Here’s what I mean about undesirable men being bashed as a result of the Harvey Weinstein allegations and fallout. This is one of the many examples in the wild:

Your periodic reminder that sexual predators often purposely create an overtly feminist public persona

— Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) November 9, 2017

Check out the whole thread. I doubt there is any real difference in the rate of sexual predatorship of male feminist allies and any other men. I suspect probably lower. Notice, though, that she’s not condemning jock types or frat bros among whom sexual assault is vastly more prevalent. Does that tell you anything? It should.

Anyway, what’s really going on here is that she’s responding predictably to the culture around her, like most people (even if they don’t realize it). The problem is that even most feminists see male feminists or male feminist allies as undesirable men, and unworthy of respect. The castigation and condemnation results from this, truly, not any actions that are unusual.

I am not blaming women. I don’t even care that much. Culture is powerful, and few people can resist it all that much. But it’s bonkers to think that a male feminist ally is more likely to assault you than some bro lawyer or jock type.

Those people have power, though. They are not safe to oppose. Male feminist allies, however, are seen as weak and emasculated by nearly everyone (including feminists) so they are a great target for derision.

I haven’t written anything about Tom Petty. I like his music well enough and some of his songs quite a lot. But his death struck a little too close to home, literally.

He was a North Florida boy like me. His dad thought him effeminate, called him a faggot. Like mine did to me. He fled North Florida. Just like I did. Found a better life, too.

He seemed like a good man.

When I saw his videos on TV in the 1980s, someone told me that he was from North Florida. At the time I didn’t know his story. No internet then. But I thought, Strange-looking North Florida weirdos can do ok in this world, it turns out, and that truly did help me. Then, I needed all the help I could get. You have no idea. I make light of it now, but times, as they say, was rough.

Me. Tom Petty. North Florida weirdos achieving escape velocity.

A very unappreciated artist, Jess Klein:

No reverb on the mic. No backing track. Just her, and better than most people with a full band.

Chevy finally released the 2017 production numbers for my car. With the options mine has, there were only 49 made on the entire planet in model year 2017.

There were only 283 in my color ever made, for all years produced.

No one cares (and I like it that way), but it’s odd driving a really rare car. I get to be in the exotic car club without paying exotic car prices.

And that car is a blast to drive. Love every minute of it. Even crawling along in traffic is better.

Even when you explicitly set Microsoft Word to French and attempt to type in that language, it sometimes mysteriously reverts back to English in part of the document and then gives you a case of the red squigglies.

I am not as good at French orthography as I am at English, so I spent like 30 seconds staring at “parfois” trying to figure out what the hell I’d spelled wrong because it looked fine to me.

It was fine; Word was the one with the problem — surprise!

I am, by nature, optimistic. My optimism has been shaken in the last year. I understand better now how optimism is empty without WORK. Optimism isn't a strategy, it's a guidepost. https://t.co/ggglTqYeJR

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) November 8, 2017

As one of my drill sergeants during basic training used to say, “Hope isn’t a plan!”

Usually followed by some cursing.

That drill sergeant was a pretty awesome guy, really.

The difference between Windows and Mac OS is that if Windows can choose to do something stupid and counterproductive, it does that every time.

Mac OS while not always being the most intuitive, at least tries to do something that makes some sort of sense. It has a unified paradigm and logic, while Windows seems to have been created in comparison by a poo-flinging chimp.

The more I use both OSes — and I use each at least eight hours a day — the more I despise Windows, especially in its latest iterations.

I can’t use Linux full-time because like Windows its support for high-DPI and mixed-DPI screens is stuck in the previous century.

Too big? The reason I’ve never bought a Kindle or any similar device is they are too damn tiny. I read quickly enough that I have to turn the page every few seconds and I just need to see more than a few dozen words on the screen at a time. Having to turn the page as fast as a crazed hamster on a wheel is just not conducive to a good experience.

