geocrasher

15+ years ago I fought piracy at a company with very well known training materials for a prestigious certification. I'd distribute zip bombs marked as training material filenames. That was fun.

It's wireless!

Context: Discussing a first century Roman politician

As somebody who had to withhold a burst of laughter when hearing "procurator" mispronounced as "procreator", I approve of this article before even reading it.

I use search engines (Google) and when they (it) fails to provide me the responses I need, I turn to ChatGPT. For example:

I recently upgraded my video card, and I run a 4K display. Suddenly the display was randomly disconnecting until I restarted the monitor. I googled my brains out trying to figure out the issue, and got nowhere.

So I gave ChatGPT a shot. I told it exactly what I upgraded from/to, and which monitor I have, and it said "Oh, your HDMI 2.0 cable is specced to work, but AMD cards love HDMI2.1 especially ones that are grounded, so go get one of those even if it's overspecced for your setup."

So I did what it said, and it worked.

My T420 has a couple of upgrades: Memory (16GB) and SSD (250GB). That's it. It's bone stock otherwise. When my buddy's laptop screen cracked, we had a hard time finding a new one. He took my T420 to work every day for a few months, and it came back to me more banged up than when it left. It's fine. And it did the job admirably.

I need to do some automotive tuning/testing and guess what, the T420 is where its at for that, too. It's no longer good as a daily driver, but it'll do everything else just fine.

EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right.

I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed?

Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".

I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.

We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.

The subject of Kerala resulted in one of the most memorable conversations I've had with a doctor that wasn't about medical stuff. My late wife had to have an emergency procedure and her regular doctor was not available, and so she got a wonderful Indian doctor (Context: This was near Seattle WA). Having worked with many Indians, I felt comfortable asking him which part of India he was from and he said "Kerala" and at the same time we both said "God's own country" and his face LIT UP. "OOOhh, you know Kerela!?"

"Kerala is Hawaii at a tenth the price! You must go. The people there love three things: Alcohol, Food, and side to side head bob Alcohol!"

He was delightful, and he took great care of my wife. I fully intend to visit Kerala at some point.

What is the significance of a reproducible build, and how is it different than a normal distribution?

I have a partially assembled QMX+ sitting on my bench. I need to get it finished.

I'll let somebody else talk about why this firmware update is somewhat earth shattering for the ham radio community and why the QMX itself is a huge deal. We're talking a $1K SDR for $150, multiband up to 6M, fully digital.

I see adminer misused in malware on WordPress sites way too often. It's too bad its reputation is tarnished that way.

I've never been in this position so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Get a job- anything where they will hire you and pay you. Use that to bootstrap yourself out of your car and into any kind of housing. Anything at all. Work that full time while you do freelance gigs until the freelance gigs pay about 2/3 of your income. Use the freelance money to fix your car etc. Now quit your job and uber 1/3 and freelance 2/3.

Oversimplified? yes. But it's not designed to be a foolproof plan, just food for thought.

Also that's fantastic that you've pulled yourself out of depression. I once had the worst clinical depression my psychiatrist had ever seen. I pulled myself out of it and got rid of the things that caused it, including some pretty bad internal programming.

You've got this. You can do it.

I've been playing since about 1989 with FS4. It's come a long way in the last 35+ years! FS2024 is so incredibly immersive that it is almost unimaginable. With modest gaming hardware, you can play at 40fps at 4K.

It's nothing short of incredible.

Ducted fans are by nature less efficient than propellers. This is one reason that the next big leap in engine efficiency may come from what are essentially unducted fans.

I'll never forget the TI-99/4A. I was 8 years old, in second grade in Southern California. We had a "computer lab" which was a mobile building with 13 or 15 TI-99/4A's, and about half of them had color TV's and the rest, B+W. Nobody really knew anything, but we did have books to copy BASIC programs out of.

One kid entered a program that flashed colors and patterns on the color TV. Our teacher was epileptic, and this sent her into a seizure. Myself and another kid ran to get the 5th grade teacher who'd been a doctor at some point (don't ask, I dont know, I was 8) and he came running and attended to her. She was fine.

