h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Farmers won their right-to-repair fight against John Deere. The settlement includes a 10-year “agreement by Deere to provide ‘the digital tools ​required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair’ of tractors, combines, and other machinery”. https://www.thedrive.com/news/john-deere-to-pay-99-million-in-monumental-right-to-repair-settlement

My first piece of work for Pimoroni talks about the new Badgeware range. Badger, Tufty, and Blinky may sound like cartoon characters, but they are the new RP2350 powered boards. Badger is e-paper, Tufty is an IPS LCD, and Blinky is 872 bright white LEDs.
https://blog.pimoroni.com/tiny-screens-big-ideas-show-us-your-badgeware-projects/

New post: Sparrowhawk

https://www.rousette.org.uk/archives/sparrowhawk/

CW for the linked post: contains some descriptions of natural predation event.

#nature #birds

*** New blog post *** in which I revisit a village in Zeelandic Flanders and sing the praises of a bypass road.

https://therantyhighwayman.blogspot.com/2026/04/ive-seen-things-you-people-wouldnt.html

Vancouver, Canada: The public transit grid is thickening! https://humantransit.org/2026/04/vancouver-the-grid-thickens.html

You'll likely catch this image a million times in your various feeds: Earth as seen by Reid Wiseman from Artemis II en-route to the Moon.

My first thought? That's *really* noisy 🧐

But then I realised – it's the *nightside* of Earth, illuminated by the almost full Moon, not the Sun 🌕

The bright limb at lower-right is where the dayside starts, & the fact that you can see aurorae, airglow, & cities in Europe, Africa, & S & N America also gives the game away.

Cool.

#Photography #Artemis

We may have a winner here. The official NASA tracker, https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/ has a hidden DIV for accessibility. This shows the live telemetry.

Holy shit this is detailed. Can you believe the hubris to silently collect all this information on users?

#privacy

https://browsergate.eu/how-it-works/

Mail in ballots have security features and a processing workflow that mirror that of in-person voting. Just about every mechanism that prevents you from showing up to vote in person multiple times or without being registered has an analog - sometimes a stronger one - in mail-in ballot processing.

The precise details vary from state to state and for different voters, but roughly:

Gen-X to Gen-Z Translation Matrix

Meaning Gen-X Gen-Z
That’s cool Dope Bussin
Lame Bogus Cringe
I agree Word Facts
Nonsense Whatever Cap
True For real No cap
Impressive Tight Goes hard
Weird Sketchy Sus
Funny That’s rich I’m dead
Attractive Fine Baddie

Any others?

Obsolete Sounds is the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening. https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds/

Clocks go forward tonight in UK and Europe ⏰

Unpopular opinion: Numbered streets can be wonderful. (An important consideration as US cities rename hundreds of streets named for César Chávez.) My take: https://humantransit.org/2026/03/the-joy-of-numbered-streets-or-call-it-39th-avenue.html

To fully confirm that I am middle aged and live in a bungalow. I am very pleased to announce that my tea and coffee shelf is now organised.