Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

>Buy a smart thermostat
>Buy a smart Lock
>Pay up or you're getting cooked alive.

Amazon probably.

 

[Porsupah Ree]

Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto's Nouveau Riche

Draw me your map of utopia and I’ll tell you your tragic flaw. In 10 years of political reporting I’ve met a lot of intense, oddly dressed people with very specific ideas about what the perfect world would look like, some of them in elected office—but none quite so strange as the ideological soup of starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise.

I knew about bitcoin only as an investment vehicle favored by several essentially sweet nerds close to my heart—and I knew, too, that cryptocurrencies are the pet untraceable funding model of the far-right. I was told there would be an overall “Burning Man theme” to the adventure, guaranteed by the presence of Brock Pierce, the cryptocurrency mogul, former child actor, and one-man art installation about peer pressure. (More about him later.) I was anticipating evenings spent listening to crypto-hippies describe the angel-faced space elves they met when they took DMT. I was expecting to fetch water and painkillers for half-conscious corporate executives with dust in their perfect hair and no idea how to get home. I was expecting to get a bit carried away and end up shouting about the government and chalking poetry all over the walls. I was expecting to hear very rich men talk without blinking about tax planning and sacred geometry. I was expecting corporate-branded swimwear. I was expecting to meet smug Californian polyamorists, about whom smug European polyamorists like me are relentlessly judgy. Reader, all of these things transpired, but by the time they did they were a blessed relief.

It's a thoroughly engaging narrative, exploring the phenomenon of the cryptocultists and their gurus, and how women factor into that power dynamic.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto's Nouveau Riche

It's a thoroughly engaging narrative, exploring the phenomenon of the cryptocultists and their gurus, and how women factor into that power dynamic.

...73-year-old John McAfee, who got rich with the anti-virus software McAfee Security before jumping into cryptocurrencies. He is the man most of the acolytes here are keenest to get their picture taken with and is constantly surrounded by private security who do their best to aesthetically out-thug every Armani-suited Russian skinhead on deck. Occasionally he commandeers the grand piano in the guest lounge, and the young live-streamers clamor for the best shot. John McAfee has never been convicted of rape and murder, but—crucially—not in the same way that you or I have never been convicted of rape or murder.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Whoops.

 

[Myficals]

John McAfee is Bender's "blackjack and hookers" mini-rant brought to life.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Okay....normally I'm not up for sharing every video of this kind that I see, but this kinda knocked my socks off.

This is Linus, he has a computer tech YouTube channel. This particular video is part of a short series where he is secret-shopping various prefab "gaming" PC retailers, from the perspective of a non-computer-savvy customer with a $1500 budget, to analyze both the customer service experience and the build quality. In the previous two videos he examined the telephone sales interaction, and the quality of the rigs themselves and their packaging once the systems arrived. They might be worth a watch if you're interested.

In this video, for each PC he has replicated the same very common problem (a RAM stick coming unseated during shipping) and is having the "customer" call each company's tech support line to ask why their system is telling them they have only 8GB of RAM when they were supposed to have gotten 16GB. The results are a mixed bag, especially the bigger companies that seem to like transferring people around; but what shocked me was the call to iBuyPower, which begins at 10:20. If you don't care to watch the whole video, at least watch that part. I realize that might sound a little clickbaity but you really have to listen to it for yourself and experience how horrible it is.

 

[Essence Lumin]

The results are a mixed bag, especially the bigger companies that seem to like transferring people around; but what shocked me was the call to iBuyPower, which begins at 10:20. If you don't care to watch the whole video, at least watch that part. I realize that might sound a little clickbaity but you really have to listen to it for yourself and experience how horrible it is.

That's pretty awful. I won't be buying IBuyPower now, not that I would anyway. I like the music choices the video maker used for the background.

