I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.

The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.

One possibility I’ve wondered about is whether, someday, email shifts to a whitelist-based system. I mean, historically we’ve always let people be contacted as long as they know someone’s physical address or phone number or email address, and so databases of those have value – they become keys to reach people. But we could simply have some sort of easy way to authorize people and block everyone else. In a highly-connected world, that might be a more reasonable way to do things.

It’s been fine for me too. That said, I don’t eat there that often.

your foreign minister was Madonna

This is like that.

kagis

Not that much like it, apparently.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/madonna-shares-support-for-ukraine-with-release-of-sorry-remix-video-3170167

In the early hours of this morning (February 26), Madonna took to social media to share a fanmade video set to a remix of her 2005 song ‘Sorry’.

“Russia’s Pointless and Greed Driven Invasion Of the Ukraine MUST be stopped!!” the queen of pop captioned the post. “Please Send in Humanitarian Aid to help millions of citizens of the Ukraine who’s lives are being affected by this CRISIS at this very moment !!

“Putin has Violated Every Human Rights Accord in Existence. Putin has no right to try to erase the existence of the Ukraine. We support you President Zelensky!! We are praying for you and your country! 🙏🏼.”

She concluded: “God Bless You All! Lets not feel helpless when confronted by Geo-political Actions of this magnitude. There are things we can do.”

I mean, they’ve done this when places charge them money to index the news articles there.

It hardly seems reasonable to both mandate that they index a given piece of news media and that they pay a fee to do so.

Well, it depends on what you want it for.

I wanted specifically to find a search engine that has a subscription-based model and does not generate its income from data-mining and ads. It doesn’t retain search logs. For me, it’s what I had wanted for some time – a service where I was the customer rather than the product – so I am pretty happy with it.

It has some other features, but I generally don’t care much about them other than its “Fediverse Forums” search lens, which lets one search the Threadiverse (Lemmy/mbin/piefed).

looks

It looks like they also have a Usenet archives search engine that I haven’t looked at. I might look into that, as I used to use Usenet archives search engines.

I’m happy with it. Depends on what you’re looking for, though.

Pretty much any brick-and-mortar office supply store I’ve seen provides copy machine and printing services. Probably faxing too, though I haven’t checked.

I mean, I don’t do much in paper any more, but I’m pretty sure that most people need – even if only very occasionally – to print things.

Both the sheriff and the mother involved were women.

I am hoping that this is in the figurative sense. I don’t think that a shootout would have improved her situation.

Seaching Kagi. I used to use googles when I used Google as my search engine; now I use Kagi.

I remember biking all over as a kid. I didn’t tell my parents where I was going. Might head off into the bluffs or to the shopping center or to a friend’s house or to a convenience store or along some bike trails. I sure went further than a mile.

And we didn’t have cell phones or whatever back then either.

I don’t feel that I was neglected.

“I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she says.

The sheriff disagreed.

“She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.

Even if his mother was walking there too, it’s not likely going to do much to stop a car from running him over. She’d just be some extra mass to fling.

Kidnappings – and a number of other serious crimes – are usually done by people who are known, not random strangers.

kagis

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zmldiz/til_there_are_only_between_150300_kidnappings_of/

There are only between 150-300 kidnappings of children by strangers each year in the US. The other 200,000 kidnappings each year are by relatives.

Even more lopsided than I’d expected.

And as for “anything” happening, I’d imagine that “anything” could have happened at home, too.

Fucking, Austria eventually gave in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria

Despite a population of only 106 in 2020, the village has drawn attention in the English-speaking world for its former name, which was spelled the same as an inflected form of the vulgar English-language word “fuck”.[1][2] Its road signs were a popular visitor attraction and were often stolen by souvenir-hunting vandals until 2005, when they were modified to be theft-resistant. A campaign to change the village’s name to Fugging was rejected in 2004 but succeeded in late 2020.[3][4]

The downside of building the phone/tablet into the car, though, is that phones change more quickly than cars.

A 20 year old car can be perfectly functional. A 20 year old smarphone is insanely outdated. If the phone is built into the car, you’re stuck with it.

Relative to a built-in system, I’d kind of rather just have a standard mounting point with security attachments and have the car computer be upgraded. 3DIN maybe.

I get the “phone is small” argument, but the phone is upgradeable.

And I’d definitely rather have physical controls for a lot of things.

If you’ve got a local Stable Diffusion setup and a GPU that can handle it, sure.

Some other folks might be able to give recommendations for sites.

I’d try doing upscaling using the upscaler models, probably SwinIR_4x, which I use for general-purpose upscaling.

I’d do so using the SD Ultimate Upscale extension, which can do the upscaling in tiles so that it doesn’t use VRAM proportional to the size of the image you want to upscale.

I don’t know what you have installed. I tend to use ComfyUI, which is more powerful, but I’m pretty sure more people have the older and somewhat-simpler Automatic1111 installed.

Once you’ve got Automatic1111 up and running:

Automatic1111

SD Ultimate Upscale installation

If you don’t have the SD Ultimate Upscale extension installed:

• Go to the Extensions tab.

• Click the “available” tab.

• Click the “Load from” button.

• Install “ultimate-upscale-for-automatic1111”

• Restart Automatic1111.

Upscaling

• Click the img2img tab.

• Either drag the image you want to upscale to the “Drag image here” square or click on it and select the image.

• Click the little yellow right triangle next to the “Resize to” area, which will copy your image dimensions to the image size fields.

• Set “Denoising strength” from what I think is 0.75 by default to 0.16. The 0.16 is a bit arbitrary, but it’s roughly what you want when upscaling an image rather than regenerating it; 0.75 is too high. Feel free to try playing with it if you want.

• Go down to the “Script” drop-down menu and choose “Ultimate SD upscale”

• Check the “SwinIR_4x” upscaler. You can play with others, but this is one that should be reasonable for photographs.

• Change “Target size type” to “Scale from image size”. Set “Scale” to “4”.

• Click “Generate”.

• Eventually your image will show up in the right hand square.

ComfyUI

ComfyUI works pretty much the same way: I’d also use the SwinIR_4x upscaler with the SD Ultimate Upscale node there. Can walk you through if you want, but at a high level:

• I’d install the ComfyUI Extension Manager. ComfyUI doesn’t have the built-in ability to automatically download nodes, so you gotta manually install this one. You can also manually install and update nodes, but I’d recommend having the manager to make updates easier.

• Use the ComfyUI Extension Manager to install the SD Ultimate Upscale node.

• Set up a workflow that loads the image and runs it through the SD Ultimate Upscale node and then saves the image.

I haven’t set up batch image processing of pre-existing images with either Automatic1111 or ComfyUI; my only batch-processing has been on generated prompts. However, I believe that that’s also possible, so you can just feed it a large number of images and then let it run until completion. I couldn’t off-the-cuff give directions to do batch upscaling, though.

Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.

I know that modern dryers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it’s maybe hard to project that.

But I don’t know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.

kagis

Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it’ll do that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1dd4k6g/my_clothes_washer_has_had_one_minute_left_for_the/

My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)

Funny… Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:

This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.

The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should’ve taken a minute or two, took 15.

A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don’t even know they have one, much less how to clean it.

In MOST modern washers, it’s behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter…

The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that’s collected on it.

Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.

If they have a display capable of it, might be a good idea for washers to suggest to the user that it’s draining slowly and that checking the filter might be in order.

We whitened them.

Well, time and nature did.

We kind of adopted the idea of them being white as normal.