Friday October 23rd, 2020
The hilarious IT office politics with monsters podcast This Kaiju Life is on hiatus, which means it's a perfect time to catch up and tell all of your friends so that Grig and Nobilis have incentive to create more and more episodes! https://kaiju.libsyn.com/
Thursday October 22nd, 2020
Spectacular Tiny Sculptures Made of Recycled Watches
New Jersey-based artist Sue Beatrice, aka All Natural Arts, creates spectacular steampunk sculptures made out of old watch parts. With the environment in mind, her clever little creations are made entirely out of recycled materials that offer a bit of whimsy. The discarded and found objects (gears, sprockets, vintage pocket watches, etc.) are upcycled and repurposed into unique items that boast themes of nature.
You've seen that animated GIF of a truck being pursued by police, skidding in a turn, bouncing off a car carrier, and driving away the other direction? Here's the making-of video: Explained | G Wagon Police Escape (YouTube video).
Wednesday October 21st, 2020
Utah senator says people should ‘stay home’ if they don’t want police dogs to bite them
“I don’t have a lot of sympathy,” Sen. Don Ipson told his colleagues on the law enforcement and criminal justice committee. “We don’t want to harm the public. But if they don’t want to get bit, stay home.”
The street finds its own uses for technology, and covering badge numbers will no longer be enough: NY Times: Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police — “We’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” one researcher said.
“For a while now, everyone was aware the big guys could use this to identify and oppress the little guys, but we’re now approaching the technological threshold where the little guys can do it to the big guys,” Mr. Maximov, 30, said. “It’s not just the loss of anonymity. It’s the threat of infamy.”
An author I really enjoy, Abigail Hilton, has her kids horror series, on the relationship between a rat and a snake, on sale for $.99 each for the Kindle version through October. https://www.amazon.com/Malachi...on-Eve-Book-ebook/dp/B08L1D8YBK/
Tuesday October 20th, 2020
Now the disinfo campaign gets really ugly: 'Proud Boys' Emails Threatening Florida Voters Appear to Use Spoofed Email Address:
The emails, which read 'Vote for Trump or else!' have been delivered to Democratic voters using Estonian internet infrastructure.
They're matching up voter rolls to email addresses....
Thinking about all the people who've mocked me for the Post-it notes over my device cameras, and how easy it is to forget that devices are broadcasting, and... Post-its over cameras are like masks: I'm not wearing them for me, I'm wearing them for you.
It's a rare feeling, but I'm very combobulated right now.
Department of about freakin' time already: Germany issues international arrest warrants for the founders of Mossack Fonseca, the firm at the centre of the tax haven scandal exposed by the Panama Papers
The two men hold Panamanian passports and are currently in the Caribbean archipelago which does not have any extradition treaties, the newspaper said.
However investigators hope that Mossack, who has family in Germany, may surrender to officials in order to negotiate a reduced sentence and avoid US charges.
Monday October 19th, 2020
Really good long read on the debacle that has been Foxconn's much vaunted leeching of public subsidies and destruction of local economies in Wisconsin: The 8th wonder of the world* *wonder not guaranteed:
In 2017, President Donald Trump and the Wisconsin GOP struck a deal with Foxconn that promised to turn Southeastern Wisconsin into a tech manufacturing powerhouse. In exchange for billions in tax subsidies, Foxconn was supposed to build an enormous LCD factory in the tiny village of Mount Pleasant, creating 13,000 jobs. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will. Inside the empty promises and empty buildings of Wisconn Valley.
Phone issues mean I'm declaring Podcast bankruptcy and starting over again from scratch. The only real PITA about this is that I have to go find all my Patreon RSS feeds again. On a mobile device. Sigh.
I was this many years old when I learned about the Ground Level Power Supply first developed for the Bordeaux tramway light rail system, that has now been implemented in other systems. An alternative to overhead catenary wires or an always-live third rail, it involves a third rail cut up into short segments, with a radio on the tram that tells the system when to energize the segments currently under the tram.
So the aesthetic advantages of an inconspicuous third rail (in fact, far less conspicuous), without the danger of it always being hot.
