@becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@tinker@infosec.exchange My two distro recommendations for "you install it and then never need to touch the thing again" are Mint and Debian. I installed the latter for my father (who's technical knowledge only really extends as far as "knows or can figure out how to put in the wifi password on most devices") several years ago when he wanted to get away from windows, and the only real issue since was the laptop physically getting stepped on at one point and thus needing a replacement screen. Yeah, debian stable doesn't come with the latest and greatest versions of everything, but for the vast majority of people it doesn't need the latest and greatest versions of software. It just needs to work...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@munin I've watched enough USCSB videos and read enough NTSB reports to know that "complacency is a killer" so it's quite intuitive to me as well: if it works fine 90% of the time and doesn't obviously fail for the 10%, you will eventually get complacent and stop or half-ass checking it enough to "fall for" the 10% at some point. It's just human nature. There's a reason that pilots have strict checklists to follow, with Every. Single. Step. written down on them, and even still there's the occasional incident because the checklist wasn't followed.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mattblaze Boston's fire boxes are very much still around, and although the backend systems have been computerized for quite a while now, the boxes themselves are still very much a wind-up telegraph inside. As a nice feature, the wiring is entirely independent of the phone and electrical systems, so should there be a major systems outage in one area, the boxes still work. They actually did work last time 911 went down state-wide and someone pulled one out of desperation. Thankfully the news reported on that, and it was promoted enough for people to actually read it and learn those are still actively maintained and monitored... The fire museum has one of their oldest computers, as well as a disconnected box for people to pull and look inside of. (Well, it's connected to the computer behind it, but not to the actual fire system) And yes, they still have the manual telegraph key in the box. AFAIK it's only really used for testing stuff these days?

