Reblogged:Friday Hodgepodge

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Four Things

1. The coals to Newcastle aspect of this story isn't really that remarkable, but I think the following is:

With rising crude exports and already booming overseas sales of refined petroleum products such as gasoline, the U.S. net oil imports have plunged to below 3 million barrels a day, the lowest since data available starting 45 years ago, compared with more than 12 million barrels a day in 2006. The U.S. could become a net petroleum exporter by 2029, the EIA said this week.

Three cheers for fracking.

2. Has someone finally produced a tablet for the inveterate taker of notes on paper? I was initially ambivalent after reading this Gizmodo article on the "reMarkable," but the following comment from a Hacker News thread has me intrigued:

Some cool facts about the device from a hacker point of view:

• Main developer/CTO is a KDE dev and very open source-friendly.
• You get root access to the device out of the box.
• The device is running a mainline kernel with minimal patches, which have a good chance at being upstreamed.
• The toolchain is open. They use vanilla QT/QML and people have already built simple example apps.
• There's an unofficial Linux client which works just fine.
• Desktop client and device run the same code, so you can just sync the files locally without connecting the device to the internet. Works both ways (it's the setup I use).

[format edits, notes omitted, bold added]

In other words, while the tablet may be pricey at the moment, and it might seem limited on its own, there is no dependence on a single device or a "walled garden" around the data it generates. Assuming the writing is as natural as the review suggests, this could make it really easy to enjoy the benefits of paper note taking and digitization all at once.

Image via Pixabay.

3. As long as they make a good gumbo: "This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe." Or an Etouffee. (Scroll down for my recipe.)

4. And speaking of crawfish, here's a map of what Americans call those delectable freshwater crustaceans. I actually called them "crawdads" when I was very young, despite being a Mississippian. The map suggests a possible explanation: My mother came from Arkansas, and her mother from Missouri, where that term is more common.

-- CAV

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