Yup. Apparently the Clintons testified in front of Congress yesterday regarding the Epstein files. That’s not high on the list headlines today.

In same camp of supporting the sentiment, I played this out in my head.

Okay, but what if they’re open carrying a large gun?
[Bad outcome]

Okay, what if they open carry and have a body camera (that they turn off while in the restroom, obviously)?
[Bad outcome and ignored by media - bad outcome]

Okay, what if there’s a group that’s open carrying and have body cameras?
[Bitch, did you just determine they had to form a militia to go to the bathroom away from home? Sigh.]

I don’t know the solution, other than for people to mind their own fucking business.

I’m late to this train, but I recently got into Dimension 20, and the GM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) has some incredible characters. Here’s a fitting quote from one of them:

Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?
Video source (YouTube short - sorry)

Very probable. I was also not the most economically sound back then. I was trying to save money on a $20 can opener!

Can openers is what did it for me.

In 2015 I needed a new manual can opener. The local big-box stores had two basic styles. A cheap, all metal one that was just stamped from a single sheet, and a more expensive one with better handles.
The more expensive one had previously rusted and began to look nasty within a few years.
Amazon had a bunch of different styles at less than the price point of the more expensive one.

I bought one. It was fine. I didn’t love the operation. It cut the whole top off from the side, rather than from the top in a downwards cut. The sharp edges were on the can rather than on the lid. It would catch the paper labels and sometimes wad them up into the can while you cut. Cans with no air space would leak when opened.

Anyway. Replaced it in 2019. Amazon still had a broad selection, but all except for obvious crap was as expensive as the local big box store’s expensive option. Wound up going to a smaller local(ish) bulk foods store and bought a cheapo restaurant one for less than Amazon’s/the big box store’s similar offerings. Minimal rusting to date.

That’s the dream. After years I finally got serious about learning/implementing VLANs and have begun to isolate everything out/properly firewall them. Most of the smart home stuff is already Z-Wave/Zigbee, but the few devices that aren’t are mostly already migrated onto a dedicated IOT network, as is the hubs, where only devices that have business talking to each other can even see one another.

I have yet to play with tailscale, but it’s on the list.

I like smart home stuff. I hate my privacy being invaded. It’s a very thin line to walk.

A company recently released a product that promises to be Matter compatible. By the time the product arrived, they edited their product description to say it worked with Matter if you bought their always online hub, created an account, let their hub talk to the internet, and then installed their internet-connected plugin to Home Assistant. (So it’s not that HA talks to these devices, or that it talks to their hub. It logs into the company’s servers to get the current state of the device.)

I wrote a review outlining this. An AI bot sent me a message offering me additional products from this company. (Ha!) And included the line “We strictly adhere to data protection regulations” … in the U.S?

Laughably misleading.

I like it. I would not go back.

But I have a nice home office, don’t live alone, and found office culture and colleagues to be disruptive.
I have ADHD. My job tends to be wide but not necessarily deep. A “quick question” can cause me to lose my train of thought, cause me to get disordered while trying to figure what the hell I was doing, get shut down by the frustration, and lose hours in ‘wait mode’ for the next interruption because it took me so long to enter a flow state that I’m fearful I’ll get interrupted again.

Being able to shut my office door, silence notifications, and focus with music playing in the background has been incredible for me.

As we saw with his first two impeachments, impeachment is not removal. So long as the cult of personality continues to support him, so too will the Republican Party.

The 4 boxes of liberty: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box (preferably in that order).

I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.

Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.

When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue. He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that. Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.

The social contract is that we do not tolerate intolerance. If someone is intolerant or they tolerate intolerance, they are violating the social contract.

If she’s calling for tolerance of his views (she is), or is clear that she’s tolerant of his views (again, she is), then she’s breaking the social contract.

As his wife, she would know his medical history, and would know if he underwent a personality shift. As a politician, she’s expected to represent all of her constituents and have sound judgement, especially in matters of conflicts of interest.
There’s no more story to know or no mitigating factors. Throw the baby out with the bathwater on this one.

It was a TCL Alto 9+.

A quick internet search reveals that this issue was known about at least three years ago.

Another model, the 8i was reported to have a root password of “12345678” - which is partially how I got the idea to start seeing if I could gain root.

I personify my ADHD symptoms as “the goblin”

The ADHD goblin steals memories, tells me to eat when in bored, tells me that every minor rejection is a major judgement against me, and all the other symptoms I can’t think of right now.

I commented elsewhere, but I once had a soundbar that just had a no password ssh login. It was one of those ‘connect to your WiFi’ to stream music through models and for whatever reason, after connecting it to my WiFi, it continued to broadcast the publicly joinable setup network.

SSH was open to both the unsecured and secured networks, so anyone within WiFi distance of the device could have gained root control of it. Or if I had a sufficiently weak network setup, anyone online could have taken control of it.

A few years ago I noticed an annoyance with a soundbar I had. After allowing it onto my WiFi network so we could stream music to it, it still broadcast the setup WiFi network.

While dorking around one day, I ran a port scan on my network and the soundbar reported port 22 (ssh) was open. I was able to log in as root and no password.
After a moment of “huh, that’s terrible security.” I connected to the (publicly open) setup network, ssh’d in, and copied the wpa_supplicant.conf file from the device to verify it had my WiFi info available to anyone with at least my mediocre skill level. I then factory reset the device, never to entrust it with any credentials again.

I don’t think it’s individual evidence, really. I suspect it’s probably more the bot farms and pressure campaign. Those carry a lot of water for the illusion of continued group consensus.

Coffee plus one of the following (it changes, depending on my whim and ingredient availability):

• Homemade egg bites (egg, sausage or meatless sausage, peppers, onion, spinach, cheese)
• Cereal
• Greek yogurt mixed with a dollop of jam
• Breakfast sandwiches (homemade, prepackaged, or from a local restaurant)
• Biscuits and gravy

And it’s an act of constant, willful effort by yourself and your community.

One neighbor is a rental, they are a large immigrant family and are barely getting along. Property owner lives out of country. Another neighbor thought it would be a fun idea to feed neighborhood stray cats. They wound up creating a very healthy breeding family of raccoons out the run-down garage of the rental. For years their offspring have wreaked havoc in our neighborhood. Every fall I’ve had to call a pest control company to trap the tiny raccoons that are small enough to climb downspouts (the big ones aren’t) and destroy the siding and soffits of my neighbors houses. The cat food guy moved away, I figured out how to occlude the raccoons from my downspouts with ample and unsightly flashing, and along with other neighbors, have built or repaired fencing in in our backyards (mostly because of pets and trespassing neighborhood kids, honestly).
It seems like the raccoon misadventure has finally concluded. I’m now stuck with damaged soffits that squirrels have moved into (on account of a looming walnut tree that lives in a neighbors yard and is so large it overhangs my roof), and a repair estimate that was $5k a year ago, when I had the garage roof redone but wasn’t sure I’d gotten the raccoon problem licked, so I didn’t want to proceed with those repairs. Who knows what it’ll be now. … yay.

You can disable the Outlook addon that nags you about Adobe cloud, btw. Small part of the puzzle, but it helps.