I'd always been interested in how things work, taking things apart, playing with my 30-in-1 electronics lab from Radio Shack. But this new computer thing... this was something. That experience flipped a bit in my 8 year old brain. All because of a TI-99/4A.

Nothing in particular, it just did what it was supposed to do quite easily. I didn't have the opportunity to load test it and the small VM it was one would have been a bigger bottleneck, I think.

Last year a coworker mentioned Caddy, so I decided to set it up on a spare box just to see how well it worked with WordPress, PHP etc. It did okay. I didn't do any big tests with it but it seemed to work well enough, and was super simple to configure. It does seem quite niche however.

My understanding is that it is standalone.

Yeah based on the downvotes I got I'm understanding that this is an unpopular opinion. Truth is, I've been in the web hosting business for over 25 years and the number of actual domain name related scams that I've personally seen are very very low. Perhaps I just don't eat sleep and breath DNS enough.

And I mean sure, godaddy sucks. I get it. I don't use them. But a customer of mine has all his domains there, and it just works. That doesn't make them better in my eyes. I work with people who helped build godaddy- and yes, we giggle and rudely point at them for what they've become. But a scam? That's a stretch to me. and what the OP posted about was not a scam.

Not a scam, just related businesses. There aren't too many scams in the domain business (I'm sure somebody will point out a few in the comments. Schroedinger's law, I think it is?) because it's governed by ICANN and fishy business will lose a registrar their accreditation.

You are alive. And your prognosis, if I am to understand correctly, is overall good.

This Sunday marks the fourth anniversary of my wife's passing at just 46 years old. She had unending nausea, and major motility issues. They also thought gastroparesis at first, and her doctor and surgeon even developed a surgery just for her, which I understand they won awards for. It helped her for about 2 months, and she started regaining weight, but her symptoms- unable to hold down food of any kind- returned.

From there things just got worse. G-J tube feedings with formula. Then TPN, which her body also rejected. And then... the actual starving. Her body refused any sort of nutrition from any source, even directly into her bloodstream.

Doctors essentially gave up. She was on hospice for quite a while. She had started off as a large woman and when she passed, she weighed about 55lbs.

I tell you this not to scare you or make you worry, but to make sure you're grateful for the health you do have, OP.

They never did figure out what was wrong with her. Official cause of death was "malnutrition." Right. Gastrointestinal mysteries such as yours, and hers, really underline the fact that as much as medicine does know about the human body, there is an infinite more that they don't know about it.

Best of luck to you.

You may be right. I read this on the late Sheldon Brown's website, and it stuck. References:

    https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tancrank.html
    Left-threaded pedals and cranks are reputedly an invention of the Wright brothers, bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio. (They also built airplanes). 

    https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/left.html
    The left-threaded left pedal was not the result of armchair theorizing, it was a solution to a real problem: people's left pedals kept unscrewing! We have read that the left threading was invented by the Wright brothers, but we are not sure of this.

So, I said it with more authority than was warranted. But it's good enough for normal dinner conversation references ;)

you have a point. how about this. s/writer/storyteller/

This is exactly the case.

I taught my son to ride using training wheels. He rode around for a few days and asked me to take them off. So, I took them off. And when I came back outside from putting the tools and training wheels away, he was riding his bike as if he'd never not ridden it. I do like the author's idea however.

By the way, did you know that the the right pedal is right hand thread, but the left pedal is left handed thread? If it wasn't, the left pedal, being right hand threaded, would come loose easily. And that was a Wright Brothers innovation.

An excellent read, no doubt. I've actually read it a couple of times. Ben Rich was a great writer.

I had dismissed that movie, based on the previews, as just silly B-movie with better production. Is it actually good in the sense that the plot is plausible and the acting is decent?

A neat detail from the talk: It's on the Amateur Radio 70cm band, and has a digipeater running. PistonMiner is willing to turn it on for people.

That is correct. But balloons would be a few orders of magnitude less lifetime.