firehose

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An anonymous reader points out this story about the latest effort by the U.S. to get Edward Snowden back in the country. "A U.S. Senate panel voted unanimously on Thursday to seek trade or other sanctions against Russia or any other country that offers asylum to former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has been holed up for weeks at a Moscow airport. The 30-member Senate Appropriations Committee adopted by consensus an amendment to a spending bill that would direct Secretary of State John Kerry to meet with congressional committees to come up with sanctions against any country that takes Snowden in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Okay, that's not strictly true. At the moment, RHex can only traverse most terrains, hurl himself over gaps around a couple of feet, and pull himself up onto ledges several times his own height, which has been enough to get him nicknamed "the parkour robot."

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

(not not a picture of my Uncle Mike — the one who lives in League City, TX and met his 3rd and current wife, “Snookie,” at Sturgis)

Cabinet members told reporters that Worm, a part-time worker at an auto-body shop and a part-time roadie for the metal band Kreator’s U.S. tour, questioned the high-ranking government officials about “how long these things take” and promised that he’d “just sit here and not bug nobody” until the smoke break.

“Joe told me these things are real easy; you just have to sit in the right spot and not fuck shit up,” said Worm, adding that the vice president encouraged him to keep his trap shut. “He told me straight up not to sit next to the chick from health and human services. They got some beef because he sent her a bunch of cell phone pictures of a pierced nipple or clit or something that got all infected.”

Original Source

No 1 cares at all

With the announcement at Comic-Con International of Mouse Guard: The Weasel War of 1149, Archaia gave the panel attendees an exclusive print that creator David Petersen now reveals was “technically” the first artwork he produced for the acclaimed fantasy series. “The Weasel War of 1149 is the earliest story I had ever thought of for [...]

More than a year after a Kickstarter campaign for a lighthearted Lovecraftian board game generated $122,000 in pledges, the project has been abruptly canceled, triggering accusations of fraud. Erik Chevalier of The Forking Path Co. announced Tuesday to backers that The Doom That Came to Atlantic City! was simply “beyond my abilities.” “Every possible mistake [...]

Most fans who make the annual pilgrimage to Comic-Con International return with some creator signatures or sketches, a few exclusive releases and maybe a case of the con crud. However, Timmy Madere isn’t most fans. According to The Verge, the New Orleans resident got drunk during the 2009 convention, stumbled into a nearby tattoo parlor, [...]

In the last few weeks, Valve has dropped the GCF file format. A "GCF" was like a ZIP file containing thousands of game files. They were usually quite large (several GB was common) and so they were prone to file fragmentation, which balloons loading times as games need to load more files and assets. With Left 4 Dead, Valve started shifting their filesystem infrastructure to a "VPK" format -- instead of being stuffed into one or two colossal files, game assets are distributed among many more smaller .VPK files, improving loading times. Valve has now converted all their older games to use the new VPK file format too.

It's great, but it has also broken most Source mods made before 2013. Fortunately, the fix is pretty trivial: it involves editing the "gameinfo.txt" to mount the file assets in a different way / order than before.

If you want to play Radiator (or any single player mod based on Episode Two), just follow these instructions:

1) Download, install, and run Half-Life 2: Episode Two at least once. You can quit right at the main menu; we just have to make sure it unpacks itself fully and generates some files.

2) In your mod installation, replace the "SearchPaths" block of the gameinfo.txt with the code below. Or, for Handle with Care, just overwrite \Steam\SteamApps\ SourceMods\morematter\ gameinfo.txt with the updated gameinfo.txt here.