I use a 10″ iPad Air almost exclusively as a reader as it’s the only device large enough that doesn’t frustrate me.

I’d buy a Kindle if it were 9 or 10 inches.

No way I’ll ever buy one otherwise. I bet there are quite a lot of people like me in this respect.

Windows 10 even at the latest update level is a very shoddy experience with a 4K monitor, and particularly unworkable if you have monitors with different DPIs. Also, if you dock or undock a laptop it fails utterly at handling 4K well, too.

I know, Microsoft has abandoned the desktop despite making billions a year from it.

It’s shocking, though, how much better and smoother the Mac experience is in this and most other respects.

Windows 10 is completely dysfunctional with 4K, and Office 2016 is utterly broken, too, making the experience all the worse.

By the way, Office 2016 on the Mac works perfectly with high DPI and Office on the Mac in general has been functional since 2013 in this respect.

Windows 10 is a pitiful OS that reminds me of my frustrations with Windows in the Windows 2.0 to 3.11 era 25+ years ago.

My partner is quite talented at math and she greatly resents all the time and money she spent in supposed “science” classes essentially taking worthless math IQ tests rather than learning anything useful.

Why, exactly, do we teach this way? We pretend as if it has to be, but it does not — obviously.

It serves almost no student well and the world even more poorly to make math the absolute focus of so much of even science education.

Math should be a tool you take off the shelf when you need it, just like any other, not the end goal of STEM scholarship.

My pet theory is that a lot of STEM types simply couldn’t handle anything else but goofing around with musty equations, but that might be just me being petty.

VLC works ok on the Mac, but has some drawbacks. Since MPlayerX is now riddled with spyware, I had been looking for an alternative.

IINA despite having a terrible name seems to fit the bill. It is Mac-optimized which VLC is not and it has some great features that are either hard to access in VLC or are just not present.

Recommended.

Most of the acting in Mindhunter is very bad, but it’s the only show I’ve ever seen that has a serious and accurate discussion of Émile Durkheim and sociology.

For that, it gets lots of points.

Perhaps the acting will improve.

Lightly-compressed 2160p TV shows look just beautiful on a 5k monitor. Glorious indeed.

How did I live before 5K? How did I trudge through each day, ignorant of such beauty?

Anyone who says there’s no visible difference is just telling me they have shitty equipment and bad eyesight.

The whole HTTPS push is a cynical and perfidious effort by Google (Alphabet) and Mozilla. Here’s why.

I wonder if they’ve even tried to quantify the outages they’ll cause. So many sites are simply residing on a hard disk somewhere, served by an ancient version of some unknown and not maintained server software, chugging along as someone keeps paying the electric bill, and replaces a broken hardware component when needed. The people who created the site might not have understood HTTPS or how to deploy it, and many are long gone. Some of course are dead. We are certainly not all sitting around doing nothing waiting for a handful of programmers on a mail list to make us perform a ridiculous act of security theater for our blog posts written in 2002.

Most of these sites do not need HTTPS. It isn’t an issue for my ancient blog posts. Or yours.

Even those who style themselves as guardians of the web seem intent on destroying it with no lack of celerity. Mozilla, having turned its back on allowing the user control (one of the core tenets of the early web), is also on the side of evil with this push to HTTPS which just throws so much of what made the web great in the garbage.

Dave Winer is one of the few who actually understands the issues at play here and hasn’t been infected by propaganda.

None of my active sites will ever move to HTTPS. If that is ever required of me, they will all be shuttered.

Hey ya’ll, it doesn’t seem like you can change the console resolution of a Linux guest running on HyperV, but you totally can.

Here’s how:

Edit /etc/default/grub with your favorite editor of choice.

Here it be:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Change this line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

To this:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=hyperv_fb:1600x1200"

Then in a console type:

sudo update-grub

I believe the max might be 1920×1200 but I didn’t try it, so I don’t know for sure.