PSA: My (almost adult now) children are interested in switching to using hyphenated family names of both their parents. It's going to take some effort to update all their legal paperwork, but to support them I'm going to start using the hyphenated family name in that format as well -- at least unofficially. I'm still the same person and you can still just call me "Kay."

(Yes, yes, I know "Ryabitsev-Prime" is a mouthful and sounds like an alien world or a doomsday comet. You're just jealous.)

Did the scouts Morse code activity yesterday, and I think it went pretty well. For the hands-on challenge part of the meeting, each patrol had a lock box with prizes inside, and to find out the combination to the lock they had to decipher three clues that were given to them in morse code.

For this part, I Claude-slopped together a small static page that was preloaded on an iPad that we gave to each patrol. Here's the one we gave to the Alpha patrol:

https://kaoti.ca/morse/alpha.html

It uses flashing lights instead of sounds because patrols worked fairly close together in the same room and the sounds would have been distracting.

The takeaway is that some kids have real trouble telling all-dashes letters from all-dots letters (such as O/--- and S/...) when they don't see/hear them next to each other. This was surprising to me, because I've never really expected anyone to have any trouble with telling those apart, but then I've always had a musical ear.

Sharing this with others in case you want to run a similar activity and want to reuse my idea. Since the app was slopped together, it's in the public domain and you can use any number of online ROT13 translation sites to encode your own messages.

This 1965 Soviet cartoon predicted "prompt engineering."

You don't even need to understand Russian to appreciate it.

https://youtu.be/YpygndkMSWA?t=762

Lol, the US admin literally took the "peace plan" written by Kremlin and pretended it's their own after a half-assed translation. This was obvious to anyone who's ever Google-translated Russian into English and then had to change all passive voice constructs because they sound really off in English.

Source: Bloomberg

I almost feel bad for Marco Rubio. He is capable of so much more, but he's like that Roomba in the viral video -- stuck spreading an orange shitstain in wider and wider concentrical circles over the carpet of world politics, while the rest of us stare in horrified disbelief.

I'm teaching scouts Morse code at our next meeting, so I'm trying to relearn all the mnemonics in English. And, boy, apparently something you've learned as a 12-year old is really hard to get out of your brain. I'm afraid I will forever have to back-translate "Щ" into "Q".

"It is not a peace plan. It is a proposal that weakens Ukraine and divides America from Europe, preparing the way for a larger war in the future."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/11/trumps-war-peace/685024/
#usa #ukraine #russia #europe #eu #applebaum #geopolitics @geopolitics

Trump has now set a deadline for Thursday next week, where he demands Ukraine signs an agreement to meet Putin’s demands:

— No NATO membership
— A reduction of its military to just 600,000 troops
— Accepting the loss of Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, and most of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia
— Forcing Ukrainian elections within 100 days

While Russia will
— Reenter the G8
— Have all sanctions lifted

This is not a peace agreement. This is capitulation.

Just in case you haven't seen this yet...
Here is the project which consumed MONTHS of my life and involved HUNDREDS of local #Nanaimo residents, each sworn to secrecy.

✅ If you're an American healthcare worker considering Canada, WATCH THIS. ❤️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k7OUowPPMQ

Donald Trump, whose name prominently features in the Epstein files, is pressuring the victim of violent aggression to just surrender.

Former Finnish PM Sanna Marin put it bluntly: “To end the conflict, Russia must leave Ukrainian territory.”

Just one point. Nothing more to discuss.

In and around 2023, Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were subject to a horrific campaign of online harassment. Unfortunately they blamed me for it, and in turn wrote and published an astonishing array of articles making false accusations against me. Last year, I sued them in the high court in London. In turn, they countersued me for harassment. The case was heard last month and I'm pleased to say that the counterclaim was dismissed and I prevailed in my case. The court awarded me £70,000 in damages.

@mjg59 took on Techrights and won 🎉

The judgement makes for interesting reading - you'll want some popcorn.

https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063

Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians with cruise missiles, which they build with EU and US made electronics.

Today, they killed 25 people in Ternopil, including 3 children.

F*ck everything about this.

Karina Bakhur, a talented 17-year-old Ukrainian kickboxing champion, was killed today by shrapnel from a Russian "Iskander" ballistic missile that hit her hometown while she was running for shelter. Christopher Eppinger is a German trader who made $2 billion reselling sanctioned Russian oil. “I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve been doing,” he told Tom Wilson of the Financial Times.

https://ukrainetoday.org/a-17-year-old-ukrainian-kickboxing-champion-died-from-a-ballistic-missile-strike-in-the-kharkiv-region/

https://en.bb.lv/article/lifenews/2025/11/16/30-year-old-trader-from-germany-earned-eur216000000-reselling-russian-oil-from-his-phone-77351

GitHub is not your friend. They're also not on your side.

How big is lore.kernel.org? I counted 17,154,017 unique message-ids.

I think that's roughly how many emails @gregkh replies to every day.

So, "Operation Southern Spear" -- is that the thing with Clinton, or am I just thoroughly confused about the news coming out of the US?