Monthly Archives: July 2020

Smartphone contact tracing has failed everywhere

Source: Hacker News

Article note: That was the inevitable outcome. It was never going to be effective, it was never going to be privacy-conscious, it was never going to have enough traction to get adequate scale, especially among the most vulnerable populations...
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On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Bunnie's note that "The point of open source is not to ritualistically compile our stuff from source. It’s the awareness that technology is not magic: that there is a trail of breadcrumbs any of us could follow to liberate our digital lives in case of a potential hostage situation. Should we so desire, open source empowers us to create and run our own essential tools and services." is a lovely expression. This reminded me to check, it looks like Gadgetbridge + an Amazfit Bip might actually have the feature (heartrate, sleep tracking, etc.) and non-feature (no cloud, records with no bluetooth connection and syncs later) set I've been looking for in a smartwatch.
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Cold Showers: For when people get too hyped up about things

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I enjoy this. The amount of hype-driven thinking that goes on in tech is really one of the worst things about it, and collecting careful hype-busting studies is a worthy activity. The scaling points are always my favorites, never underestimate sqlite and awk.
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Intel’s 7nm is Broken, Company Announces Delay Until 2022, 2023

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Intel has been considerably later than their public plan to every node for years. I can't tell if they're bad at estimating or making risky choices because they consider themselves bit enough to absorb it.
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ThinkPad 560E

Complete ThinkPad 560E system.

I’ve been idly looking for one of the mid-90s ThinkPads known to have perfect OpenStep/Rhapsody support for years as a fun collector piece, but been unwilling to pay eBay prices. The other week I scored a pristine IBM ThinkPad 560E for $20 in a Shopgoodwill auction, below is notes on getting it up and running, plus some relevant history and plans.

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Posted in Computers, Electronics, General | 13 Comments

Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft

Source: Hacker News

Article note: So, there are some similarities to earlier Microsoft anti-competitive bundling practices... but fuck Slack for whining about anti-competitive practices, their flavor of IRC with stickers established in large part by bait-and-switching everyone with early interoperability then converting to a walled garden.
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Why only some kids should go back to school

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: As much as explicitly differential treatment makes me nervous, this increasingly seems like the sanest thing. Favor: - Kids too young to take care of their own physical and social needs. - Kids in documented precarious situations (Free/Reduced lunch, etc.) and invest the in-person resources in them. The upper-middle-class highschoolers can sit in their rooms, do computer-mediated-communication like they would be doing preferentially anyway, and learn to make themselves lunch. Otherwise, the already-epic gap between the kids whose parents have the means and will to independently care for them and the ones who don't is going to accelerate to an untenable degree.

As coronavirus cases continue to climb in the U.S., the question of whether or not schools should open in the fall presents an "absolute disaster of epic proportions with no good answers, no clear sides, and no room for either/or thinking," says Shayla R. Griffin, Ph.D., MSW, author of Those Kids, Our Schools & Race Dialogues. In a Medium post, Griffin says that instead of either/or thinking, we should try a both/and solution: Some schools should open. Some students should go.

More specifically, schools should open full-time only for the students most at the margins, "who are at greatest risk if school buildings remain closed, who cannot meet their basic needs without them." This includes children who need school in order to eat, or are too young to be at home alone while parents go back to work, or who have disabilities "that cannot be supported outside of a school building."

Everybody else should stay home "so that there is some hope of educating those who truly cannot stay home safely." While this plan will be hard for everyone, Griffin says, "unlike many of the other proposals I've seen, at least this response will be both hard and just."

Read her entire argument at Medium.

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The Left Is Now the Right

Source: Hacker News

Article note: TFA overstates it's case, but I have been noticing a lot of tactics crossing the political spectrum and being used in noticeably more (self aware, disingenuous, and/or refined) horrific ways by the second group to get there in the last decade. I think a lot is just observing opponent's strategies and co-opting the successful ones in more refined forms, but the amount of moral panic flavored activity - which is a 100% "I don't want to be associated with you politically" behavior - is going up. As is the amount of absolutely unabashed "I want what's best for me and mine, fuck y'all and your liberal and/or egalitarian ideals" and "I got mine, now I need to pull up the ladder so no else uses it to effect social change" behavior going on.
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Apple 12″ Macintosh RGB Monitor Recap

This post is a retro post on a retro topic – a repair I did in 2017 on a monitor made in 1991. I got a question about (probably) the same problem in another venue and realized I never put it online. I managed to dig up my pictures and notes, so there is useful information to be shared.

My 12″ RGB Display is getting sad.

The end of my (2016) post about Recapping my Macintosh LC I discovered that my matching Apple 12″ Macintosh RGB Monitor ( M1296 ) was going pear-shaped, and speculated that I’d need to recap it.

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Posted in Computers, DIY, Electronics, General | 3 Comments

I have a machine with SSH exposed on one high-numbered nonstandard port forwarded through a NAT. A few days ago I noticed some log noise about failed SSH logins and turned on fail2ban with sane defaults. It banned almost 300 … Continue reading

Posted on by pappp | 1 Comment