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@AmyZenunim ...and shortly after I made that reply, one of my coworkers PRed a giant mass of vibecode. Thankfully it's almost entirely DTOs in a brand new package, so it couldn't mangle things that badly, but it's clear from the comments and (lack of) naming "sense" that he just let the "AI" run wild without really understanding anything it was doing. Certainly doesn't help that his programming fundamentals were somewhat lacking to begin with, though. (I noticed him starting to lean on it a while back and warned him it was a bad idea. Looks like he hasn't listened...) (I can also Just Tell that it wasn't him who wrote most of it. It's not written in his usual style at all. There was no real thought process, only pulling the handle on the fruit machine and committing the result if it looked like it got things closer to working. And yes, I can tell that just from the code. It's soulless, the thought patterns I can usually see just aren't there)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@da_667 @eniko And some of us can also "smell" that rot, even if we can't definitively identify why. I've read enough of "other people's code" that I can generally 'see' approximately what they were thinking when they wrote it. LLM-extruded code is just as 'soulless' as normal text, and I'm still not exactly sure how, but I can feel that there's "something missing." Even the worst human-written stuff has that 'soul' to it that I can feel, and I was a CS tutor for my entire time in college, so I've seen some pretty bad code... "The lights are on, but nobody's home" is a fitting description for how it feels to me. It feels hollow more than anything else, even if it "works" in the loosest sense of the word.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@dansinker Penn Central around NYC and DC was also pretty completely electrified, but of course someone tore it all out because it was costing loads of money to maintain. So you can see "Ghost Catenary" all over DC. And at least one of the railroads that did that promptly went bankrupt because guess what? Diesel costs more than that wire maintenance. And a rather significant part of the problem is that "management" as a culture here in the US seems to be utterly allergic to actually hiring people directly and preferring to lean on "the consulting industrial complex" instead of actually keeping in-house expertise... And then once we learn a lesson the hard way with a project going way over budget, we then retreat back into a cave for 20 years and say "never again" losing all the institutional knowledge that was gained, ensuring the exact same problems happen the next time we try to do a major construction project... (Not to mention "not invented here" usually overcomplicating things too...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@hannah@posts.rat.pictures Yep, they're good at that. I remember when a driver took out a pole on "main street" (the bottom few feet of the pole were just missing with the rest hanging there from the wires), they only had to cut power for a minute or two to safely move the masthead to the new pole, and no cuts for the low-voltage side. (Rules regarding hot work here are "only if not otherwise possible" but they do work to minimize the power cut when possible)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sibrosan@mastodon.social @pikario@mastodon.gamedev.place @bit101@mstdn.social My eyes say it's probably due to contrast with the background, rather than the specific colors of the boxes, because if I focus on the yellow box while tracking it, the illusion mostly breaks. And if I cover the blue one with one hand, the false stuttering is less "impressive", but very much still there. If you picked a different shade for the blue one that blends with the black bars instead of having good contrast with both, while keeping the yellow one as-is, I suspect it would either "double" the effect so both look stuttery, or produce something similar to just the yellow one alone, where the effect is somewhat weaker.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Unixbigot@aus.social tldr of that particular PBX: It converts all the incoming telephony into uncompressed digital samples (With a high enough sample rate and bit depth so it doesn't interfere with modems and fax, which is nice) before they're moved around the backplane to other modules and eventually back out into another analog POTS line. Which means that if I want to attach a custom module that can receive and send audio, it's already digital data, so I don't need to faff about with analog converters. And "CO line" is just short for "Central Office", aka "the lines you pay the telephone company to run into the building." So my custom module would allow me to hook the thing straight to a VOIP provider instead of needing a separate ATA. (Hell, there's even an ISDN module for it. I might get one just to have an excuse to play with ISDN...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@brouhaha@mastodon.social @anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange The Curta's mechanism for this is quite ingenious: there's a "tenth tooth" on the barrel with each digit having a sliding "carry gear" that can either miss or hit that tooth, and it's only moved whenever the previous digit actually rolls over (IIRC, I forget the exact mechanism, it's quite intricate) and is reset at the end of every crank. That requires both a minimum of force at the point a carry is "enabled", and distributes the actual rotational load across the rest of the crank, one digit at a time.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@BalooUriza @beckermatic @dansinker *Operating costs. Infrastructure is a capital cost. But yeah, American MBAs are utterly allergic to capital costs for some reason, which is one of the reasons The Cloud™ stuck around as hard as it did: Lots of places will happily spend more on Cloud™ stuff than having an on-prem datacenter, and vendors are more than happy to cooperate, as it gives them far more lock-in than they could reasonably have with on-prem software. And what makes it even dumber? at least one railroad in a budget crunch had "new management" go "we're paying how much to maintain these wires?" and promptly tear it all out. And then go bankrupt less than a year later, because guess what? If they "barely had the cash-flow to break even" (they were still reasonably profitable before the wires were ripped out IIRC, just not "enough") they definitely didn't have the cash flow to pay for diesel, yet that didn't seem to sink in until after they had ripped everything out...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@phillip Two entirely unrelated things, though the notification settings mitigation may close this particular hole. (Depends on whether it's the app or the OS acting on those settings) This particular issue has nothing to do with "unified push" and concerns only an internal detail of iOS, where notifications are stored in a local on-device file outside of the signal app, which the phone also has to be jailbroken to access. Signal already mitigates "unified push" to the point it exposes nothing to google/apple other than "this user possibly received a message." They only send a push to 'wake up' the app to fetch the content directly from signal's servers, with no content exposed (because they can't expose the content to apple/google, as they don't know it themselves)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@phillip I don't remember where I read that signal does that, but I do remember that it came from an authoritative source to mitigate that exact "google can see your notifications" problem. And I can't find any docs on it, but I did find a thread from someone "who's probably an authoritative source": https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/111563866152334347 And it's technically not misinformation, as AFAIK push notifications aren't by nature E2E encrypted, though they can be, it's just that signal in particular has mitigated that particular hole so it's not true for signal.

