A comment by Adam Keys about showing grace in airports over on Craig Mod’s site reminded me of this story from the introduction of Genny Rumancik’s book The Wisdom of Feeling: Finding Clarity, Courage, and Connection Through Emotional Intelligence:
This advice works for crowded online spaces too. I feel like the KDO community guidelines are geared towards creating this type of atmosphere in the comments section here. ↩
Tags: books · Genny Rumancik · The Wisdom of Feeling
When someone says “German techno group”, you probably have a pretty good picture in your mind. MEUTE, on the other hand, is an 11-piece techno marching band that plays electronic music with acoustic instruments: tubas, trombones, drums kits, etc. Reset (above) is a single from their new album, KOSMOS. I love this.
Batteries have a habit of quietly getting worse. Anyone who has nursed an old smartphone through its final years knows the routine—it leaves the house at 100% and is begging for a charger by lunchtime. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common worries about electric cars is what happens to the pack after a few years and a lot of kilometres. Nobody wants to buy a used EV only to discover it can barely make it across town. Fears around battery degradation and high replacement costs were…
Another banger from neal.fun: Battle Draw. Sort of an open world tower defense “game”?
Scientists have discovered that gut bacteria can feed on the protective mucus lining your intestines, producing potentially harmful compounds, but fiber helps keep this activity in check. Overlooked proteins in plant foods also help shift gut bacteria toward producing beneficial substances, revealing a surprising new reason plant-based diets may be good for you.
Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' is a definite, and Luc Besson's 'The Fifth Element' is possible too.
Google is rightfully facing blowback for forcing K-12 schools to enable AI if they wanted to keep using Google search. The company quickly backtracked and decoupled and turned off the services by default, but made it clear search will continue to be just another AI chatbot. This mandate forces an ultimatum on educators: accept generative AI or de-google your school.
Students, teachers, and parents across the U.S. are now years into an argument about how schools should respond to the growth of AI-enabled tools. Google decided to skip this debate and take this choice from schools. In August it activated AI chatbot Gemini for 150 million K-12 students on Google Classroom, leaving educators scrambling to respond. A few months later, Google introduced a new way to turn it off — but now administrators would also be turning off Google search.
Google walked this back somewhat, clarifying that Gemini, Gemini notebook, and Search will have their own controls and will be off by default. But because of Google’s broader approach to force AI on all search users, this change is still an example of a tech monopolist pushing unwanted changes into the classroom.
It’s no secret that the biggest companies in AI are operating at a huge loss, in the hope they can follow Uber’s enshittification playbook. Offer a cheap convenience at a major loss until old systems atrophy, then flip the script to reduce wages and raise consumer costs—whether that’s paying with cash or with data.
This puts Google in the odd position of an incumbent, with around 90% of search traffic. It needs to not only make good on its own AI investment, but protect its dominance from new AI tools. It’s not just enough to offer its own AI mode, it needs to turn search into AI mode, while engaging in clumsy self-preferencing that is eating its own ad revenue.
Google can and should offer a way to disable AI overviews. Smaller services like DuckDuckGo* and Brave search have simple and persisting AI settings which don’t require login. These services also don't mince words and make a distinction between generated AI summaries, suspected AI results, and the backend use of AI to curate links.
It’s not enough to point to opaque workarounds, either. Adding “-ai” to your Google search will usually remove AI Overview, but so will “-unicorn”. This trick isn’t meant to be an AI off-switch, it’s a quirk of how AI Overview was implemented and can change at any time. These tricks also don’t generalize well to settings for system administrators. Hacks might work for now, but everyone—including administrators—deserve clear set-and-forget controls for the tools they rely on.
De-googling your life isn’t easy, and for schools it can be even more difficult. For decades Google has gone after schools to foster life-long Google users—resulting in many institutions being deeply entrenched in its ecosystem despite data privacy concerns. That’s because schools face major switching costs when moving to a competitor. It takes more than flipping a setting—it means a lengthy contract process, staff retraining, and a cumbersome migration of past work.
The difficulty of switching makes granular controls even more essential, particularly for a hot-button issue like generative AI. Few parents would send their kids to AI-driven schools, but they may want their kids to learn tools like search as they exist outside of the classroom. However, many parents and teachers concerned with AI disrupting learning are pushing major school districts to implement temporary AI moratoriums for young students. These pauses are meant to make sure any introduction of AI fits the needs of students and is done in a way that actually makes sure educators are prepared.
But in either camp, this is a choice that must be made by schools, not Google. Teachers know more about what their students need than a trillion-dollar tech company, and this expertise should be respected in their own classrooms.
Google’s self-preferencing and desperate attempt to eventually recoup on an AI money pit must be tempered with more fine-tune controls over generative AI. It’s in Google’s own interest to stop abusing its dominance to piss off users, advertisers, and school communities. It’s also Google’s responsibility as an adjudicated monopolist.
*DuckDuckGo is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.
