sccart has added a photo to the pool:

A personal, favourite image
Whats he doing .. is he trying to find a quiet space in an urban jungle to listen to his music .

Qld. State Library
Cultural Centre . Brisbane

I assume somewhere in VolleBak’s headquarters lies a massive whiteboard with the words “WHY NOT” scrawled on it, because if the past few months have been any indication, the company’s product launches have been getting progressively stranger but at the same time, exciting just because we’re witnessing one of the most avant-garde movements in apparel and fashion design.

After making kevlar, iridescent, and graphene jackets, VolleBak’s latest uses a material found exclusively in jet engines, missile housings, and supercars. I’m talking about Carbon Fiber, the material that’s lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel. VolleBak’s Carbon Fiber shirt comes with a price tag of $110 which seems pretty reasonable considering it comes made with woven strands of carbon fiber in it. Designed to be worn close to the skin, the material is breathable, lightweight, and wicks moisture incredibly well.

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering why (and also how) would VolleBak integrate carbon fibers into fashion. Carbon Fiber is known for its incredible strength, which lends its properties to the shirt, making it practically abrasion-proof. Designed to last much longer than any traditional tee shirt, even in the most demanding of scenarios, the Carbon Fiber tee shirt will not scuff, rip, shred, or tear if you accidentally fall off a bike or slip while trekking or bump your shoulder against a tree’s rough bark. In extension, the fabric even protects your skin, preventing damage to itself as well as you. The fabric itself comes made from a yarn that contains thousands of intertwined individual carbon fibers. While you’d expect these fibers to be incredibly tough, the fabric also comprises 36% elastane, giving it strength but also a 4-way stretch, making the VolleBak Carbon Fiber Tee look like just about any other tee shirt you’ve seen, but behave unlike any other. Why not, eh?

Designer: VolleBak

"Loving ourselves points us to capacities of resilience, compassion, and understanding within that are simply part of being alive." A curated collection of links with inclusive materials so that many groups of folks can access a space of self-compassion. Be well, care for yourselves in troubled times.

Kristin Neff on The Three Components of Self-Compassion

Self-Compassion Guided Meditations and Exercises

Tara Brach: The RAIN of Self-Compassion Guided Meditation (10m video)

A Practice for Nourishing Yourself

A Case for Black Self-Compassion

Blackness-Centered Compassion Therapy from Race Reflections

Cultivating Self-Compassion in Trauma Survivors

Self-Compassion & Trans People

How To Locate Your "Felt Sense"

Meditation and Mindfulness for Deaf People (YouTube video with captions)

Self-Compassion for Parents

Self-Compassion Break Audio - Chris Germer (6m audio)

Self-Compassion Break Audio Long Version - Chris Germer (12m audio)

Self-Compassion Break Written Instructions

Il grande scrittore siciliano, autore della fortunata serie di romanzi sul commissario di Vigata, è morto oggi a 93 anni. Dai romanzi al teatro fino alle prese di posizione sulla politica, l'Italia piange uno dei suoi più grandi autori contemporanei. Nessun funerale pubblico, ma da giovedì 18 luglio dalle ore 15 chi vorrà potrà dare l'ultimo saluto al cimitero Acattolico a Testaccio a Roma dove sarà sepolto Andrea Camilleri, writer of the wildly popular Inspector Montalbano books, has died at the age of 93.

After retiring from a career as a director and writer for television, 64-year-old Camilleri wrote his first book, The Shape of Water. The books became bestsellers and were made into popular television programs that have been broadcast for the past twenty years. Originally, the books weren't intended to become a series, but after the second one, The Terracotta Dog, became popular with the public and with critics. The English translations, done by Stephen Sartarelli, were just one of the many languages the books were translated into.

The language used by the author encompasses regular Italian, the Sicilian dialect, the casual blending of the two, plus slang, words imported from English. (There is a link on this page to a dissertation discussing the language in the books: "Setting a New Standard: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the
Regional Italian of Sicily in Andrea Camilleri's Commissario Montalbano Mystery Series."). His use of language gives the books a particularly lively flavor of the area and makes his characters come to life vibrantly. His writing captured such a sense of place that they have actually created an uptick in tourism for Sicily itself, the "Montalbano Effect." (Some of this probably also had to do with viewers watching the tv shows and seeing how beautiful the area was.)

"To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day -- that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind -- one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind. "

Most of all, his main character, the police officer Salvo Montalbano, became beloved. The Sicilian sleuth is a lover of good cooking who would prefer to be left alone to eat a wonderful meal, a grouch who is constantly frustrated by his coworkers, and, above all, is a man who values truth and honesty in a world where it can be hard to come by.

