dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • Probably not terribly relevant if their only requirement is to drop one on Pyongyang if necessary. Japan’s got planes. I don’t think anyone else outside of their hemisphere is saber-rattling at them at the moment.

    From what I understand from sitting in the comfort of my own armchair, North Korea’s air defenses and indeed pretty much all of their traditional military is pretty rickety at this point. They rely on the nuclear threat plus the assumed support and intervention of China, along with a battery of conventional artillery pointed directly at Seoul, to dissuade any other state from just steamrolling them. North Korea’s missile game is pretty weak, too, but likewise really all they need to be able to do is hit Japan. Hell, if all they wanted to do was cause chaos in the south they’d just have to truck a bomb to the edge of the DMZ and set it off right there.







  • It’s a cost thing. It’s cheaper to get a shitty commodity touch screen from Alibaba and slap it in a cheap bezel, hook it up to a potato, and then just outsource the design and functionality to the code team in India. It’s more expensive to actually do the industrial design to fit physical buttons and dials and source all the components required for the same. Engineers are obsessed with screens because their bosses are obsessed with cost.

    It’s the consumers, not the engineers, who go all starry-eyed and get so easily wowed over a crappy $12 touch panel with shit for pixel density and fuck-all for viewing angles, because they’re the ones who have been bamboozled into believing this is all “futuristic.” Most people aren’t tech savvy enough to realize they’re being sold cheap bullshit at a premium.



  • Highly unlikely. Even in bumpus old corners of Texas, the state is absolutely obsessed with doing anything to take away any citizen’s gun rights and will do so by nailing them with some kind of felony, and a negligent discharge scenario that results in somebody getting killed in normal circumstances would definitely qualify.

    People in Texas may love their guns, but the cops in Texas are the same as cops everywhere and if they had their way nobody would have the guns except them.

    This points to me that someone involved in law enforcement, someone involved with the government, or someone with very high level connections and/or a lot of money was the one responsible for this and that’s why it was swept under the carpet. If it were just a regular Joe there’s no way.



  • I personally do not trust ISP provided routers to be secure and up to date, nor free of purposefully built in back doors for either tech support or surveillance purposes (or both). You can expect patches and updates on those somewhere on the timescale between late and never.

    Therefore I always put those straight into bridge mode and serve my network with my own router, which I can trust and control. Bad actors (or David from the ISP help desk) may be able to have their way with my ISP router, but all that will let them do is talk to my own router, which will then summarily invite them to fuck off.

    Likewise, I would not be keen on using an ISP provided router’s inbuilt VPN capability, which is probably limited to plain old PTPP – it has been on all of the examples I’ve touched so far – and thus should not be treated as secure.

    You can configure an OpenWRT based router to act as an L2TP/IPSec gateway to provide VPN access on your network without the need for any additional hardware. It’s kind of a faff at the moment and requires manually installing packages and editing config files, but it can be done.