day a month where we go full '90s.
Kinda wild Apple will kick ICEBlock out of the App Store on safety grounds but the Saudi government app that lets men track women (their “property”) and control their travel is fully allowed even after the Human Rights Watch AND members of the Senate begged them to ban it.
The canceling of ICEBlock is more evidence, were any needed, that the Web is the platform of the future, the only platform without a controlling vendor. Anything controversial should be available through a pure browser interface.
