I am not thrilled with the price of new video games. Don’t take this to mean that.
But in 1982, the Atari 2600 game “E.T.” went for about $120 in 2025 USD. I promise you that any modern AAA game is much more fun.
I’d started a new job a month before April Fools. I got to the office very early and then had the idea to put a piece of tape over everyone’s optical mouse laser. I scurried around and got everyone except the office manager, including myself. Then I left.
When I returned to the office, people stifled giggles and watched me go to my desk. I sat down, wiggled my mouse, and said, “Hey, what’s wrong with my computer?” My coworkers started laughing and came over to show me how I’d been “tricked.”
The office manager arrived a little later. I watched with my new chums as she came in, sat down, and started working without any incident. Someone popped their head into her office to ask if her computer was working, and she laughed and said of course it was. I sowed the seeds of discord: “She must’ve done it!”
And that’s how the whole office blamed the office manager for my April Fools joke. I was quite pleased about that.
France Fines Apple €150 Million Over iOS Data Consent Rules - Bloomberg
Things like this are why it’s hard for me to take EU regulation seriously. (In before “but what about the US…” Yeah, I know.)
It’s purely good that Apple makes apps get your approval before allowing them to track your actions. France claims this is hard for the poor companies like Facebook that want to collect every move you make. Yes. It’s supposed to be. That’s the point. I want it to be.
I ordered new prescription sunglasses today. The optometrist asked if I wanted regular or mirrored lenses.
I was almost personally offended.
There’s no plausible scenario in which I wouldn’t prefer mirrored sunglasses.
This is a copy-paste of a conversation I just had with my kid.
Kid: Can I get a ride home at like 10:15
Me: Yeah
Kid: Never mind im gonna be here late
Me: Oh, OK
Kid: Okay like can u do 10:17?
That’s still within the margin of error of when I was going to be there in the first place.
But her emails!
After White House national security adviser Michael Waltz’s idiotic misadventure of texting top secret war plans to reporters, I don’t ever, ever want to hear another word about Hilary Clinton’s email server. Not a whisper.
AG Bonta reminds 23andMe customers of right to delete data
AG Bonta reminds 23andMe customers of right to delete data:
California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a consumer alert Friday urgently warning the public that 23andMe is in financial distress and instructing customers on how to delete their data.
That’s good enough for me. I used 23andMe when it launched and love the promise of gaining medical insights from my own genetic data. That’s a powerful vision I still support. But given the lack of federal privacy protections on this most sensitive and personal of all data, I’d rather delete it than let some creep buy it in a fire sale.
Unboxing the DM42n
I didn’t need a new calculator. I have an HP 50g on my desk I hardly use. I work on a full-sized computer capable of unimaginably fast and intricate math. And yet, from the moment I saw a SwissMicros DM42, I had to have one. Then they recently released the updated DM42n version, which clinched it. I ordered.
It arrived today.
When I opened the small, heavy parcel, an owl greeted me. I don’t know why. It’s a fine-looking owl, though.
Beneath the owl, there’s a meticulous little cardboard box. Ah, we’re so close now!
Nope! Inside that box is another wrapper, with directions on how to open it.
An Easter egg: behind the inner wrapper, there’s a nice picture of the Matterhorn.
The inner wrapper is also persnickety in all the right ways. I followed the diagram to carefully pull apart the sine wave-shaped flaps without tearing them.
Now we’re down to the textured leather-like case.
And inside that is the beautiful little tool I’ve been drooling over for many months. That stainless steel obelisk is surprisingly heavy for its size. This isn’t a plasticky TI.
For completeness, the back. It feels “soft” in a way I wouldn’t expect a steel case to, it’s assembled with beefy screws, and it has large rubber feet.
It’s a beautiful device, luxuriously wrapped like a piece of jewelry, but with the heart and mind of one of HP’s best-ever RPN calculators, except improved. This is a happy day.
I am “hurt my back playing video games” years old.
Some friends and I got a pack of Orbic mobile hotspots so we can install the EFF’s Rayhunter software on them to detect “StingRay” IMSI-catchers. This is what one looks like.
RIP Mark Klein
In Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying
I moved in down the block from Mark when we first came to the Bay Area. One day he saw me getting out of my car and noticed my EFF hat. He asked if I worked for them, and I said I’m just a happy supporter. He told me they once helped him out of a bind and said I should look him up.
Mark was a super nice guy. He also had the world’s most aggressive golden retrievers that would bark at me as I walked down the block. One day I found a “sewer cleaning” van parked on the parallel street behind his house, but to this day I wonder what it really was. They drove off right after I took a picture of it.
Of the security stuff I do for friends, nothing less excites me than financial compliance. If the task has “PCI” anywhere near it, you owe me a nice dinner.
I bought a case for my Meshtastic radio. It came with a couple of buttons and switches that reminded me that I’m only so-so at soldering. I still like how it came out, and everything works like it’s supposed to.
Happy Day of the Dude on this first day of Carpet Diem.
May you mark all strikes, no gutters.
We just finished “Shogun”, and it’s going to take me a day or two to decide what I think about that ending.
A Case for Turning Tulsa Into the Next Big Tech Hub | WIRED
Requirements OK will never meet:
- Better politics. Techies are largely for individual rights. The Midwest largely isn’t.
- Better worker protections. Great tech jobs aren’t usually in right to work states.
- Employees own their ideas. In CA, for example, you can launch your own startup while still working for someone else. In the places in the Midwest I’ve lived, your employer generally owns things you create while working for them.
If you don’t build those, they won’t come.
I bought a 50MB (yes, megs) HD from an acquaintance. It was freaking slow connected to my Amiga, like 20-30KB per second. It also made a horrible high-pitched whine.
Figuring I had nothing to lose, I turned it over and squirted some 3-in-1 oil on the motor spindle. The whine started increasing in pitch as it quietened, and slowly the HD benchmark program started creeping up toward a more reasonable 1MB/s or so. I didn’t use that drive afterward, and just copied the, ahem, public domain apps and games off it and then threw it away.
I have not before or since sped up a computer by oiling it.
Golden Gate Bridge as seen from the Presidio.
AWS WAF now uses /64s instead of /128s for IPv6 rate-limit bucketing. That’s a huge and welcome improvement!