• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I’m in IT, but not that kind of IT.

    Last week I afflicted myself with the Location Services are turned off bug by installing the 23H2 update to duplicate an issue a user in my work area was having.

    When I called desktop support, we could not replicate the issue after he remoted in.
    He closed the Remote Desktop connection, and the issue reoccurred.
    He remoted in. The popup vanished as soon as he connected. We couldn’t replicate the issue. He seemed dubious now. He disconnected. It occurred. I got a screenshot. He reconnected. We looked at the remote connection settings. Remote connections were set to override location. Disabled that. Issue presented. We both had a good laugh.










  • I used to have a TCL soundbar.

    In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

    If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

    It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
    After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

    Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.



  • I’m glad I have ADHD and will forget about this by tomorrow, or else I’d spend my weekend trying to figure out what temperature and droplet size makes the slipperiest ice. You can probably use far less water with a mist sprayer, assuming the mist doesn’t freeze before it hits the ground. (Saving water means better coverage by the time you run out, being my thinking.)


  • I sort of think it’s a multi-pronged thing.

    I think one of Trump’s advisors floated it for the easy to grasp reasons -
    Proximity to the trade lane that’s beginning to open up through the arctic as the polar ice melts, and access to Greenland’s rare earth minerals as a way to not be reliant on China for them.

    I also suspect that should the Trump admin ever gain control of Greenland (I don’t believe they would), but they would turn it into a penal colony as they attempt to turn the U.S. into a white ethno-state.

    There’s the ego factor. The rest of the world is telling the man-child Trump no, so he’s trying to see if he can get away with it. He’s a psychopath who likes to see if he can enforce his will on others. It’s not even about the actual gains of the action, but about overcoming the objections of others because he’s fragile and weak inside.

    And finally - because if the U.S. looks like a credible threat to Europe, that means that Europe will have to invest in meeting that threat, even if the threat never materializes. Resources are finite and that harms Ukraine’s defense. No doubts from me that Trump is getting encouragement from his pal Putin to keep pushing for Greenland.

    It is completely fucked, though. No ‘real’ U.S. citizen wants this, either.



  • Having just read a comment about someone who actually went through the process of having a kid by employing stuff like cycle and fertility tracking, scheduling both sex and abstinence, as well as other not-fun stuff, your comment made me think of taking the kink to an extreme, where instead of lots of rambunctious boning, it was a couple nerds doing intense and fruitless science to find the optimal way to impregnate someone that was impossible to impregnate. (Unless they start looking at the mating habits of bedbugs, but that’s a third, separate, entirely unhinged thing.)

    I mean, I’m pretty sure I know which interpretation you meant. But brains are weird and I’m sleep deprived.


  • As someone who isn’t going to have kids and doesn’t want them, I still get the growing old alone concern.

    It’s not that I would have wanted children to take care of me, but that I don’t trust the social safety system in the U.S.
    Even if things are going well, it’s still a terrifying proposition. My first job ever was as a dietary aid at a mid-level retirement home, and while some of the people there were thriving (namely the folks who somehow managed to go into the home with their partners), the majority were a study of what happens when the ability to live exceeds the will. It was a formative experience.

    That’s why I’m in therapy and desperately scared that between neurodivergence and trauma, that I’m not going to be one of those really social old people with friends everywhere that care for them and keep them company. Although I think it’s not a given that kids will automatically be there for you as you age, I can see the appeal of doing what you can to hedge your bets. It’s a terrifying world out there, and we only have each other.


  • I installed clips onto the bottom of my sectional sofa that prevent it from separating. Which is good, because it’s been separating a lot since I installed wheels onto it.

    The wheels were to make it easier to move because stuff kept falling behind it, but they worked too well. They even just slid around while locked. With all the sections clipped together it doesn’t seem to budge. The clips are the alligator style ones that you push the couch together to cinch, or lift the couch section to release.