She was scared of him but soon loosened the Shakespearean up – then watched him give Star Trek depth, even insisting scenes be rewritten for her. Captain Picard’s right-hand woman salutes her fabulous friend
Source: theguardian.com
‘We freed Patrick Stewart!’ Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis on breaking in her beloved but very serious co-star
- The Guardian MEWS 📰 (@guardian) Oct 31, 2026
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#PatrickStewartMEWS #StarTrekMEWS #TelevisionMEWS #CultureMEWS #Television&RadioMEWS #FilmMEWS #HuddersfieldMEWS #TottenhamHotspurMEWS #MEWS
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She was scared of him but soon loosened the Shakespearean up – then watched him give Star Trek depth, even insisting ...
"A month before Covid hit, my husband died. I was on my own in my house in Los Angeles for a year with just my dogs for company. Patrick was one of the very few people who invited me over for lunch, socially distanced in his garden. It had occurred to him that I was grieving and on my own – and he did something about that. It’s a mark of who he is."
#startrek #SirPatrickStewart #tng #marinasirtis
- Hank G ☑️ (@hankg) Nov 01, 2026
A touching tribute to Patrick Stewart by Marina Sirtis
#PatrickStewart #News #InMemoriam #StarTrek #Xmen
- Osma A 🇫🇮🇺🇦 (@osma) Nov 01, 2026
‘We freed Patrick Stewart!’ Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis on breaking in her beloved but very serious co-star https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/31/patrick-stewart-star-trek-marina-sirtis-picard-shakespearean
- Matthew Rimmer (@drrimmer) Nov 01, 2026
She was scared of him but soon loosened the Shakespearean up – then watched him give Star Trek depth, even insisting scenes be rewritten for her. Captain Picard’s right-hand woman salutes her fabulous friend
- (gobsmacked) (@nwchapman) Oct 31, 2026
#StarTrek #SirPatrickStewart
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/31/patrick-stewart-star-trek-marina-sirtis-picard-shakespearean
🔁 @VWDasher:
‘We freed Patrick Stewart!’ Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis on breaking in her beloved but very serious co-star
#StarTrek #MarinaSirtis #PatrickStewart
- Carolyn (@CStamp) Nov 01, 2026
‘We freed Patrick Stewart!’ Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis on breaking in her beloved but very serious co-star | Patrick Stewart | The Guardian
- Jock Rutherford 🌻🇨🇦 (@jockr) Nov 01, 2026
‘We freed Patrick Stewart!’ Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis on breaking in her beloved but very serious co-star | Patrick Stewart | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/31/patrick-stewart-star-trek-marina-sirtis-picard-shakespearean #startrek #patrickstewart #history #trivia
- kctipton (@kctipton) Oct 31, 2026
"There was a scene written for Picard and Data, where Picard tells the story of how his family were burned in a fire. Patrick went to the writers and producers and asked if they could rewrite the scene to have me be in it instead of Brent Spiner."
- ATMcashpoint (@atmcashpoint) Oct 31, 2026
Follow the entire discussion on Twitter
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Palm OS, an operating system for a range mobile devices that predated mobile phones, is largely forgotten today. Or at least, that’s what [Aaron Ardiri] thought. That all changed when he was …
Source: hackaday.com
🔁 @hackaday:
Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks to Personal Backups
- John-Mark Gurney (@encthenet) Nov 02, 2026
Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks to Personal Backups https://hackaday.com/2026/10/31/huge-palmos-development-archive-goes-online-thanks-to-personal-backups/
- Joseph A di Paolantonio (@jadp) Nov 02, 2026
Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks To Personal Backups https://hackaday.com/2026/10/31/huge-palmos-development-archive-goes-online-thanks-to-personal-backups/
- trends (@trendsbot) Nov 01, 2026
Palm OS, an operating system for a range mobile devices that predated mobile phones, is largely forgotten today. Or at least, that’s what [Aaron Ardiri] thought. That all changed when he was …
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29 uses from 29 accounts #toplink
🔁 @13:
Huge PalmOS Development Archive Goes Online, Thanks to Personal Backups https://hackaday.com/2026/10/31/huge-palmos-development-archive-goes-online-thanks-to-personal-backups/
- retrogaming_bot (@retrogaming_bot) Nov 01, 2026
#Retrocomputing #SoftwareDevelopment #Datapreservation #Palmos #PalmPilot #Vintage
Follow the entire discussion on Twitter
Check out the hottest stories shared on Murmel
A massive study of nearly 486,000 adults found that regularly drinking tea was associated with an 11% lower risk of heart and blood vessel diseases. The lowest risk was linked to drinking roughly six to eight cups per day, with black tea showing more consistent benefits than green tea.
A simple concept from Kansas City is sweeping the country. Planting fruit trees on vacant lots and making the produce free to anyone has cascading positive effects for the community. Now, more than a million people live within walking distance of a Giving Grove orchard.