mastodon.world

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@hannah@posts.rat.pictures Oh yeah, they just do that occasionally. Usually when the power company replaces the pole but the low-volt techs haven't been rolled to move their shit from the old one. And if there isn't enough slack to move the cables to the new pole, they just strap the old pole chunk to the new one.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jerry@infosec.exchange @gsilvapt@infosec.exchange My favorite pair of cargo pants is this super comfy lightweight material, and they basically look like "cargo slacks" already. If only they made a version without the cargo pockets... (Though I also haven't looked, because thankfully I don't work in an environment with that much of a dress code, so would be entirely unsurprised if they did make them)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Unixbigot@aus.social That's the very first thing I tried when I realized the old PBX I had just pulled out of a dumpster supported pulse dial, yeah. (It was an old analog system that was replaced with a 1U VOIP appliance. Given that it's modular and fully digital PCM internally, I've been tempted to reverse engineer the "CO" module and implement a custom "SIP trunk" module for it that pretends to be up to 4 CO lines, but never got around to it...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@irelephant @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt Yeah, for weird reasons I have an "industrial" phone that's actually "can take it swimming" waterproof, and it's absolutely unusable in that state if you don't turn on the "waterproof mode" first (which is just a funny way of saying "turn off the touchscreen, open the camera, and take pictures with the side buttons", there's not a magical valve that makes the phone not-waterproof when it's off...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@mirth@mastodon.sdf.org @tinker@infosec.exchange Unless you're using the latest-and-greatest hardware, it's entirely unnecessary to use a backported mesa IMO. The whole point of this is "keeping otherwise e-waste machines MS no longer wants to support still functional", and those usually aren't so new that stable's mesa can't drive the GPU...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@jiub @ShadowJonathan mine was a physical button under my desk, in the form of a cheap KVM. Because occasionally the i915 driver would just fail to buffer swap for one reason or another, so the output stuck on the last displayed frame, and gnome would never retry it. Give it a kick by unplugging and re-plugging the monitors and it came right back. With such a cheap KVM, switching inputs is roughly equivalent to just yanking the cords out of the back of the machine, so it did the job just fine without needing to reach down and interact with the actual box.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@millihertz Yeah, there's a reason I have my phone's JP keyboard set to 9-key swipe. Just a button for each consonant, and tap/swipe it for the desired vowel. (5 consonants, 4 swipe directions plus 'tap' to map them all) But for English I'm far faster with the fiddly-AF qwerty board, so that's what I use. (I never really used 9-key, my first cell phone had a slide-out keyboard before everything became generic fondleslabs)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jimsalter@fosstodon.org That confirms it's only gnome asking for the inhibit, but it's absolutely mindnumbingly stupid that gnome is supposedly inhibiting just because there's a foreground process... For reference, my gnome-session-inhibit -l on debian Trixie only shows org.gnome.gedit: There are unsaved documents (logout) which is what I mentioned above: I have unsaved documents open in gedit (Which is perfectly reasonable to inhibit on, if somewhat annoying when trying to do a remote reboot of my desktop. It's the exact thing that triggers the "please save or discard your changes" popup)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jannem@fosstodon.org Ah yeah, if the documentation explicitly says "now", that behavior makes more sense. Though -i failing with --when definitely seems like a bug if they documentation doesn't mention anything about how the two interact.