So, if you want to fix it yourself -- open up \SourceMods\YOUR_MOD\gameinfo.txt -- and in the SearchPaths block, you might see something like this:

SearchPaths
      {
         Game            |gameinfo_path|.
         Game            |all_source_engine_paths|ep2
         Game            |all_source_engine_paths|episodic
         Game            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2
      }

To fix it, we have to replace that SearchPaths block with an updated version, one that will load the base HL2 files using the new VPK system:

SearchPaths
{
game+mod                        |gameinfo_path|.
platform                        |gameinfo_path|.

game_lv                         hl2/hl2_lv.vpk
game+mod                        ep2/ep2_english.vpk
game+mod                        ep2/ep2_pak.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|episodic/ep1_english.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|episodic/ep1_pak.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_english.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_pak.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_textures.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_sound_vo_english.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_sound_misc.vpk
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2/hl2_misc.vpk
platform                        |all_source_engine_paths|platform/platform_misc.vpk

mod+mod_write+default_write_path                |gameinfo_path|.

game+game_write                 |gameinfo_path|.

gamebin                         episodic/bin

game                            |all_source_engine_paths|episodic
game                            |all_source_engine_paths|hl2
platform                        |all_source_engine_paths|platform
}

3) Restart Steam to make sure the gameinfo.txt changes propagate.

4) Try running the mod now.

If that doesn't work, or you want to troubleshoot a Half-Life 2 or Episode One based Source mod, look at this forum thread for more details: "SteamPipe fix for HL2 and Ep2 Mods"

Via Vintage Kids' Books My Kids Love (where there are several more).

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I was turned onto Amala's Blade in the same place where I get most of my comics news, reviews, and previews: Tumblr. Specifically, I was following the Tumblr for Princeless, which I picked up after realizing it was an all-ages comic starring a POC princess who is out to save all the other princesses from...

Well, a Princeless review is for another time. At any rate, in a case of like begets like, the Princeless Tumblr shared Amala's Blade, another comic with a POC heroine protagonist. I was intrigued.

Unlike Princeless, Amala's Blade is not an all-ages comic. Issue #0 is packed with swarthy, unsavory pirates, staggering fight scenes, and quite a lot of bloody violence. It also gave us a lot of insight into our titular heroine. Amala's Blade #1 follows that swashbuckling adventure with much more exposition on the world at large and Amala's place within it. Mild spoilers are below the cut; if that bothers you, the spoiler-free summary of my thoughts on the issue is that I liked it. It isn't the raucous and crazy introduction we had in issue #0, but it's solid, and while not meaty on action and adventure the exposition is far from dull or ham-handed. The art is pretty stellar throughout, as well, and coupled with the excellent and interesting characterization that alone may make the issue worth picking up.

Imagine it. You walk down the aisle on your special day and lock eyes with Benedict Cumberbatch. Then you turn to the side and go, "Oh, right. You." Such is how I imagine any wedding the newly ordained actor officiates. Yes, that's right, Cumberbatch can legally marry you. But not to himself, to your significant other. He explains, "Two friends of mine are getting married and they really wanted a friend to perform the ceremony. So I went on the Internet and got ordained. I really know how to do weddings now! And I'm available!" As much as I love this story, it still doesn't beat Sir Ian McKellen marrying Sir Patrick Stewart. (via The Hollywood Reporter) Previously in Benedict Cumberbatch

Neil Gaiman has been spoiling us lately. He has already been working on a new prequel to the beloved Sandman series, he just released a new book, and now it has been revealed that the author has been working with The Odd Gentlemen and Moonshark to create a video game. Titled Wayward Manor, the multiplatform game sounds like it fits perfectly with all of Gaiman's witty, whimsical, and dark works. The game follows a ghost residing in his home for 200 or so years as he deals with the many tenants who come to stay and learns about his own life and death.

Finishing up our series of SDCC 2013 cosplay wrap-ups, here we have some of our favorite examples of... well, just weird cosplay. But weird in a good way. A very, very good way. Previously in SDCC 2013 Cosplay

• Kids Cosplay at Comic-Con 2013!
• Cosplay That Really Impressed Us From Comic-Con 2013
• Genderswap and Other Cosplay With a Twist From Comic-Con 2013

Game of Thrones recently announced yet another new casting: Indira Varma (veteran of Luther, where she played the titular character's ex-wife, Torchwood, and Rome) will be joining the Dornishmen as they begin to make their way onto the screen in the coming season. So who is she playing? Check it out under the cut, and beware vague Game of Thrones spoilers!