Source: kcur.org
KCUR/NPR: A Kansas City nonprofit turned vacant lots into free fruit orchards. It's branched out nationwide
#Fruit #FoodSecurity #BuildingCommunity
- [object Object] (@zzt) Oct 31, 2026
Follow the entire discussion on Twitter
Check out the hottest stories shared on Murmel
There's a website you enjoy visiting, but it contains some elements that for whatever reason you don't like. Maybe they're distracting or you just find them ugly. What do you do? You could put up with it, but you can also take matters in your own hands and remove the annoying stuff yourself. I don't know that browsers can do this out of the gate, but there are extensions which can. Here are two I'm familiar with, and one of them you might already have installed anyway.
With uBlock Origin, which I can highly recommend anyway unless you love seeing ads, it's actually really easy. I'm doing this in Firefox, I assume it works the same in other browsers which support uBlock Origin.
Let's assume you'd want to remove the Links gif at the top of my weekly linkdumps. In uBlock Origin it's really simple, you go to the site which has the element on it you want to remove and click the extension icon in the browser toolbar.
Then you select the pipette symbol which allows you to pick the element you want to remove, and click the element on the site. A window pops up that tells you what will be removed and you can click preview to see if the effect is the one you want, and if it is, click Create and a filter will be created which removes this element from the website.
That's it, done. The element is gone.
To get rid of the filter, open uBlock Origin again, select the gears symbol and then click the My filters tab. There you can see the filter rule which was just created and you can modify and remove it.
Another extension which is more powerful but also more complicated to use is Stylus. This extension allows you to modify any CSS element of a website, giving you total control over the appearance of a site, but also requiring some knowledge about CSS of course.
In order to use Stylus, first you need to identify the CSS class or ID of the element you want to remove. You can either look it up in the site's source code or use the inspect tool of your browser. In the case of the gif on my site, it has the ID linkdumps_gif:
<img class="image" id="linkdumps_gif" alt="an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background" src="/images/gifs/links.gif">
Knowing this, you can open the Stylus extension from the browser toolbar and click the plus symbol next to the URL, or the URL itself.
This takes you to the extension's page where you can add new CSS rules for the selected website.
Here, some CSS knowledge is needed, but in order to hide an element, it's usually enough to select the element and make it invisible with display:none. In the case of my site, this code snippet will do the trick:
#linkdumps_gif {
display: none;
}
This will hide the element in question. Save, and you're done.
So that's it, two ways to hide unwanted objects on a website. I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones I know. Hope this is helpful.
BBS-era "door" games are preserved by the site Break Into Chat, along with their history. Now the site's actually traced the origins of several ANSI art screens in the 1980s and "how different people later transformed the original images," starting from one of the most popular bulletin board systems in St. Louis, Missouri. Slashdot reader Kirkman14 writes: "Fire Escape" was curator of the authoritative list of bulletin board systems in St. Louis's area code and sysop of the area's most…
This is great: Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia fame) sifted through the archive at newspapers.com to find the goings on of long-ago celebrity name doppelgängers (follow-up post). A few of my favorites:
Tags: Annie Rauwerda · celebrity · language
Somehow I’d never heard of this before: NPR produced and aired1 radio dramatizations of the films in the original Star Wars trilogy. The first program was particularly popular, garnering NPR hundreds of thousands of new listeners. The original versions are available in full on The Internet Archive:
Or get all three parts ripped from the CD.
All three programs contain elements of John Williams’ original soundtrack. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised their movie roles for the first two radio programs2 and some other bold-faced names made appearances throughout: Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, John Lithgow as Yoda (??), Ed Begley Jr. as Boba Fett (???), David Alan Grier as a nameless X-wing fighter pilot, and Nia Vardalos.
The radio programs were based on the original film scripts with some added scenes; from Open Culture:
With science-fiction novelist Brian Daley brought on to add or restore scenes to the script of the original dialogue-light feature film, the story stretches out to thirteen episodes for a total runtime of six hours. The series thus stands as an early example of the expansion of the Star Wars universe that, in all kinds of media, has continued apace ever since.
And from Wikipedia:
Daley adapted the script partly using material from earlier drafts of Lucas’s scripts, and restored several scenes cut from the final edit of the film, as well as adding original new scenes created specially for the audio version. The narrative of the first two episodes takes place entirely before the opening scene of the 1977 film, and expands the background to events leading up to the capture of the Tantive IV spacecraft above the planet Tatooine. Episode 1, largely based on cut scenes from…
Although no ghouls, goblins, or trick-or-treaters come knocking at the International Space Station’s front hatch, crew members aboard the orbiting laboratory still like to get in the Halloween spirit. Whether individually or as an entire crew, they dress up in sometimes spooky, sometimes scary, but always creative costumes, often designed from materials available aboard the space station.
Take a look at how the station crews have celebrated in years past.
Follow the astronauts aboard the space station to see how they celebrate holidays in space.
The space station remains a vital scientific platform, providing the foundation needed to survive and thrive as humanity ventures into the unexplored territories of our universe.
Explore stories, images, and research from more than 25 years of continuous human presence aboard the space station.