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jimsalter@fosstodon.org Ok yeah that's just plain dumb then, absolutely nonsensical. If reboot is permanently inhibited when someone is logged in, everything will just start invoking it with -i and nothing will inhibit it...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jimsalter@fosstodon.org That says gnome asked it to inhibit logout due to a user application asking, usually gedit's "unsaved changes" in my experience? Not that it shouldn't ignore inhibitors by default when doing an interactive invocation of shutdown, but gnome-session-inhibit can show what's actually blocking the logout. (IMO an interactive invocation should just do an "are you sure? y/n" prompt at most)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ahnlak@kavlak.uk @revk@toot.me.uk Can confirm from experience here in the US, milk from a normal shop generally doesn't like being turned into cheese, but the "raw milk" from a small farm by my parents turns into excellent cheese. (And is rendered safe because my parents' cheesemaking process of choice inherently pasteurizes it with heat) Said farm has very large disclosures of "you really should only use this for making cheese" right on the fridge. But yeah, don't drink the stuff unless you know exactly what you're getting into. And I'd say you probably don't if you're even considering it in this day and age. I grew up around said farm with the cows, so knew exactly why that stuff wasn't particularly safe to drink. Mostly because everything there was covered in cow poo at one point or another...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@diggerbatedog@woof.group @Unixbigot@aus.social It's one of the old Panasonic units. I found the manual for it already, but it doesn't detail the actual module bus interface because there's absolutely zero reason for a normal admin to want that. The modules are plug-n-play with some small configuration in the software. Thankfully it's just a big fat pin-header I can easily add a mezzanine tap board to should I ever get around to that project, and the ROMs are also socketed. (it's currently somewhere near the bottom of the stack, as I'd have even less use for it than the plastic model ship kits I'm currently working on. Back when I had a whole basement to myself I used it for screwing around with fax and dialup, but my current living arrangements are quite a bit less spacious, so it's currently in storage)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@alienghic@timeloop.cafe @futurebird@sauropods.win And if it is traceable to vehicular pollution, correlation is not causation. Just because it happened after something big doesn't mean it's related. I'd want the actual traffic numbers and measurement scatter plots to see if it at least passes the sniff test, or if it's just someone picking evidence that supports their position.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@dtl@8bitorbust.info As I mentioned before, I unfortunately don't have either the spoons or the time to actually get around to writing that any time soon. I just have the "rough sketch" of how it would probably work. But will do if I ever manage to start it and get to a working state. My current project list is about a mile long: Finish lego Notre DameFinish that little laser-wood bookshelf dioramaBuild the Yukikaze PlaMo I just acquiredDo Something with my model railway layoutPut the "borrowed" RAM back into my SGI box and buy some new stuff for the IPX lunchboxFinish reverse engineering my radio scanner's memory format (I have basic channels down, but that's it) and implementing it in CHIRPMore stuff I've forgotten about until I see the pile of parts lying around

