People assume that because I’m into technology that I can unlock stolen phones or do XYZ whatever with their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram accounts or whatever. One, I don’t touch stolen devices. Two, I don’t have any accounts with any of those sort of services, and ain’t about to start one to learn the ins and outs for other people.
CIF - Compressed Image File
No particular reason, except that it’s a proprietary format I wrote myself, comparable compression to PNG, but totally different codebase and format.
I have 378 hours on…
Calculator, Doom Scroll Edition
I thought Gidget was cute, back when I was like 12…
We are a result of our own ancestral design.
Think about it for just a few moments. When our ancient ancestors figured out how to make fire, rather than carry it around in a sled thanks to a lightning strike, everything changed…
It’s done all three, more or less in that very order.
Initially, modern tech was a progressive tool, helping immensely with science, mathematics, and documenting history and literature.
Then it became commonplace, everyone and their grandma has the internet, posting their random brainfarts, cat memes and fails of the day.
Now we’re digressing, people using AI left and right, while simultaneously losing their own critical thinking skills, and also finding it harder and harder to double check anything without running into another AI brick wall.
Yes I realize your question is more about how tech has affected civilization. Technology has always been affecting civilization, so its done all three, evolved us, stagnated (I think peak useful tech and functioning generally happy civilization stagnated around 2014), and has been regressing since.
Given that the average healthy body temperature is ~98.6⁰ F, and humidity on the Gulf Coast tends to be so high you gotta drink the air, I prefer temperatures 85⁰ or lower.
With high temperatures and high humidity, sweat can’t even evaporate, forcing your internal body temperature into unhealthy feverish levels. I’m not a fan of heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
I’m also not a fan of freezing temperatures either, but at least people can dress in layers to keep warm when it’s cold.
Save the machine state after you get it booted up and configured. Host+T
The concept of secure boot and the TPM and BitLocker and all that stuff is somewhere between protection against hackers with hands on access to your system, protection against rootkits infecting the boot sector, protecting the average amateur end user from themselves doing something dumb, and keeping you in the Micro$haft ecosystem.
If you’re fairly comfortable that none of these should be a significant risk to you, then I’d say disable it and do whatever you want with your own system without all the headaches.
That mold growing on last month’s leftovers in the back of the fridge would like to have a word…
Before or after he got captured and briefly assimilated into the Borg?
My bifocal glasses. They were donated to me last year, and some fucking how, they’re a perfect match for my prescription, and have absolutely no scratches.
They were manufactured in 1988, literally 2 years before I ever got my first pair of glasses.
I didn’t exactly sign up for big ass thick bifocals, but the last prescription glasses I paid for cost me $217, are scratched to hell and back, and the frames split at the nose bridge.
They’re big, they’re ugly, but they just fucking work, even clearer than my most recent actual prescriptions.
You can’t complain when it’s free!
Thanks!
Although, the first PDF link says invalid format…
Like I said, I was also studying acoustics at the time, and also writing sound card drivers.
I probably have one of the longest open bug tickets ever for VirtualBox…
My original algorithms were specifically designed to help artists perform nearly perfect color matching, based largely on text inputs. It started off as a single purpose application, but totally human driven.
The more I used and tested my own software, it taught me more than I even expected to learn about photochromatic processing. More than I even designed it to do even.
I was already also studying acoustics around the same time. I saw how well my chromatography software was working, and just barely started adapting the algorithm to process acoustics.
I quickly realized that I didn’t have nearly enough RAM or processing power to do anything meaningful in any sensible timeframe, but I could already see that it was possible to go as far as changing one’s voice with the voice print of someone else.
I announced that with online friends at the time, around 2017, and nobody believed me. Probably because I couldn’t quite prove it yet. But I knew it.
The more I thought about that, the more I thought it would only contribute to fraud. So, I just fucking stopped, slammed on development brakes, and said fuckit.
I don’t want to be part of the problem, I just wanted to design a better color filter/processor system.
I was actually developing a crude form of AI, for graphics processing, between 2009 to 2017.
When I realized that my algorithms could be repurposed to the point of cloning someone else’s voice, if I just had enough RAM and processing time, nobody believed me back in 2017.
I will never touch AI again.
Too bad that happiness is banned in the USA…
You know how people sometimes like to write their phone number on public bathroom walls, looking for a ‘good time’?
Yeah, I’ve been tempted to go around and write this number on bathroom walls, wonder how many people might actually fall for it…
1-911-867-5309
Tapes can have long term issues in storage, as the tape reel winds will eventually start to bleed over magnetic signals from one wind to the next.
In analog world, they call it tape hiss. In digital world, with good error correction, it can last a long time, but is still ultimately prone to data corruption, eventually…
I recommend a video surveillance rated multi terabyte hard drive, they’re designed to run 24/7. I have two 4TB Seagate Skyhawks.