adrianpike

Depends on the item and if you and the military are optimizing for the same thing It's a lowest bidder situation, so keep that in mind.

Mil-spec transport containers? Excellent.

Mil-spec rucksacks? Not so excellent.

We've done that at a few places I've been at - it's tricky because if the failure is too short its just annoying toil, but if it's too long there's risk of losing context and having to remember what the heck we were thinking.

Overall it's still net positive for me in certain cases of enforcing things to be temporary, or at least revisited.

There's supposed to be a 260 megabit link: https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/esc/o2o/

Maybe it's not operating as described yet?

Yes, with the caveat that you'll need decent line of sight to it.

Which adblocker are you currently using? The arms race is getting pretty tiring...

Yes and yes, we've used it for civilian Search & Rescue in tandem with CalTopo.

We did sailing charters growing up and had one of these on the boat, I was in charge of it and the sound & feel of the CH-CHUNK is seared into my memories like nothing else. We never got any declines, but I always wondered how that reconciliation process actually worked out.

Super neat - I did something similar on a lark to enable useful "web browsing" over 1200 baud packet - I have Starlink back at my camp but might be a few miles away, so as long as I can get line of sight I can Google up stuff, albeit slow. Worked well but I never really productionalized it beyond some weekend tinkering.

I guess you got me as either an easily nerd-sniped plebe or an Old — I use it in all my discourse when I'd normally take a speaking pause.

Depending on your perspective, that's either very concerning or a great business opportunity for this decade's Heroku to enter the fray.

This is very accurate - microservices can be great as a forcing function to revisit your architectural boundaries, but if all you do is add a network hop and multiple components to update when you tweak a data model, all you'll get is headcount sprawl and deadlock to the moon.

I'm a huge fan of migrating to microservices as a secondary outcome of revisiting your component boundaries, but just moving to separate repos & artifacts so we can all deploy independently is a recipe for pain.

Same dream here - they work very interesting problems at very interesting scale, but I can see 3-4x the comp while working from anywhere? Not even a chance. I do sometimes fantasize about making a career shift when the cash comp isn't that important to me and the kids are out of the house, but as of now I value afternoon coffee breaks with my kids just too darn much.

I'm also super excited to see more on this, it's been living rent free in my head for a long time. I played around with keypress extraction from sound recordings a couple decades ago in college, and it was remarkably straightforward to extract keypresses based on sound signals, even with zero training - based on the time between keypresses and the unique signature of space/return/backspace you can build a predictor pretty quickly. We never made it to the "bounce a pair of lasers off two window panes a known distance apart and triangulate everyone's keyboard", but it was one of those things that's definitely doable with enough time and brains.

Those geostationary sats sound really interesting, but I've struggled to find any remotely modern tools or DB's to find visible sats - is there a current best of breed I can look at?

I've also had my email posted in mailto's in a half dozen places for... a long time. I remember in the early 00's when I'd cargo cult the old "type the whole email out as adrian at adrianpike dot com" thing on forums thinking it would work as some mystical talisman, and it turns out considering emails to be secret isn't worth the time.

Funny story, I wound up finding a bunch of my old Mac-formatted Zip disks a few months ago, and trying to extract data off of them was a wild, tangled mess of external SCSI enclosures, `ddrescue`, and then quick archiving it up onto the NAS before the drive or disk started making the famous clicking noises. Blows my mind we lived like that.

The ones I've seen usually just spam the spectrum with noise, since it's easiest and totally effective, and there's no need for them be sneaky or clever with their emissions since it's very very rare the victim would have a way to notice, and you don't need more than a few watts.

I'd love to find any actual FEMA publications that back up some of the numbers and claims - so far to the best I can tell is it's mostly from interviews with the regional director, which, while valuable, isn't quite at the level of citation I'd like. If anyone's got a PDF I'd love to retract all my critiques though. :)

Thanks for jumping in with your experience - every time the New Yorker article makes the rounds, I do a little light digging to try and find some sources the author based it on. Reading through some of Goldfinger's publications will help unlock a bit more, thank you!

Freshwater availability is a big factor that swings in the PNW's favor.

That New Yorker article goes viral every few years - it's a well written piece and spins a great yarn, but there's some significant hyperbole and it's sources don't quite back up the claims. Yes, a 9.x will be devastating. No, everything west of i-5 will not be toast.

Oh hey, fellow Miku friend. I was _furious_ when they first announced their bankruptcy plan. We supposedly paid a hefty premium for hardware that enables onboard breathing monitoring, and suddenly they're pretending they have to ship it to the cloud to do some magic? Nah, tear it down, and turns out we did pay extra for hardware.

Our Miku's use a Novelda (fka Xethru) UWB sensor SoC, specifically designed for human presence monitoring and, drumroll, breathing and heartbeat. Specifically they use an X4: https://novelda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/x4_datasheet_...

I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.

Early Hotline was amazing from a hacker community perspective - I ran a series of hotline servers off of dialup, and then was able to get some hardware on my high school campus and have a server on our T3 for all of a day or two before our sysad called me in and said that hypothetically, if someone had a hypothetical Performa plugged in and was hypothetically to turn the hypothetical thing off that day, nobody would get suspended, and then that hypothetical someone could hang out in gap periods or after school and get paid to do actual IT work for the school department, learn a ton, and kickstart a fairly decent career hacking on stuff and getting paid for it - and hypothetically help run the official unofficial school Hotline server.

Super grateful to that dude to this day, I hope I'll get the chance to pass it on.

I believe OP is speaking specifically to the IoT space, which is still a bit of a stretch - but slightly more accurate than the massive ARM dominance we're seeing elsewhere.

I built a fun hack back in college that used a laser microphone to listen to keypresses - the timing and sound of which is relatively straightforward to extract letter pairing heuristics from, and from that, given some time, you can build pretty strong guesses on people's passwords.

The next step I was going to take it was to use to microphones on different windowpanes and be able to triangulate multiple keyboards in a room - never quite got there because my DSP skills were garbage, but it's in the back of the mind someday to pick back up if I ever take a sabbatical.

Yep, even the furthest spot in Wyoming in the Thorofare wilderness complex is something like 19 miles out from a road.

One thing to keep in mind is that only a few miles over rugged terrain can be a _lot_. A few miles away from a remote forest road in the wrong direction and you might not see any people for years and years.

I do search and rescue out here, and even with helicopters it's pretty vast; https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=9&cx=-...

Both - the firearm has to be incredibly precise, but you also have to take into account wind and air density to get that much accuracy, and a big portion of marksmanship is accounting for those. Knowing that you'll have a temperature change over a body of water, and how to adjust for that, for example.

Yeah, that was the rough plan, start with a pair of mics and triangulate out - I was hoping to iterate all the way up to a pair of laser microphones on different window panes, and on paper I think it should be all doable. I'd assume all of the organizations that have budgets for things like this already have it, but it was a fun project to hack on between gigs.

Not this specific code, but I have done accoustic keyboard analysis in the past with success. The thing I wasn't able to get working was multiple keyboards in a single room - in theory it should be doable, but the signal processing was (and still is) far beyond my rudimentary skills.

Yes - but you don't even need their output. I did this a dozen or so years ago at a coworking space, where I trained it on my officemate's keyboard assuming they were typing Ruby code, and then was able to guess their passphrase pretty quickly using the trained model.

I manually fudged spacebars and enters because they're accoustically obvious, and played around with punctuation keys. Generally the timing for fingers to move from one key to the other was where I was finding the strongest signal.