R.NF

According to provincial data, 193 Albertans have died due to influenza so far this season, surpassing last year's total of 175.

That's the highest death toll since at least 2009.

The previous major peak, in 2022-23, was 123 flu deaths.

"I'm concerned now that after seeing this trend now for three years that this is becoming the new normal," said Craig Jenne, a professor in the department of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Calgary.

It's silly to use the geographical map of Canada to show election results. Land doesn't vote, people do.

Image source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/28/world/canada/results-canada-federal-election.html

Mehr Infos zum Heft: https://www.kultboy.com/magazin/12431/

I switched to a Linux Mint/Win11 dual boot system over the weekend and installed Unity from Flathub. Running Unity Hub is fine but when I try to login, it hangs with no errors. I can log into the asset store just fine, so nothing wrong with the credentials. I'd like to know what terminal commands I could use to see what it's actually doing and figure out why it hangs.

I really don't want to continue using it in Windows and only keep it to run work programs, and really need to use Unity for University.

Edit: Troubleshooted via the terminal, then uninstalled the .Deb package that I downloaded from the Unity website and then followed another tutorial from another part of their website with terminal commands. Managed to log in and run my projects.

Kdenlive 25.04 is out with background removal (SAM2), OpenTimelineIO import/export, performance enhancements, optimized audio waveforms and lots workflow improvements and bug fixes.

https://kdenlive.org/news/releases/25.04.0/

#kdenlive #floss #videoediting #artWithOpenSource #OTIO #pixar

@kde

“I recall Midwestern summer nights, standing on my grandparents’ hushed lawn,” Ray Bradbury told me in 2010, “and looking up at the sky at the confetti field of stars. There were millions of suns out there, and millions of planets rotating around those suns. And I knew there was life out there, in the great vastness. We are just too far apart, separated by too great a distance to reach one another.”

For the young Bradbury, who would grow up to make that great vastness feel, to many, as almost as tangible as home, there was one celestial body more captivating than any other: Mars.

Mars: The fourth planet from our sun, some 140 million miles from us on average. The only planet in our solar system, other than our own, deemed by scientists and stargazers over the centuries to be—possibly, at one time—hospitable to life.

The planet has been part of our collective imagination for centuries, from the tales of ancient mythology, to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, to David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars. Ray Bradbury may have been yet another in a long line of artists dreaming about Mars, but he was the first science fiction writer to elevate the planetary tale beyond the marginalized gutter of “genre fiction,” with his 1950 story cycle The Martian Chronicles.

While Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 is often cited as his crowning achievement, it was The Martian Chronicles—arguably a superior work—that put his name on the literary map. The Martian Chronicles was published by Doubleday 75 years ago, on May 4th, 1950. Until that point, science fiction had been mostly dismissed by the firmament as “kids’ stuff,” littered as it was with pulpy tropes such as ray guns, little green men, and scantily clad damsels in distress. But The Martian Chronicles subverted all that, addressing a range of vital, vexing, timeless societal themes in the midst of McCarthy era America: nuclear war, genocide, environmental destruction, the rise of technology, corporatization, censorship, and racism.

Lamentably, these themes still tower over us in the Trumpian zeitgeist all these years later, but their continuing relevance only underscores the point: The Martian Chronicles is a serious book about serious human themes. It is science fiction as a reflection of modernity. The writing is exquisite, showcasing Bradbury at the dizzying height of his poetic prowess, lyrical, rich in metaphor, pastoral, with stunning passages of seemingly effortless prose, eschewing the occasionally purple passages of certain other works, like Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the more dialogue driven polemics of Fahrenheit 451. It hits the sweet spot between poetic exposition and complete narrative originality. With its publication, Ray Bradbury, not quite 30 years old, had pulled off a tour de force magique—he had created literary science fiction, and the intelligentsia quickly took notice.

When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn't want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.

Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers' lawn is a different animal than her father's. It's in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over.

Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. "It's easier in the sense that you don't need to be beating back as many weeds," explains Weaner Cooper. "The native plants came in so thickly that they outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown."

It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn.

https://archive.ph/fno9c

For one user account, I want to have some bash scripts, which of course would be under version control.

The obvious solution is just to put the scripts in a git repository and make ~/bin a symlink to the scripts directory.

Now, it seems on systemd systems ~/.local/bin is supposedly the directory for user scripts.

My question, is mostly, what are the tradeoffs between using ~/bin and ~/.local/bin as directory for my own bash scripts?

One simple scenario I can come up with are 3rd party programs which might modify ~/.local/bin and put their own scripts/starters there, similar to 3rd party applications which put their *.desktop files in ~/.local/applications.

Any advice on this? Is ~/.local/bin safe to use for my scripts or should I stick to the classic ~/bin? Anyone has a better convention?

(Btw.: I am running Debian everywhere, so I do not worry about portability to non systemd Linux systems.)

Solved: Thanks a lot for all the feedback and answering my questions! I'll settle with having my bash scripts somewhere under ~/my_git_monorepo and linking them to ~/.local/bin to stick to the XDG standard.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33521285

Archived

TDs in Ireland [a member of the Dáil Éireann -the Lower House of the Houses of the Oireachtas elected by the people of Ireland- is commonly referred to as a Teachta Dála (TD) or Deputy] increasingly regard China as an “international security issue” amid complaints about the bullying and intimidation of Irish residents, a journalist has said.

The Chinese State has long taken a different attitude to free speech to Ireland’s and individuals who criticise Beijing can face harsh consequences.

On The Pat Kenny Show, Irish Times journalist Colm Keena told the story of Nuria Zyden - a woman from China’s Uyghur minority.

“She came to Ireland in 2009, is a naturalised Irish citizen, has three Irish born children living here,” he said.

“She gets phone calls from the police in Xinjiang because they’re not happy with her Uyghur activities here [in Ireland] on behalf of the Uyghur community.”

[...]

“[They would] ring people and [tell them], ‘I want you to come back to China to face charges,’” he said.

“Then, if you weren’t inclined to do that, then something bad might happen to family members back in China.”

[...]

A report by a human rights group Safeguard Defenders concluded that sometimes such tactics work, with at least one Chinese person returning from Ireland to China to face charges.

“They published a new report last year, the same NGO, and they looked at the history of this activity,” Mr Keena said.

“One of the reports that was in it is a news report from China about a fella in Ireland from Fujian living in Dublin who was wanted by police back in Fujian.

“He got 19 telephone calls from police in Fujian saying, ‘We’ve been visiting your family.’

“He eventually agreed to return to China to face charges and it was all sub-diplomatic, not done through Interpol or anything like that.

“It was reported in Chinese media because, I suppose, the Chinese authorities want people to know this is happening.”

[...]

A sizable number of Ireland’s Chinese diaspora come from Fujian province and the local police force has even set up a centre on Dublin’s Capel Street to keep an eye on them.

“It was created in, I suppose you could say, in a sub-diplomatic kind of way,” Mr Keena said.