iramiller

What I want is something that amounts to a stateful firewall/allow list on top of PiHole ... if a device is attempting to connect to an ip address which was not resolved by PiHole then it gets blocked ... Similarly if the RDNS for an address resolves to a domain PiHole would block it gets dropped as well.

Far too many apps/IoT/appliances have gotten smart and use DoH (or similar methods of circumventing network control). Despite that they all require routing and can still be forcibly cut off.

Similar story with Portmaster 2s and a wall of modems layed out. The resulting blinking lights acted like a load monitor of sorts as the activity would spread across the wall as customers dialed in after work and signed off at night. Not mention a wall of flashing red lights made a pretty good picture of ‘the internet’ for those just starting out on this adventure in 1997.

The biggest missing piece in these definitions? The tires. Most cars these days come with a very highway biased tire. These tires will fail very quickly in most conditions found on off road trails, especially those that are designated as 4x4 required. Failure can be as innocuous as limited traction or complete such as a flat tire from a puncture. If you are in a situation where a tire is punctured from lack of durability how do you think that space saver spare (or can of fix-a-flat) is going to help you get out?

The second major issue with AWD systems is often the clutch based systems that are engaged to transfer power ‘from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip’. When used in demanding conditions these systems can overheat and shutdown. This also applies to brake biasing systems as well (brakes applied to spinning wheels to transfer torque to other wheels). It can be especially challenging for brakes as there is generally not sufficient air flow over the brakes to cool them during slower speed off-road travel.

No car with paint you care about should ever be washed in the sun. If you look around some detailer forums for basic car washing instructions staying in the shade and carefully drying your car are very important to avoid water spots, swirl marks, and similar damage. Cars with dark colors are particularly notorious for this type of damage.

And you know how much Coca is needed to make Cocaine? Might as well compare chewing a piece of sugar cane to drinking HFCS.

IPv6 only? If you have a DNS record for that your are still not making it very difficult for scripts to find you.

They cite that the data in the study was from 2011-2015. Cars have changed significantly in that time so it is worth remembering that the common stability and traction control, and safety systems on cars sold today are significantly improved from those when this study was performed.

A performance automobile or sports car can certainly perform at levels that raise risks. That said I would rather be in an automobile that spends most of its time operating far below its capacity with sufficient performance reserve to handle emergency situations despite being significantly handicapped by a less than perfect human driver.

`nc -Z x.x.x.x nnnn` works well enough for me.

Stories like this remind me that in distributed systems time becomes a very imprecise concept at small scales.

I’ve used the shaped orange foam 3M ear plugs extensively while riding a motorcycle. The wind noise is extremely bad for you given the duration and surprisingly high decibels.

One interesting thing I have noticed is that these plugs are extremely sensitive to being inserted correctly and despite extensive experience and good technique (which for me involves two hands, one to insert and one to pull the top of my ear for alignment) I still find the need to reinsert plugs on occasion.

Unfortunately the poor fit isn’t obvious until I am on the road at speed when the sound volume is higher than it should be. If this same situation arises in combat I can easily imagine that the higher intensity of noises would cause hearing damage far sooner and in addition it seems unlikely soldiers would call for a timeout to fix their ear plugs.

This line of reasoning is what is used to justify lock-in and anti-right to repair legislation. Following this reasoning you shouldn’t be allowed to change a flat tire on your car as it could be improperly tightened and fly off at speed.

Technical constraints to lock out owners/users only serve to enforce a manufacturer’s feudalistic rent seeking and revenue extraction policies.

In the overall scope of driving a personal automobile cellphone use or even adjusting the car entertainment system are far more common causes of accidents and death and yet these are not locked away via technical controls despite being very easy to accomplish.

Doing crime on a system with a perfect immutable record doesn’t seem like a smart play to me.

As noted above the firms like chainalysis will continue to uncover and attribute all of the nodes in the graph. If you are taking 100s of thousands or more through fraud the incentives are aligned to see your crimes prosecuted.

You still have this requirement for your users that depend on screen readers… a segment of users which coincidentally are unlikely to appreciate the fancy icon.svg

How long until vision based ‘AI’ systems make these kinds of counter measures obsolete? It seems like it should be straight forward for a multi-modal sensor package to combine with some basic physics logic (the airframe can only ‘move’ so much) which would defeat these types of counter measures. The vision based processing component should be able to filter out chaff and flare based disruption.

I expect that the Ukraine war is a very useful proving/testing ground for a great many defense industry companies.

Well the SEC certainly has one point of view.

Unfortunately the CFTC has another view and they both can’t be right so which part of the federal governance applies here?

https://www.cftc.gov/digitalassets/index.htm

This ambiguity is why clarity is needed. In the famous words of Matt Levine everything is securities fraud.