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@GossiTheDog Not bad advice, but also that depends on whether the government actually enforces the law against them... Here in my corner of the US we recently passed law banning "broker's fees" (Usually 1 month's rent, paid by the tenant as a condition of move-in, on top of first, last, and deposit) if the landlord is the one who hired the broker, and there's a massive issue with them desperately trying to keep the easy-money pipe propped open though all sorts of blatantly-illegal schemes... (Usually by trying to get the tenant to sign something saying that "the broker represents the tenant, not the landlord" despite the law very clearly saying otherwise...) (The big reason being that our housing shortage is severe enough that the brokers have no reason to compete on price when the tenant foots the bill for the landlord's chosen broker, while landlords actually have the negotiating power to counteract arbitrary price increases)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@js Depends on if it's actually disabled in the config, or if it's built-in to the kernel itself (as some distributions do) in which case the only way to mitigate is to patch, assuming you're not running android, which already incidentally mitigated it with aggressive selinux policies. (The relevant socket family is entirely inaccessible to everything but the bug-report ZIP generator) The socket family makes a lot more more sense on low-horsepower embedded hardware that leans on offloading than on desktop hardware, so it shouldn't be that controversial to just disable it outright on desktop distributions. (It makes sense for platforms where the accelerator blocks are located somewhere on a peripheral bus, rather than being tied into the architecture's normal vector registers like x86 and ARMv8's crypto extensions do)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@hikhvar @hanno The "stdlib" is often "out of scope" for interpreted languages in code golf though, but yeah. Though the dependencies are minimal since they're just FFI interfaces to raw OS sockets, so compiled C code would be just as small (especially if it's using raw vDSO syscalls instead of going through libc)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@GrapheneOS Note that the exploit itself only depends on the executables behind a "privileged" process being readable by the malicious app, so Android could still be (theoretically, if you managed to bypass selinux) popped if the zygote binary is world-readable. Setuid just makes it trivial to trigger on desktop distributions. (Not disagreeing overall, just pointing out that a lack of setuid/setgid stuff in particular isn't really a defense against this, as it can easily modify running processes as well)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@sjolsen Yeah that sounds about right from some of the foamers I've met, and is somewhat of a threat: it usually ain't the models that will hurt you if you touch them... (Unless it's G-scale or larger, those can absolutely pinch you) I do like the "kilovolts" to "millivolts" bit though, I may consider that for my layout... (Though N gauge is so tiny that signage is either "oversized" or has no legible text) (Reminds me of the poor lad over in Japan that accidentally biked between a group of foamers with cameras and a "rare train" right as it was passing them...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@howtophil Found an image online, got the name wrong. It's "Arithma" (And that's also the brand apparently...) A description of how it works is in the alt-text.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@howtophil Reminds me of my "Arithmator" (I forget the exact spelling, it's currently in storage) that I got from my grandfather. It's basically a "more compact abacus" using slides with holes in them instead of separate beads. (And it even has convenient "hooks" at the top and bottom so you can slide the stylus into the next column for carry) If I ever manage to get my mitts on a set of watchmaker's machine tooling, I'm seriously tempted to scratch-build a replica Curta...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@patcharcana@furry.engineer ...and then in 2020, a whole bunch of parking meters broke because they used code that went "if year < 20, year += 2000 else year += 1900"... And AFAIK a lot of RTCs operate with what I can only describe as "the BCD of time" so I'd be entirely unsurprised if it really did support up to the year 4k with no issues. (Though personally I think a u64 epoch timer would be most appropriate, as that could support arbitrary calendars while simultaneously avoiding the "oops, windows interprets the RTC as local time, but Linux uses UTC" issue...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@phillip I do that all the time, no worries. I just don't like "fear mongering" (even if unintentional) with incorrect details and try to correct it when I see it. And yeah, that article is why I said it's technically not misinformation to say they have access to it, it's just not the case for signal and a few other apps that actually give a crap about privacy. Lots of apps still send notification content through it in plaintext AFAIK, but most of those are "probably benign" compared to signal and other messaging apps. (Like games doing a "promotional push," even if that's just gross from a user's perspective, the content is generally nothing more than a confirmation you have the app installed, which they already know via "who sent the push")

