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Photo by Kamil Switalski I’ve previously discussed how I modified my PlayStation 4 to give me control over the hardware I own. Sony has been increasingly anti-consumer . Not to be undone, Microsoft requires linking a Microsoft account to a Sony account for gamers who want to play the first Halo game released for PlayStation, even in single-player mode 1 . Sony is also requiring customers purchase…
I haven’t been playing a whole lot of games lately. Over the past year I finished two titles on my PlayStation 4 . The first was the narrative walking adventure Firewatch , and the second was the relaxing turn-based puzzle game Hitman Go . To finish things out, I took a trip down memory lane and played the raunchy 1990s classic Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out! using ScummVM on Linux. It…
Although I’ve bought some digital titles on PC (via Steam, GoG and other stores) and a few titles on a very old PS Vita, starting with my PlayStation 4 Pro, I decided to only purchase games on physical discs. Same with my Switch and PlayStation 5. Last year I purchased Hogwarts Legacy for the PS5 and was horrified, after playing the introduction, that an Internet connection was required to…
Slide to Unlock by Solstad This year we’ve seen cracks in Windows 11 BitLocker , VeraCrypt developers losing their ability to distribute their software on Windows , and Apple removing encryption support from the HFS+ filesystem . We’ve also seen some cases where public outcry and awareness were able to reverse some of the corporate decisions that removed the freedom of users to run secure…
I’ve talked a bit about large language models (LLMs), and I do have friends who’ve been at odds with me for my reluctance to call these predictive algorithms “artificial intelligence” . Still, I do use LLMs frequently for coding both professionally and on my own projects. For things I care about, I often use them as a scalpel, either using chatbot output to implement my own design or heavily…
Fables de La Fontaine - Epinal (public domain) Earlier this year, Antrhopic announced a large language model (LLM) called Mythos , a model they claimed to be so powerful for finding software exploits that it was too dangerous to release to the general public 1 2 3 . Instead, they provided a limited release of this model to select organizations as part of Project Glasswing 4 . Then, last week,…
Memory has become insanely expensive over just the past few months. Micron cut production of Crucial, their consumer brand of memory, to focus on data center products at the end of 2025 1 . This was after Micron received massive amounts of taxpayer money from the CHIPS Act 2 . Crucial’s exit has radically changed the market. We’ve seen big shifts in RAM prices over the past few decades. It has…
4x 30TB Seagate Hard Drives Over the course of my life, hard drives have continued to get denser as far as their data capacity. Back when I was traveling for years, I could comfortably put most of my data on a single hard drive. Over the years, when I reached capacity, I’d copy everything to a new drive and ship the old one as an offsite backup to a family member halfway across the world. In…
In today’s world of content generated by the Weighted Random Word Generators (also known as Large Language Models (LLMs); too often incorrectly referred to as Artificial Intelligence ), the vast majority of top search results are a mix of mainstream news sites and automatically generated articles, which are difficult to read and verify for correctness. Too many people simply read and trust the…
Last year, I thought 2025 would be the year of psychological operations . It’s not a risky prediction to make since false flags and propaganda infiltrate everything these days, from Wikipedia to film and cinema . Still, it was a year filled with economic hardships for most Americans, combined with questionable narratives surrounding political assassinations . Now that we’ve entered 2026, the year…