'No safeguards' on QA accounts, and suddenly this guy gets a Tesla and $1.6m home, say prosecutors

A former Microsoft software engineer was arrested on Tuesday and charged with mail fraud for allegedly attempting to steal $10m in digital currency from his former employee, US prosecutors said today.…

Judge green-lights $113m from Samsung, Sony, and others – but $34m in legal fees?!

A long-running legal battle over the alleged price-fixing of lithium-ion batteries involving Samsung, Sony, LG, Hitachi, and NEC, has finally been settled for $113m.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon faces a formal European Union antitrust investigation (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) into its dealings with merchants that sell goods on its site, marking an expansion of a multi-pronged regulatory push that has ensnared other U.S. tech giants like Facebook and Google. The European Commission, the EU's top antitrust enforcer, said Wednesday that its investigation will examine whether Amazon is abusing its dual role as a marketplace where independent sellers can offer products and as a retailer of products in its own right. In particular, the probe will study whether Amazon is using nonpublic data from independent merchants to compete unfairly against them. Investigators will also examine what data Amazon uses to pick a seller as the default option for a given product when a user clicks the "buy" button -- and whether Amazon has an unfair advantage to be designated the default for products it sells. The probe could eventually lead to formal charges, fines and orders for the company to change business practices, but it could also be dropped.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rashes, blisters, and hair loss have all been reported. So has vomiting, migraines, and shortness of breath. All of these -- and more -- are symptoms reported by flight attendants after their airlines got new uniforms. But no one knows why. From a report: Delta is the latest airline to have flight attendants report health issues possibly related to their uniforms, and employees at the airline filed a lawsuit in May against the manufacturer, Lands' End. But flight attendants have been battling health issues that have appeared after an airline instituted new uniforms for years. And for years, airlines have said their uniforms are safe. Meanwhile, flight attendants and others are working to discover the cause of their symptoms and the identity and total number of chemicals present in their uniforms, all of which can be difficult to ascertain. Until the cause can be identified -- or until airlines start listening to employees and moving quickly after their complaints -- it's likely employees will continue to face symptoms. And it's likely that flight attendants will keep heading to court, where they've historically needed to go to get policy changed by their employers. The problem was first reported after employees at Alaska Airlines got new uniforms toward the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011. Flight attendants began to report rashes and eye irritation, and documented hives, blisters, and scaly patches, according to a 2012 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) report looking into the issue. In 2013, flight attendants at Alaska Airlines filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the uniforms, Twin Hill, and the airline recalled the uniforms in 2014. In October 2016, Twin Hill won the lawsuit, with the court claiming there was no reliable evidence the injuries were caused by the uniforms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Starting in Firefox 70, Mozilla aims to have the browser report when any of your saved logins were found in data breaches. This will be done through their partnership with the Have I Been Pwned data breach site. From a report: Mozilla is slowly integrating their independent Firefox Monitor service and the new Firefox Lockwise password manager directly into Firefox. Mozilla is also considering premium services based around these features in the future. As part of this integration, Firefox will scan the saved login names and passwords and see if they were exposed in a data breach listed on Have I been Pwned. If one is found, Firefox will alert the user and prompt them to change their password. This new feature will only work, though, for data breaches that exposed passwords and when the password was saved prior to an associated data breach.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The desert outside Tennant Creek, deep in the Northern Territory, is not the most obvious place to build and transmit Singapore's future electricity supply. Though few in the southern states are yet to take notice, a group of Australian developers are betting that will change. From a report: If they are right, it could have far-reaching consequences for Australia's energy industry and what the country sells to the world. Known as Sun Cable, it is promised to be the world's largest solar farm. If developed as planned, a 10-gigawatt-capacity array of panels will be spread across 15,000 hectares and be backed by battery storage to ensure it can supply power around the clock. Overhead transmission lines will send electricity to Darwin and plug into the NT grid. But the bulk would be exported via a high-voltage direct-current submarine cable snaking through the Indonesian archipelago to Singapore. The developers say it will be able to provide one-fifth of the island city-state's electricity needs, replacing its increasingly expensive gas-fired power. After 18 months in development, the $20bn Sun Cable development had a quiet coming out party in the Top End three weeks ago at a series of events held to highlight the NT's solar potential. The idea has been embraced by the NT government and attracted the attention of the software billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is considering involvement through his Grok Ventures private investment firm. The NT plan follows a similarly ambitious proposal for the Pilbara, where another group of developers are working on an even bigger wind and solar hybrid plant to power local industry and develop a green hydrogen manufacturing hub. On Friday, project developer Andrew Dickson announced the scale of the proposed Asian Renewable Energy Hub had grown by more than a third, from 11GW to 15GW. "To our knowledge, it's the largest wind-solar hybrid in the world," he says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.