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TL;DR: Strange technical quirk rather than datamining techbro shenanigans (okay, only a little techbro shenanigans). This is “Miracast” under the hood, which (sometimes) requires scanning for and connecting to a dummy WiFi Access Point to make a direct connection, and baddies can use access to your nearby APs for location tracking, so this scan is […]
Ah, the United States Supreme Court. Wrestling with the country’s thorniest legal questions of bodily autonomy, presidential immunity and whether you can ducttape a banana to a (consenting) wall. No, seriously, the Supreme Court issued an 80-page ruling on whether taping a banana to a wall is copyrightable (TL;DR: it isn’t). Suppose, just suppose, you […]
–Thursday, March 31, 2039– “That was brilliant!”, Aimee said. “Simple convolutional neural nets they can build and train themselves. They loved it! The look on their faces when you threw the colorful jellybeans in with the Lego bricks just after they finished training their classifiers. And when they realized they could just add another layer […]
TL;DR: Software locked it out because front passenger side door latch detects a nonexistent key in its nonexistent keyhole. It ultimately wasn’t, but could have been, dependent on which hand you used to open it! Before I begin – and before anyone pictures me with cape and golden locks blowing in a heroic breeze – […]
TL;DR: Noping out of a probably-not-a-scam scientific study that should benefit everyone, with the ongoing realization that I can’t currently trust the fucking CDC not to do me or my family harm instead of good in the current administration. Takeaways: I try not to get into overtly political topics here, but there’s no dancing around […]
Finally, a blinky project of the scale I can actually bite off these days (unlike pre-kids), but it requires a bit of backstory. My wife’s mom absolutely loves Christmas, and like many families, their Christmas is full of tradition. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without egg dish, Dead Thelma Neuboldt’s Merry Christmas Chicken in the […]
I’ll begin this rant with a tiny bit of history: look at the HTTP(S) headers a modern Web browser sends with its requests, and you’ll notice that for historical reasons it refers to itself by an odd name: not a browser, not a program, not an App, but a user-agent. While the term may have […]
Louis Rossmann, my spirit animal from the alternate reality where I don’t have a day job and kids, is again speaking some truths. He makes a great argument that we should be pining nostalgic for Clippy, the dancing paperclip everyone of a certain vintage hated for being naively helpful, as opposed to hating our industry […]
Or: Tim reverse-engineers an open-source product to reconstruct the open-source materials! Long story short, I picked up this Autodesk “open-source” (words I thought I would never hear together) stereolithography printer at a local freecycle event. I thought it was a vacuum cleaner until I saw the Autodesk name on the back label. On realizing what […]
Hello friends from the search engines! If you’re reading this, you’re not the only one to receive one. With apologies in advance for turning this blog into an archive of my snail-mail, here is an “invoice” I got the other day, for a magazine I used to have a gift subscription to years-and-years ago. As […]