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@0xabad1dea I'm wondering what the actual performance bottleneck is, I suspect there's a good bit of "low hanging fruit" nobody's bothered to optimize "because it's not worth the effort" with how fast modern GPUs are.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@dragonminded@chitter.xyz Entirely understandable. I tend to do database-type storage stuff with an indirection layer: A "repository description" interface defining all the abstract queries that need to be implemented, which application code then uses as abstract calls, and the database backend implements the actual queries to back them up in whatever way it feels like. That allows for plug-n-play with all sorts of different SQL backends without needing to care about syntax differences and other "implementation defined" bits.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 7mo ago

Replying to on 8bitorbust.info

@dtl@8bitorbust.info Hell, even a form of WebUSB where the device (or OS driver/config) needs to be explicit about enabling WebUSB access (which moots 99% of mozilla's "security concerns") would be great... I've been tempted to do a "native extension" thing that implements webUSB-as-RPC with a 'shim' extension and small daemon, but that requires both spoons and time, of which I have neither... Someone already made one for the FileSystem API IIRC.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@futurebird@sauropods.win My understanding is that some places use "trophy hunting" as a way to turn otherwise necessary culling into a fundraiser of sorts, but it's still amusing when something gets them. Mostly when there's an individual impacting the "reproductive viability" of the group to my understanding? (I remember at least one case where a particularly aggressive bull elephant "well past his prime" was keeping all the younger males that could actually produce babies away from the ladies)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@dtl@8bitorbust.info I just keep a copy of debian-chromium around and launch it with --temp-profile (which IIRC is a debian wrapper feature, it creates a new profile directory in /tmp before launching) for that stuff. But I'm also annoyed by it, hence the temptation to do the native-shim thing. The idea is to utilize the native-RPC mechanism there to allow extensions to talk to native apps, but have an "app" whose sole purpose is to expose the WebUSB API over that RPC channel. The extension handles all the permission prompts, and the 'app' handles all the device restrictions (no "sensitive" device classes, mainly). The native side could also in theory be implemented in a way that allows its use as a portal by flatpak and friends for accessing specific USB device types via manifest permission, too (as an explicit dbus portal and/or a "libUSB compatible" drop-in shim, like pipewire-pulse)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@jannem@fosstodon.org Yeah, it's usually only gedit's "unsaved changes" popup that does that to me. You can replicate it by popping open a new tab, typing something, then trying to reboot without saving it. It should then fail with the same "inhibited" message. (And you can use gnome-session-inhibit to see exactly what's asking gnome for the inhibit) But if -f is overriding the timer, that's almost certainly a bug, IMO.

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

...I just had a horrible model train idea. If one doesn't care about "realistic" looks (or if it's a model with hidden wheels like Kato's E5 Shinkansen, that thing's hell to put back on the track if it derails at a switch because of how the couplers work) take a page from electronics and plate the wheels and 'bearing surfaces' in hard gold for better electrical conductivity.

Mostly because my current track ass if the train isn't directly on top of one of the feeders unless I'm rubbing it down with contact cleaner every few days, probably because my layout isn't perfectly flat... (I don't have a foam plate I can trench wires into yet, so the track is bumped up where the feeder wires need to cross it. And the plywood 'tray' itself is currently sans legs for space reasons, so no drilling through the layout either...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems One of these days I want to get my mitts on a Glasgow, but the issue is that I don't really know what I'd do with the thing outside of a few "use it once" things, so it would just spend 99% of the time on a shelf...

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@rootwyrm@weird.autos @cR0w@infosec.exchange @da_667@infosec.exchange @Viss@mastodon.social I give them exactly 2 points. Out of 100. One of those is Apple Silicon, and the other is the touchpad. Their touchpads are way better than any other touchpad I've used somehow. Everything else? Absolutely meh at best, especially post "Liquid Ass." (And yeah, the keyboard sucks ass even by laptop keyboard standards) (I begrudgingly use a mac for work because it's either that or windows, and windows is even worse these days, at least for my work)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@lina@vt.social Ah, yeah, looks like TrueDepth is currently only available on iDevices? Weh. Looks like I'll have to stick with other cameras for NIR shenanigans for now. (My phone has one, but the issue is that the NIR floodlight is hardwired to turn on with the camera, and it doesn't have a visible spectrum rejection filter...)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@lina@vt.social I wonder if the 'raw' depth camera is even accessible to regular software? If it works in NIR, I'm half tempted to play around with it simply for that... (In MacOS that is. I'm not allowed to put Asahi on my work mac for obvious reasons, and my only "personal mac" is an old Core2-era mini I use for firewire DVcam stuff)

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Emelia/Emi @becomethewaifu@tech.lgbt

· 5mo ago

Was just reminded my headphone's "desk cable" (that's actually threaded through the cable management under the desk) is falling apart at the headphone end again. I despise PVC cables...

Unfortunately as far as I can find, there's no 'standardized' parameter terms for low-voltage cabling like power cables have with "SEOOW" so my options are either "brute-force through godawful text search", "order from a specialty cable supplier", "butcher a ready-made 3.5mm cable to put the right ends on it" or "manually thread individual silicone 28AWG wires through some paracord" (I have a bunch of the latter for "bodgewire" reasons)

And no, wireless is not an option for this, mostly because I have the executive function of a goldfish and would never remember to charge the thing. (Plus it would require replacing my perfectly functional cans)

Though I will accept suggestions for a 3m silicone 1/4" to 'unbalanced' mini-XLR cable if anyone already knows of one. (Another PVC one would just crack again within a year)

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