Rosalind Franklin, the female scientist who discovered the double helical structure of DNA during the course of her work with x-ray crystallography, would have been 93 today. Learn about how her work went largely unacknowledged for so long, and refresh on the most dramatic story you heard during high school biology over at Geekosystem.

peg.gd:

Quickly create and share a web page, using Markdown.

Via gridwriter.

Layouts:

Layouts is an AppleScript file and an Alfred Workflow to give you a lightweight window manager for your Mac.

Out of the box, it allows you to resize your active window to top half, right half, bottom half, left half, top left quarter, top right quarter, bottom right quarter, bottom left quarter, center window and zoom (full screen).

pinboard-cli:

Search your Pinboard bookmarks from the command line.

If you still haven't settled on a Google Reader alternative, or you're concerned about security on any of the popular offerings, MiniFlux is worth checking out.

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Mason jars are great for holding cleaning supplies and cooking ingredients, but they aren't great at dispensing them in moderation. Adding the top of a juice carton to your jars though can give you the best of both worlds.

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nerdache-cakes:

All of you are wrong. The J in GIF is silent. Like in José.

Hif.

atomhjarta:

Futhark on stickers found in pub toilets: Somehow less annoying in Scandinavia than in the US.

On Saturday (July 20) we moved over a terabyte of data from one storage system to another. We made the move because the amount of data we have to store simply did not fit on our servers, and our preliminary tests showed that the new system will only be using about ⅓ of the disk space.

Migration went through fine, however we started seeing a higher I/O load after we finished, and suddenly one SSD drive in one of our database servers stopped working. Not a big deal, we thought — we obviously store data in mirrored mode on several servers — so we asked our hosting provider to swap the drive. We had to re-sync the data to the new disk, so you might have noticed the site being flacky.

However while data was syncing, another SSD drive went down in a different server. We got it replaced, and started syncing two database shards at the same time. At this point we lost 2 more drives, one of which unfortunately was on the server in one of the shards that were repairing.

While you can fly a plane with an engine off, unfortunately when all your engines stop your flight is over. Right now we have to restore our last pre-migration full database backup, and apply incremental updates to bring database to a fresh and (hopefully) consistent state.

Here comes the worst news - this will probably take a day or two.
Sorry about that.

This is a tough and incredibly stressful situation, but it looks like we have no other choice. We understand your frustration (actually, we are in the same boat: we are RSS junkies and built The Old Reader for ourselves and friends) and we are doing everything to make it as fast and painless as possible and live happily ever after.

After that, we will deploy bug fixes along with new things and improvements we have already developed. During last year we adapted and successfully expanded first from 2000 to 5000 users practically overnight, then from 10 000 to 160 000 in several weeks and from 200 000 to 400 000 in four months, so we are considering this as a new level-up for the project (although bumpy and painful one).

It’s 5 AM right now and backup restoration has already begun. We are monitoring and working on The Old Reader nearly 24 hours a day. We will keep frequent (but not annoying updates) in Twitter and will answer all your questions.

We deeply apologize for what has happened but we intend to come back in a much better way.
Thank you very much for your patience, support and understanding,

The Old Reader team.

UPD:

July 25, 21:07 UTC
Back online! We hope this outage lasting July 25 19:12 UTC
If everything goes as planned, we should be back in 4-5 hours.

July 25 15:50 UTC
Import — check;
Indexes — check;
Balancing data between shards and configuring replicasets — in progress.

July 25 08:45 UTC
It looks like we have managed to upload the data. If indexes get generated correctly, we might be back online later today.

July 25 2:00 UTC
Continuing the upload, hoping it goes as planned, counting hours.

July 24 14:00 UTC
Proceeding with restore. More details hopefully in the evening.

July 23 18:00 UTC
We have managed to create a consistent dump of our database and started uploading it to the database servers.