LaputanMachine

We had this one too, the one with the blue head. I always wondered how it worked, as cassettes only had two different sides.

Watching this video, I noticed that they must've used the left and right channels on either side for a total of four mono channels.

Unfortunately I never tried to play the cassette in a normal cassette player.

The existence of the Selectric bug was mentioned in an issue of Popular Science from 1987 [1].

In the article, a typewriter salesman from New York correctly describes the working principle of the bug, even though the exact working principle of the bug was not publicly known at the time. The six metal bars as well as magnetic switches are mentioned.

See the paragraph "Low-Tech bugging" at the bottom of page 87, as well as the subsequent paragraph "The cold (bugging) war" on page 88.

[1]: https://books.google.com/books?id=mgAAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA87#v=one...

Nowadays, technology firms are going to the extremes like implementing virtual machines with a custom instruction set inside of PDF files [1], so they can sell exploits to governments who use them to spy on their enemies.

I think not much has changed. Highly sophisticated spying activities are still happening in today's world. The advanced techniques required are very valuable, and are thus only used in cases where the desired info is valuable enough, and cannot be obtained through simpler means.

Users voluntarily sharing "a ridiculous amount of information" are not the target group of today's sophisticated hacks, and were not the target group of the Selentric bug either.

[1]: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...

I think they're mistaking the RAM's heat spreaders for radiation shields.

Heat spreaders were common for DDR2 and DDR3 ECC RAM. Some models, like the KVR667D2D4F5/2G, have temperature warning labels, indicating that it's not a radiation shield.

Such a thin layer of aluminium isn't able stop a significant proportion of gamma radiation.

CL!ng may be what you're looking for [1]. The app is available in the App Store, but I have not tested it.

[1]: https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/monitoring-thunderbolt-band...

> Seems like a poor safety feature to have it also turn on when you're cleaning.

Right, that's bad design.

The cooktop I'm familiar with always turns off and beeps if something (metal pots or a liquid) covers a part of the button area.

To turn it on, you have to press two different buttons within a certain time limit, with a pot standing on the appropriate cooking zone. Most cats probably won't manage to do that.

> The only dumber idea I can think of is a touch screen

Oh, don't get me started. We own an oven with a touch screen. It's pure idiocy. But the cooktop is actually very good IMO.

I think this is a safety function. You may not be able to turn off the stove yourself if something boils over, and the buttons get covered in hot liquid.

Some app ideas from Krzysztof Kowalczyk (author of Sumatra PDF): https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/e4132d5a44014b2aad81d815...

This is the configuration I use:

  veto files = /._*/.DS_Store/.Trashes/.TemporaryItems/
  delete veto files = yes

The second line allows vetoed files to be deleted. Otherwise, already existing vetoed files would be stuck on the drive.

(Note that "._*" prevents HFS+/APFS extended attributes from being stored on the SMB drive.)

>Just a basic cryptographic risk management principle that cryptography people get mad at me for saying (because it’s true) is: don’t use asymmetric cryptography unless you absolutely need it.

Is there any truth to this? Doesn't basically all Internet traffic rely on the security of (correctly implemented) asymmetric cryptography?

According to the video in the article, the data rate is 66 MB/s (100kB per frame). So a Pi with 8GB of RAM should be able to capture almost 2 minutes of footage.

This ambiguity was not intended, I have edited my comment.

If you look at the percentage of affected reviews [1], it looks like some customers might be experiencing long term loss of smell. Note how the percentage of affected customers is still considerably higher in mid 2021 (where covid numbers were pretty low) compared to January 2020.

The graphs are based on only about 150 negative reviews though, so I don't know how much you can read into it.

[1]: https://twitter.com/nick_beauchamp/status/147355576211076710...

The linked graph may be misleading, because more scented candles are sold in the winter. There is still a correlation if the graph is divided by the number of reviews [1], but it is much weaker.

It would be interesting to see the data before 2020.

[1]: https://twitter.com/nick_beauchamp/status/147355576211076710...

I'd rather live in a world with fact-checking than in a world with gene-checking:

»The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct ... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.«

- Nikola Tesla, 1937

> You'll be expected to never turn on your Pi Zero without an antenna attached again, should your transmitter get fatally confused by the mismatch of hardware-defined impedance assumptions.

Can the hardware really be damaged by using it without an antenna? I would not have expected that at all.

So if I understand correctly, copy-on-write is implemented using hard links, but the existence of hard links alone doesn't constitute CoW.

If the file system implements copy-on-write, wouldn't a hard link even preserve the original file if the file is edited through the original inode?

> no one predicted anything remotely correct regarding Corona.

That is simply not true. The RKI (Germany's main institute for disease control and prevention) almost exactly predicted the current Covid numbers back in July [1]. The top left of the picture on page 7 shows the prediction under the assumption that 65% of Germans get vaccinated; currently 68% of Germans are vaccinated.

[1]: https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Archiv/2021/Au...

This post reminded me of the "88x31 GIF Collection" post from a few months ago [1].

Weird to think about how much the Internet has changed. Makes me wonder how people will look back on today's Internet.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27500624

UK. Here's the Megaprocessor on the museum's website: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43063/The-Megaproces...

> The smoothing out is done by the elasticity of the belt which provides mechanical isolation and by a flywheel. With the exception of one esoteric Eumig brand deck, all cassette decks have flywheels.

I just had to look this up. Interestingly the Eumig tape deck used a small mechanical fan to dampen the tape movement. The white fan can be seen in the third and fourth pictures on this site:

http://www.captndifool.de/index.php/cassettendecks/eumig/eum...

I like how some of the photos show the same place years apart.

These two images [1][2] show the same junction near St Martin station.

Note the patch in the ceiling in these two pictures: [3][4]

The pink graffito on the back wall in this [5] picture can still be seen years later if you zoom into this [6] picture.

A red graffito can be seen on the back wall here [7] (very small) and here [8].

[1]http://web.archive.org/web/20130513204844im_/http://sleepyci... [2]https://www.urbextour.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/21.jpg [3]http://web.archive.org/web/20130513204844im_/http://sleepyci... [4]https://www.urbextour.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/8-1.jpg [5]http://web.archive.org/web/20130513204844im_/http://sleepyci... [6]https://www.urbextour.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/58.jpg [7]http://web.archive.org/web/20130513204844im_/http://sleepyci... [8]https://www.urbextour.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/59.jpg

It's still not working for me for some reason.

In the second recursion step, when entering the URL manually, the tab remains blank. If I instead try to click on the unedited "portfolio" link, the site opens in a new (native) tab.

Happens on Safari and Firefox (macOS) as well as Chromium (Debian).

You can even open the website recursively within its own "Safari" window. The recursion depth seems to be limited to one though. Nice easter egg nonetheless.

Edit: It's possible to bypass the recursion limit. First open the "Blog" bookmark on the Safari start page. Use Inspect Element on the "portfolio" link at the top right, and remove

    target="_blank"

from the HTML. Open the portfolio and enjoy infinite recursion.

You can enter the name without the dash first, and add the dash later.

I also use a 4 bit e-ink display, and there are sometimes large areas of the same color where you can't see any details. After several hours of tweaking I managed to improve the quality, but it's still not perfect.

Do you have some tips / links that could help me improve the dithering even further?