DAK catalogs were wild. Each item had a magazine article length description that was clearly bullshit. But by the end you’re certain that the constant emptiness you feel is from not owning the World’s Best 16 Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer.

An alkaline AA may have more capacity, but the LiPo has lower internal resistance and it’s electrolyte is flammable. The worst the alkaline would do it shorted or punctured is get warm and poop out KOH.

Other than niche Keysight gear that’s has three layers of nameplates because it’s '90s vintage NOS, LXI and USB-TMC have replaced GPIB.

Next week: Fedora meets a new friend named Lennart while on her way to Multiuser Mountain. Will they be able to cross the init bridge without being caught by Sammy the Systemd Hating Troll?

You’re gonna carry that weight

Up until a few years ago there was a local urologist named Richard Chop, and Dr. Peter Ruff is still seeing clients. Nominative determinism is a thing.

You’re welcome.

GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR

Except for that time it was CPE-1704-TKS

It’s not known to be a backdoor, but it’s a juicy attack surface that customers are largely ignorant of and provides little consumer benefit. If I were an NSA employee and my boss handed me a blank check to develop a preboot exploit for Intel PCs, I’d start with IME.

IME is even worse than that. It runs on a supervisor processor in the chipset that has privileged access to the memory, peripherals, and CPU, and can run when the rest of the system is powered off. IME is how Intel AMT can serve as a KVM-over-IP, and just because you don’t have a CPU with Vpro doesn’t mean all the components aren’t there for an exploited or backdoored ME firmware to remotely log your console or inject keystrokes.

I think you meant :r!:() ::& ;:

20 years ago the pocketable digital cameras that took over the consumer market didn’t have hot shoes. 30 years ago the compact point and shoot viewfinders that were the weapon of choice for vacationing didn’t have hot shoes. Today neither are relevant and are all outclassed by smartphones, and there is hardly a consumer camera market.

You don’t have to spend five figures for that exposure, but it’s going to be an intentional hobby.

The intersection of people who aren’t five figures into photography and know what a hot shoe is, and people who recognize a wall mount phone trend old.

Try the steak.

This is the future oldpeoplefacebook wants.

Oh man. Huge company I used to work for had:

• two separate Okta instances. It was a coin toss as to which one you’d need for any given service

• oh, and a third internally developed federated login service for other stuff

• 90 day expiry for all of the above passwords

• two different corporate IM systems, again coin toss depending on what team you’re working with

• nannyware everywhere. Open Performance Monitor and watch network activity spike anytime you move your mouse or hit a key

• an internally developed secure document system used by an international division that we were instructed to never ever use. We were told by IT that it “does something to the PC at a hardware level if you install the reader and open a document” which would cause a PC to be banned from the network until we get it replaced. Sounds hyperbolic, but plausible given the rest of the mess.

• required a mobile authenticator app for some of the above services, yet the company expected that us grunts use our personal devices for this purpose.

• all of the above and more, yet we were encouraged to use any cloud hosted password manager of our choosing.

Oh, like back in the Before Times when everything was statically linked?

How did your contributions impact the world? I’m not talking about Wikipedia worthy projects or products. If you didn’t do what you did, how would the world be different? Let’s say you worked on data validation tools in tax software for the IRS. Maybe you prevented thousands of people from the stress and struggle of bogus audits. Or maybe you worked on compilers for a defunct architecture, and your optimizer saved billions of watt-hours of energy in wasted cycles over the years

I can look back at my career and point to moments where I’ve made a small dent in the history of the technologies I worked with, yet my name isn’t attached to any. I’ve also worked on personal projects that are mostly defunct but had thousands of users in their heyday, but because I used a handle for many of them (for reasons) the people who might remember what I did will never know my name when I’m gone.

I’m good with knowing I made some sort of difference without being personally remembered. But that’s just me, and I think it’s important to recognize the ways you want to be recognized.

With that said, name recognition on for-pay work is rare. You’re probably out of luck getting that recognition for your previous work, but there are things you can do now. If you have personal projects, post them on GitHub and advertise them on relevant forums. If you don’t, consider contributing to an OSS project. With Github’s Arctic vault program, your PRs to a major project may outlive humanity. If you don’t want to work on personal projects at all, consider finding a job where you can be paid to contribute to OSS, or ask your employer if you can spend 20% time giving back to libraries your company depends on.

Intel ARC M.2 edition