Sunday October 18th, 2020
And yet another picture of my tripod light and tablet stands
Just a another picture of my tripod light and tablet stands
Saturday October 17th, 2020
So if Bakersfield is the armpit of California, is that like an erogenous zone, or just ticklish?
Finish is still drying, so I put a piece of scrap plywood in place of my tablet, but I think this will make a better video conferencing setup when I have to use my laptop for audio and need a second device for the visuals
Andy Slavitt on the test, which could cost $4/test (vs ca $100 for current COVID-19 tests) and thus may be usable for very frequent testing.
Wall Street Journal on Facebook's political leanings:
In late 2017, when Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm to minimize the presence of political news, policy executives were concerned about the outsize impact of the changes on the right, including the Daily Wire, people familiar with the matter said. Engineers redesigned their intended changes so that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were affected more than previously planned, the people said. Mr. Zuckerberg approved the plans. “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesman said.
Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement
In the global race to measure ever shorter time spans, physicists from Goethe University Frankfurt have now taken the lead: together with colleagues at the accelerator facility DESY in Hamburg and the Fritz-Haber-Institute in Berlin, they have measured a process that lies within the realm of zeptoseconds for the first time: the propagation of light within a molecule. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second (10-21 seconds).
and
Professor Reinhard Dörner adds: “We observed for the first time that the electron shell in a molecule does not react to light everywhere at the same time. The time delay occurs because information within the molecule only spreads at the speed of light. With this finding we have extended our COLTRIMS technology to another application."
Esquire: So a Would-Be Libertarian Utopia in New Hampshire Was Mauled by Bears
The New Republic: The Town That Went Feral (via Sensible Endowment)
Both are reviewing A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling
New York Times: ‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist
New accounts from the scene raise questions about whether Michael Reinoehl, suspected of killing a far-right Trump supporter, pulled out a gun before officers fatally shot him.
Friday October 16th, 2020
From all the way back in 2017: "Alt-right" women are upset that "alt-right" men are treating them terribly.
It would be easy to snark, but the thing about abusive relationships is that the victims are often unable to see the framework in which they're being abused for what it is.
Just a thread to hang all of that NY Post "Biden's emails" silliness.
RT Dan SIoan 🇺🇸🇨🇦🏳️🌈 @dantoujours
So just so I follow this story:
Hunter Biden, who lives in Los Angeles, decides to fly 3000 miles across country, to drop off 3 MacBook Pros at a repair shop run by a blind guy who charges the insanely low price of $85.
He gets off the plane and drunk drives to the repair shop
The rest of the thread lays out the facts as we know them so far. Yeah, the narrative is as stupid as it sounds.
Errata Security: Yes, we can validate leaked emails
I'm also a little confused, because OS/X has had FileVault since 2003, and has become progressively more aggressive in turning it on. So casually browsing through the user's files on a MacBook Pro circa 2015 involves a user who's given up their password to the repair shop. Which is super bad opsec.
I mean, the times I've taken a laptop internationally I've put a little effort into scrubbing it, and even taking the laptop through TSA checkpoints I have an account that I'm happy to let people look through to demonstrate that the laptop is indeed a working device without letting them access my actual files.
And I'm not a high flyer in international business deals.
RT Accidental CISO @AccidentalCISO
Sir, I can’t die on all these hills at once. I’m going to need you to prioritize.
In this era of virtual meetings and audio collaboration, it's really kind-of amazing how casually we poke holes into each other's living rooms. Sitting here listening to my voice teacher get ready for my lessons on Jamulus, but she hasn't let me into the Zoom room yet.
Thursday October 15th, 2020
Ooooh. Mapping the impact of Prop 13 on a neighborhood level: https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/
RT Linda Tirado @KillerMartinis
It’s 2020 and y’all are still signing petitions? Do you just love data breaches that much?
Wednesday October 14th, 2020
"This is a message from Sonoma County Registrar of Voters. Your ballot for the 2020 General Election was received and will be counted. Thank you for voting!"
Institutionalizing Gender: Madness, the Family, and Psychiatric Power in Nineteenth-Century France is free on Kindle and various other digital platforms.
I ran across this because I saw RT @jessie_hewitt:
A student realized my husband and I were a couple after recognizing the same cats zoom bomb both our classes. I find this simultaneously adorable and a bit dystopian.
The metadata will reveal you