I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • , couldn’t the brokers just filter the period when i started clickning everything?

    They don’t care about the quality of an individual profile, it’s the quality of the aggregate data that’s important to them. If anything, your profile might be identified as an outlier compared to the average and simply discarded. They’re not going to look any further than that and try and “rescue” your data, they’ve got a million other profiles to sell to advertisers.



  • Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

    Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

    Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.


  • I don’t think there’s anything commercially available that can do it.

    However, as an experiment, you could:

    • Get a group of photos from a burst shot
    • Encode them as individual frames using a modern video codec using, eg VLC.
    • See what kind of file size you get with the resulting video output.
    • See what artifacts are introduced when you play with encoder settings.

    You could probably/eventually script this kind of operation if you have software that can automatically identify and group images.


  • I’m guessing something like:

    Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

    Main page: invisible link to particular area at top of page, with alt text of “don’t follow this, it’s just a bot trap” for screen readers and such.

    Result: any access to said particular area equals insta-ban for that IP. Maybe just for 24 hours so nosy humans can get back to enjoying your site.




    1. Replace CMOS battery.
    2. Get small UPS.
    3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
    4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
    5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
    6. Get small generator.
    7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
    8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
    9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
    10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

    Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.





  • Did they give you a very funny reason for this requirement, or is it just some windows exclusive garbage that doesn’t work in wine?

    Why do people always ask this kind of crap?

    If you have a corporate laptop, it will likely have a suite of software centrally managed by your company’s IT department.

    It will contain software that is also centrally licenced so that your boss doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for thousands of dollars of software, they can just tell IT to bill a licence for software X to your cost centre at $13.75 a month.

    It will have a domain login that is your corporate identity which will usually require multi factor authentication.

    It will have some corporate VPN solution which operates mostly transparently and requires zero setup on your part.

    It will contain company sensitive data which will usually be encrypted by bitlocker, whose keys are stored with your domain account.

    It will have the usual Teams/Outlook/SharePoint stuff with a centralised calendar and contacts for your company, and likely security classifications for all the communications you do through it, allowing you to join groups, accept invites to restricted groups, and limit access, all linked to your domain account.

    It will have mapped drives to your corporate file storage , again, all linked to your domain account.

    It will probably have OneDrive, synced to a corporate server, again, linked to your domain account.

    It will have a printing solution that is linked to your domain account so that your printers follow you wherever you go and you can easily find and print to the secure print queue on some random printer you happen to walk past in one of your offices, so you can enter your PIN or swipe your access card and have that IMPORTANT_SECRET_RESEARCH.DOC file print while you’re standing in front of the printer.

    And finally, your work laptop does not belong to you. Wiping it and installing Linux plus Wine and keeping company sensitive data on an unmanaged device will attract the ire of HR.

    Your IT department won’t give a crap. But they also won’t help if anything doesn’t work, such as trying to join a domain to access allllll those domain-linked features with an unauthorised device.

    They will simply re-image your laptop to bring it back to a known state that they can deal with, because they are dealing with thousands of devices. They need everything to be homogeneous simply because they don’t have the manpower to manage anything else or to audit a million different configurations for security issues or data leaks.

    So no, suggesting Linux + Wine to run some “windows exclusive garbage” isn’t an answer here.


  • Precisely.

    A 1200 watt microwave is essentially like a 1200 watt bar heater if you’re outside the oven cavity. To a person, it will feel pretty warm at a distance of a few feet as the energy is basically unfocused as it exits through the open door.

    But to a drone, it’s 1200 watts of RF noise near a receiving device that’s tuned to listen for signals that are typically around 0.00000001 watts. It would be like trying to hear a pin drop at a rock concert.

    Do need to make sure you point it upwards though as it will cause havoc with microwave motion sensors and a bunch of other sensitive listening stuff. Also, good luck getting wifi within a hundred metres of it.