It seems obvious that some legal clarity is actually required here.

Gatorade is great… if you are exercising in heat, like perhaps football players in Florida.

For everyone else their body probably doesn’t need all those sugars and salts in their hydration.

It’s a similar problem with metal grating typically used on outdoor staircases. There are practical benefits in places where it snows for these designs. Sometimes clothing is simply impractical for certain environments.

It still find the idea of glass stairs to be a poor choice with no practical benefits.

Just remember then when all of your neighbors have power out as well that those small generators often “grow legs and disappear” … it is a very good idea to chain them up.

Also _always_ ensure the exhaust is no where near any open doors or windows. Small portable generators are exceptionally dangerous for carbon monoxide poisoning.

All that said these small generators are fantastic and they can even easily be setup to run from an external fuel tank to increase flexibility.

I have 400aH worth of lithium batteries and 600 watts of solar (not laid out in an ideal configuration down the sides of the roof on my airstream).

I have found I use 60-90watts AC to power my starlink.

I can easily go all day even with 2-3 laptops and external monitors (150 watts or so). The solar keeps up and even does a little charging during the day.

Every other day when it’s cloudy or rainy I will need to top up with the small generator but that is easy to do with lithium batteries since they charge at the full 120amps unlike lead acid that taper the current significantly.

I see pretty consistent 65 watts AC on my Victron inverter with some peak surges to about 90watts. Very doable with a small solar array.

Curious if they bothered to comply with the GVWR for the vehicle.

An extra 730lbs is most of the typical payload capacity for a typical car.

The model S has a GVWR of 5600lbs and weighs about 4600lbs meaning you can only put about 1000lbs of stuff in/on it safely.

With this extra battery weight there isn’t enough capacity left to carry more that two typical adults let alone any luggage.

They are not without their drawbacks but you can get an excellent picture quality 4K home theater projector that has none of the ‘smart’ tv features.

A good burr grinder is all about consistent grind size and is very easy to observe.

Spread a small amount of ground coffee out on a piece of paper. Observe the varying sizes and shapes within the grounds. Better grinders produce more even grinds which produce more even extraction during brewing.

It’s an exceedingly simple concept. As an extreme example try and brew an espresso using a simple blade style ‘grinder’. It will be impossible. The refinement of a good grinder is simply optimizing along this axis.

This would be easily solved if car manufacturers cared at all… simply cover the bottom of the car with panels. A side benefit would be the increased fuel economy from the cleaner airflow and reduction in drag (this is an inherit benefit of electric vehicles—-especially trucks). It’s not done because no one looks under their cars and it’s easier/cheaper to manufacture and design for cooling.

I should add that installing a simple piece of metal cut to fit over the bottom of your vehicle isn’t a great idea if it doesn’t properly account for the changes in ventilation and cooling that it causes.

(Controlled Unclassified Information)

Having built a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform inside a fintech startup over the last three years I am completely unsurprised by this announcement.

From the start the HLF platform appeared to be extremely optimized for demos and quick start tutorials but fell flat for any production use. The operational complexity of the Hyperledger Fabric spirals uncontrollably with the tight ‘enterprise style’ control layered on top (the extensive use of certificate authorities—an external chain of trust at conflict with the blockchain) resulted in extensive administration overhead.

Early on we would joke occasionally that the platform seemed to be designed around an idea that customers should be overwhelmed and just choose to have IBM host the network instead. I absolutely do not regret our decision to move off of the platform in the slightest.

Given the wildly different rates of speed involved, incidents per unit of time would perhaps be more directly comparable.

Moderately well trained (based on 8-10hr/wk cycling specific training year round) older (40+) cyclist here... 260w average for an hour is pretty reasonable... 300w for an hour for hard a effort is possible for me when measured at the crank with a power meter.

One thing to keep in mind about power numbers vs pro cyclists is that they can churn out these kinds of watts at significantly lower body weights than a recreational cyclist. For output into electricity though it doesn't matter if I’m 35lbs heavier than a pro because watts are watts.

Regardless it seems to me that these levels of output using a full body motion of a rowing machine would be exceedingly difficult for a one hour period compared to cycling that leaves most of your muscle groups relaxed.

Its not a tv at all but a projector... still plenty of these around that have no functions other than displaying what is input. As a bonus it is much easier to deal with when it is eventually obsolete than an extremely large flat panel tv. ALR screens are pretty good these days too so you dont have to use it in a cave.

In all this discussion of the art of design in old houses I am surprised to see no one has mentioned “A Pattern Language” [1] yet. This is truly a must read book for anyone considering the design and building of their own house.

Interesting topics such as the design of a front door viewed from a street have stuck with me and is something I reflect on when walking through an old neighborhood. Infallibly the most appealing houses match up well to the principals outlined in the book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language