myself248

They are also not all that limited. I used a Privacy.com card for a New York Times trial subscription, which of course I could not cancel online, so I just let it expire. A few days past the renewal date, I saw a $waytoomuch charge on my card.

I wrote to Privacy, and this was their reply:

Jun 1, 2022, 5:21 PM EDT

I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened.

It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.

We are refunding the transaction to the original funding source used for this purchase. You should see this refund reflected in your bank statement in the next 5 business days. However, please note that since this merchant uses force posts, they will continue to do this monthly until the subscription is cancelled. Please contact them to have the subscription cancelled.

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Or just own your own hardware. Spend a few bucks at Microcenter, build a machine, and there's simply no mechanism by which they could decide later that you should actually pay 100x more, and then magically suck it out of your bank account.

None of this can happen unless you first cede control.

We mostly discover new music from about 15 to 25 or 30, right? It's pretty normal for that to slow down as the concerns of adulthood kinda get in the way of keeping up with whomever is hot now.

Maybe, I guess? I still listen to some of the stuff from that era, but I've gotten wonderfully addicted to a music trivia game called Whatsamusic, which introduces me to a ton of music played by whoever's in the round. But only 30 seconds at a time (it's fairly fast-paced), so when I hear something that's intriguing enough to want to hear the rest of the track, I go add it to a "check this out later" playlist elsewhere. (I could also bookmark it in the game.)

My tastes have exploded in the 2 years since I found the game. There's so much good stuff out there! And playing with hosts that pick good themes ("Songs that're a good source of protein" was a recent favorite. The first play was "Maneater" and it went downhill from there.), you can't help but find more.

And Bluetooth still doesn't have a good "headphone splitter" function to plug in 2 or more sets of headphones, does it?

I love this idea!

Yeeeeears ago, I was in the middle of some late-night hacking session, hanging with friends on IRC, and I had shared my screen via VNC so they could watch/help. (ISTR I had found the UART port on some piece of embedded hardware and we were muddling our way through U-boot incantations or something.)

At some point, I tabbed over to Winamp to change the music, which everyone saw, and one of the crew was like "oh hey you have artist X on your playlist, do you like artist Y?", and I admitted that I had not heard of artist Y. Seconds later there was a DCC file transfer.

Artist Y fit the mood perfectly. This was great.

This evolved into spawning Winamp on a second box that could be separately VNC'd into, where anyone could upload and play music they thought was appropriate for the session, without interrupting the main console. And someone installed a Shoutcast server on it too, so everyone could listen.

After a little while this was our little Friday-night routine, regardless of whatever other hacking was happening. The collaborative deejay stage -- we popped a Notepad on the Winamp box to track who was playing and who was up next, though ephemeral chat remained on IRC -- defined a brief era of my internet experience.

Many years later, I ran across a Spotify plugin called Jqbx that did basically the same thing. It was short-lived, but there seem to be several work-alikes. Sadly the community disbanded, but now it's got me thinking...

Yup. Buy it, test it, post a review, return it. It's the only message you can send.

I feel like it was sooooo close to catching on, but basing it on CET instead of UTC made it a bit too clearly tongue-in-cheek. That also torpedoed its main user-base, which I always thought was sysadmins.

Well, nothing is easier then adding constraints.

Technically it's easy. Mentally it's nearly impossible. This comment posted on Ars yesterday blew my mind:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/we-cannot-choose-to-becom...

tl;dr: When given the easy option, people always take it, even when they know the hard route would be better in the long term. But the full story is interesting and not that long, it's worth reading.

Featured towards the climax of Short Circuit 2, which was huge in my childhood. What a powerhouse piece of music!

See also, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/SCEE

Interesting, thank you! That is quite a list.

I only used one for a few years, and never thought to laminate the pages because they didn't need it -- dye-sub wax-printed pages were already suitable for outdoor maps because the wax repelled water, and they held up where inkjet pages became a smeary mess immediately.

We definitely did wash our hands before and after loading ink blocks, I remember being cautioned about that.

Oh well. I guess my memories are better than the tech deserved. Won't be the last time.

This looks like a partial reinvention of NNCP's sneakernet transport, but for a much more limited use-case: http://www.nncpgo.org/index.html

You can also run NNCP over networks if you want to.

And if you use your cellphone as a USB mass storage device, it still is!

And not a single solid-ink-onto-paper sublimation printer, that I'm aware. There are badge printers still using a dye-sub ribbon, but the Tektronix Phaser, later the Xerox Phaser, is completely gone.

I wonder why. Were the consumables too cheap and the printers too reliable to be commercially viable? Did color laser printers catch up in terms of print quality? Did it have some other fatal flaw?

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Whenever I stopped on the public access channel, it was reruns of city council meetings and stuff. I've heard about all sorts of wild and wooly productions by teenagers and weirdos, but never saw any myself.

Having spent some time as a cellular tech in Detroit, scrambling up half-wrecked stairwells in long-abandoned buildings to service the radio equipment still running on the roof, those accounts make it sound downright tame. I'd visit in a heartbeat next time I'm in DFW.

The landscape is so spacious, I hesitate to call it urb-ex. Rur-ex?

Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000.

What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.

Hey now!

Speaking as a co-founder of a large community hackerspace, we don't have the volunteer bandwidth to manage the additional overhead of tool lending. Please, please, please let the libraries offer more alternatives. It's exactly their mission.

I presumed that was to make sure there was no accidentally-warm RAM cache or whatever, start from a known system state.

Also it seemed to have revealed the aforementioned ulimit hiccup, so it sounds fruitful.

Seems like this process itself should be incredibly amenable to automation. Here's 25 parameters, permute over them, perform this test on each loop.

But it sounds like there were other gremlins (like ulimit reverting itself) that would've thwarted automated testing.

Do you feel like there's a point where it would've made sense to automate?

Microsoft Tay is looking more prescient by the minute.

Furthermore, it helps to talk with people who think differently from you.

Maybe they studied the same subject but at a different school, or maybe they specialize in something else entirely.

Maybe their first language is different from yours, since language idioms can affect the way we frame problems.

Maybe they want to get into the field you're working on, and your thinking can also be teaching.

For me, this is a big part of the value of a hackerspace/makerspace. The tools are nice, but the intellectual environment is amazing.

Yeah, it's a significantly trickier proposition when the pads aren't there.

The contacts are in the connector, you just need to bring them out and get the resistor on them, which is frankly a pain I shouldn't have to endure when USB-C has been out for 12 years. None of this is rocket science, the manufacturers just aren't feeling the pain.

The thing is, making a 5v-only device PD-compliant is literally one resistor. It costs well under a penny.

It's pure ignorance, not a decision, but the lack of one. Lack of caring, lack of having an actual engineer involved, just slapping an oval-shaped port into a product where a trapezoidal port had been, and blindly thinking that magically makes it spec-compliant.

Or not thinking about the spec at all.

I return these devices too. Lots of them. My e-commerce returns over the last year are probably 50% PD non-compliance, 50% all other defects combined.

How many times have the cops busted a dealer who turned out to be another undercover cop?

I think that's even more significant, since it's measuring people who cared enough to click the form in the first place, which is juicier than just page loads.

The trick is that the scratches need to recur at the right revolution rate, while the bandwidth needs to slowly decrease as the stylus nears the end of the groove. Hmm.

Absolutely this. Blind application of a technique, not understood by the one applying it, is jarring. IMHO it insults the era from which they were trying to mooch cool points.

If you're hiring from the town where Kool-Aid is headquartered, don't be surprised if most of the candidates drink a lot of it.