 

[Free]

Windows 10 will soon include ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ kaomoji

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

More interested in this new feature though: Microsoft makes Windows Sandbox for running risky executables

Sandbox is a virtual machine, but it doesn't require a separate operating system be installed to use it. Microsoft uses the existing copy of Windows 10 already installed and creates a new lightweight version of it running in isolation. Microsoft calls this a "dynamic base image" and it only requires 100MB of storage space to work. The Sandbox version of Windows is a self-contained unit, so anything that runs inside it can't impact your desktop or laptop, which means if an executable is malicious it's trapped. When Sandbox is closed, the isolated instance of Windows is wiped and a fresh one created next time you use it.

An early build of this feature is flighting in the Insider fast ring today, but will only be available to Pro and Enterprise versions of Win10, not the Home version.

 

[Essence Lumin]

More interested in this new feature though: Microsoft makes Windows Sandbox for running risky executables



An early build of this feature is flighting in the Insider fast ring today, but will only be available to Pro and Enterprise versions of Win10, not the Home version.

That would be useful. On rare occasions I run an executable that I want but seems risky. Not available for home edition though. Oh well.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

I have a shelf full of those.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I just read this fascinating article about WLW. In 1932 they put together the highest power AM radio station in US history, 500 kw. Today, stations are limited to 50 kw. The author of this article is a talented and entertaining writer. If you are technically oriented and like reading about US feats of engineering you might enjoy this page.

WLW's Big-Arse Transmitter

A small sample -

The huge, high-level modulator was also water-cooled. It could easily make 400 kW audio with both of its largely redundant modules simultaneously cranked to full rock and roll. Fortunately for the survival of civilization, this case was rare. Each module used four more of the biggest tubes made, bringing all of RCA 1's RF and AF output tube complement to twenty, with a total cost of $34,000 in 1930s' depression dollars. Even more mindboggling were the two modulation transformers, one per module, each 37,000 pounds, oil filled, and 10 feet high. It's possible that these two Westinghouse reactors were in fact the world's largest transformers for a brief time - "heavy iron" indeed!

 

[danielravennest]

New Horizons is approaching object 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule). Flyby will be New Year's Day. In the image sequence below, left is the actual photos taken by the spacecraft, right is after the fixed star background has been nulled out:

 

[Govi]

New Horizons is approaching object 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule). Flyby will be New Year's Day. In the image sequence below, left is the actual photos taken by the spacecraft, right is after the fixed star background has been nulled out:

The image sequence is not showing, not even as a link discoverable by quoting your post.

 

[danielravennest]

The image sequence is not showing, not even as a link discoverable by quoting your post.

I tried reposting the image. The link was:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/pluto/wp-content/uploads/sites/253/2018/12/movie_w150_d50_Greys_r_n42_f8.gif

 

[Free]

Hurry up, I need some ice!

 

[danielravennest]

Hurry up, I need some ice!

That's why when my old coffee-maker died (a switch or cord problem), I didn't get a smart, IoT device. I got a basic Mr. Coffee for six bucks, used from Goodwill. It brews coffee, that's all I need it to do. No regrets.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Wired has a fascinating and lengthy article about a large meteor that fell into a small village in Peru in 2007 and the meteor hunters who traveled there to see it. It is extraordinarily well written describing history, science, adventure and modern times of a traditional people.

The Mad Scramble to Claim the World's Most Coveted Meteorite

Here is one of the paragraphs about the meteor hunters and history.

Ward loves the romance of antiquity, and now they were venturing into the realm of the Inca. He’d reflected at times about how much of human history is fleeting, how civilizations rise and fall from war, weather, and the flaws of human nature. The Inca had the largest empire in the world at the turn of the 16th century; three decades later they were gone. Even the Andes began their tectonic rise only 25 million years ago, but Ward knew the rock he and his colleagues were looking for was once illuminated by the infant sun—a smaller, brighter memory of the mature star we see today. Ward bought some coca leaves, filled his pockets, and stuck a pinch in his cheek.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

A new fissure opened on the flank of Sicily's Mt. Etna today:

Antonio.M @AntonioMusolin2

The eruption is noisy but relatively calm so far.