sky-traveler

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Literal definition of spyware:

Also From Microsoft’s own FAQ: "Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. 🤡

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Finnish Miku, but its the iron age because I'm a cultural history nerd.

The outfit I used as reference is from the later parts of the iron age, perhaps around 1000 AD. Based on archaeological finds in the Karelia region, and this particular reconstruction has been made by Hanna Aalto. I did take some minor artistic flairs and instead of the funky headdress just added some braid decorations.

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doodle of a reconstructed 11th century finnish dress known as the perniö dress (there's more clothing like this called "muinaispuku" but i don't know what good translation there is to this, ancient dress??)

i don't know why i made her look so mad....

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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The Illustrated Book of Manners: A Manual of Good Behavior and Polite Accomplishments, 1866

"If the amount of happiness, immediate or ultimate, is increased by any costume, it is right to wear it."

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That's not quite what it means...

It's more "Joyful on the surface even if you're rotting deep inside".

Or possibly "Keep having a good time even though you're rotting inside."

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Likewise seized by the urge to dig holes by reading too much early medieval history.

Inching towards archeology career shift one podcast a time

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places you can go in Finnish

to your own road (mennä tiehensä, to buzz off)

to the wolf (mennä hukkaan, to lose something)

inside the bilberry (mennä mustikkaan, to go pick bilberries; the same form works with other berries and also mushrooms in general)

into the forest (mennä metsään, to make a mistake)

into the doorjamb (mennä pieleen, to make a mistake)

to the magpies (mennä harakoille, to be wasted)

to an ancient god (mennä jumiin, to be stuck)

into yourself (mennä itseensä, to reflect on something bad you said/did)

to become a bunch of vulvas (mennä vituiksi, to be completely unsuccessful)

onto the thighs (mennä reisille, to be completely unsuccessful)

to the havings of sex/into marriage (same root word) (mennä naimisiin, to get married)

into the underworld (mennä manalle, to die)

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Those of you who have been learning finnish bc of käärijä or other finnish artist like kuumaa. How much can you speak it or are still at the moi minun nimi on____?

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I cannot believe there's absolutely no way to watch free shows and movies anymore, there are too many paid streaming platforms and pirating websites have viruses and ads preventing you from watching it uninterrupted((.)) id rather follow the rules and purchase media moving forward because it is too inconvenient. Seriously, free and no ads or viruses with 1080p streaming is DEAD.

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I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again:

You have to put energy into your plans for after the election. Every single US election season, tons of people get incredibly excited to participate in the political process, they sign up for a bunch of groups, and then as soon as the election is over, they never go back. Unions, street medic groups, Food Not Bombs, arrest support, covid safety advocacy...I've seen all this and more fall completely apart after presidential elections wrapped up and everything went "back to normal." People think they're done after the votes get tallied.

I am the social media coordinator for my union. Trying to get asses into meetings is brutally fucking difficult, because people only like the idea of political action. The second it gets hard, or boring, or requires more than just ticking a ballot box, people disappear. And it's incredibly demoralizing, to be perfectly honest. So many people on this site talk about smashing fascism and sticking it to the man, but where the hell are you when it's time to have a union meeting? Where are you when it's time to vote on the next action? Where are you when we need help with the tedious clerical shit? Where are you when we need to plan the big actions that you're so excited about participating in? Where are you?

You have to participate in activism and organizing and resistance even when there isn't a presidential election. You have to pick a way to get involved that isn't just electoral season. You have to actually do all the "holding him accountable" you keep saying will happen after you help Biden win.

This short-term "vote blue and then never do anything else" shit has got to stop. Put your money where your mouth is and go to a fucking union meeting.

[sky-traveler]

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows the user to drag select multiple hyperlinks and open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips" and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

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how you die in Finnish

you sleep away (nukkua pois)

you go forward (mennä edes; "edesmennyt")

you go away (mennä pois; "poismennyt")

and also...

you change your diocese (vaihtaa hiippakuntaa)

you throw a crank (heittää veivi)

you kick emptiness (potkaista tyhjää)

you enter the underworld (mennä manalle)

you join the upstairs orchestra (liittyä yläkerran orkesteriin)

[sky-traveler]

A little thing I made about inflecting municipality names

Most names in this list were checked from the official web pages of the municipalities. Blame them for any mistakes (/j)

A lot of teachers will tell you to remember some kind of rule set for these kinds of things but I wouldn't do that. Instead, I would advise you to think of them as guidelines; for example, many places that end in -joki use the allative. The most important thing to remember though is that it is not set in stone! There might be a place that uses the illative instead.

Also, remember that even native speakers get these things wrong sometimes. (I had to google an embarrassingly large amount of these just to be sure which one it was) When in doubt, think of a similar place name and use the ending. (you might or might not be correct!)

There might also be situations where the locals cannot come to a conclusion on what the "real" way is, I added some examples of that too. I've also come across situations where two different places have the exact same name but they both inflect it differently...

Here are some resources on this.

(In Finnish) It's very useful since it gives both the inflection (yellow) and what the locals are called (green)

The Institute for the Languages of Finland advice page on the matter. (there's more links to stuff in there too) (In Finnish)

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does anyone know where to watch Moomin in Finnish online?