BC TECH
Saved by @jay_millerjay

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

 but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...
it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.
and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"
there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(
I could mostly fix it by hacking around it: write my own "search engine" which redirects to google if the text doesn't start with "foone "
but
1. this will break the "searched from the address bar" magic, which means google will make me do captchas if I search too fast
2. it will break search suggestions too
this workaround works. although from the comments on the bug that might also be a bug and they'll "fix" that workingness later.
https://t.co/KShHdCMzeT
related bugs:
https://t.co/RxcaI3qKK2
https://t.co/JzYlzwWUOk
I like the bullshittery of the developer question of "What appeals to you about space vs. tab?"
which I can't accurately reply to because twitter doesn't let me use 72pt font
here's why it appeals to me:

1. this is how it's been for years. I can type "foone blah" faster than you can blink, man. it's the #1 thing I DO in my browser. what appeals to me is THIS IS HOW IT FUCKING WORKS, DIPSHIT. CHANGING THINGS BECAUSE YOU FEEL LIKE IT IS NOT FUN
2. the space key is placed under one of my fingers while typing, because, and this may shock you, it's heavily used when typing english text.
it's a very common key to press. the tab key is not so centrally located, because it's rare.

AND I SAY THAT AS A PYTHON PROGRAMMER
why don't we change it to ctrl-alt-F12?
What appeals to you about space over ctrl-alt-f12, dipshit?
3. and probably most importantly:

SPACE IS HOW IT WORKS IN OTHER BROWSERS MOTHERFUCKER
I don't just use Chrome. I use Firefox almost as much. Hell, if I go into IE, which I haven't since like 2006, I bet it works using space over there too
Are you just trying to make it incompatible with firefox to punish people who dare use more than one browser?
Because having used multiple OSes/Browsers/Etc for years I can tell you one thing I've learned is that while muscle memory is 100% a thing and it can be retrained, what it's very much NOT good at is the idea of having muscle memory that's contextual.
it's way harder to remember "type foo blah on firefox, and type fooblah on chrome" than it would be to switch from "type foo blah" to "type fooblah" everywhere, for example.
this is why I have a set of hotkeys on my keyboard which do things like open a terminal and they were carefully set up to work exactly the same on my windows machine and my linux machine, so that I don't have to remember "ctrl-alt-t for a terminal on windows, and meta-T on linux"
so this "just use fooneblah!" solution would only work (and I say "work" very loosely. I wouldn't be happy with this solution) if I never used firefox ever again.
WHICH I'M SURE YOU'D LOVE
my favorite example of "no contextual muscle memory" is when I have to switch between a "classic layout" keyboard and one with a function key in the lower-left, like a thinkpad or that BTC-compact keyboard I use so much
every time that happens you WILL end up doing function-C and wondering why it doesn't copy and/or kill the program
That's why, for my Thinkpad, I've got the BIOS option to swap the keys turned on, and I even got stickers to relabel them.
Haven't yet figured out a solution for my BTC-5100.
Maybe I could swap the keycaps and mod the key matrix or reflash the controller?
think about that for a second.
I have a keyboard from the mid-90s and I'm thinking about dumping a 8051 firmware, reverse engineering it, modifying it, and reflashing it onto the keyboard just to eliminate a tiny source of friction in using it.
THAT'S HOW MUCH WORK I'M WILLING TO DO JUST TO AVOID THE PROBLEM OF OCCASIONALLY HITING FUNCTION-C ACCCIDENTALLY
EXACTLY HOW PISSED DO YOU THINK I AM THAT YOU BROKE ONE OF THE MAIN THINGS I DO IN YOUR BROWSER?
hmmm. It's definitely an 8051 but it's a custom-made one:
C32191AE or 1001000220 have no results.
maybe I should just stick it in my EEPROM reader and see if it can dump it as a generic 8051, then flash the modded code onto a replacement flash-enabled 8051?
Gah, this is going to be a pain to mod.
I'd want to desolder the 8051, but look, this controller PCB is basically sitting on top of the main keyboard PCB
And you can sorta see here that there's no connector between the two boards. They just soldered some pins onto the bottom board and then soldered them into the top board.
I assume they did this (rather than just making the bottom PCB double-sided and including all the components on it) is that either they needed more room to route the top components, or they use the bottom PCB for multiple "keyboards"
like this is the PS/2 version but I bet there was an AT version (which is just a different cable, really) and an XT/AT switchable version. and if they ever wanted to make like a Sun version of an ADB version, they could just swap the controller board.
still.
connectors, man. use connectors.
otherwise some punk yelling about web browsers is gonna get annoyed at you 28 years later.

what's a web browser? OH, YOU'LL SEE!
(although to be accurate, Mosaic was released in 1993 so there's every possibility they could have known what a web browser was)
the first major web browser is older than Doom. That's not something that feels like it should be true.
and the first FIRST web browser is older than The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.
It's older than the US release of the Super Nintendo.
That was WorldWideWeb (aka Nexus), launched in December 1990.
it was released to the general public in August 1991.
Zelda: A Link To The Past, The US release of the Super Nintendo, and the dissolution of the USSR hadn't happened yet, but would later that year.
WHEN THE FIRST BROWSER WAS MADE, THE TWO MAIN FOUNDERS OF GOOGLE WEREN'T OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE YET
Oh hey, its's a Foam-and-Foil keyboard.
This use a capacitive method to detect key presses. These seem to have been liked by some companies as a better feeling keyboard than a membrane, but the foam sometimes completely disintegrates so they don't last forever.
Here's the other side. This one seems to be still doing fine after 28 years, though.
Pads closeup.
You can see there's a little foam pad under the foil.
This is apparently for "overtravel". The key actually is detected shortly after you start pushing it down, but to make it feel like you can push it down farther, the foam is there and gets compressed.
Several companies made these, like Cherry and Key Tronic and, of course, BTC.
https://t.co/syXLRu6Rly
TexElec makes replacements in case you need to fix one of these. THANKFULLY I don't, at least not yet.
https://t.co/8xEis5WHID
Anyway I was looking at the key matrix to see if I could easily just adjust these to make ctrl and function switch. Not really, no.
The two pins in the middle go off to other keys (since it's a matrix) so I can't really swap them without affecting other ones
What I could do is chop the traces here, scrape off the solder max, and cross-connect them.
This would be hard because they'd have to cross, so I'd either have to use insulating layers or drill through to the other side.
plus, this is capacitive, and who knows what the tolerances are on that? it's entirely possible that doing all this modding will change the capacitance and now the keys don't work.
so I don't think that's a very good solution. Changing the controller is probably a much better one.
I'm also not sure what those two solder blobs are about.
The ones on top are for a reverse-side jumper connection.
But if you look at the opposite side (I mirrored it so they'll match) you can see that those aren't vias, there's no hole here. It's solely on the top, not the bottom.
https://t.co/GvdQ2dmzzL
by the way, BTC is still around! They just don't make keyboards anymore:
https://t.co/vh3qJTKdSs

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
Something that I didn't realize but hurt my brain to learn:
John Norman (aka John Frederick Lange Jr.), of the Gor series of sci-fi/BDSM novels, is still alive.
He released two books (one of them a Gor book, #35), in 2019.


I guess with the fact that the series started in 1966 and feels like it's always a historical thing... I assumed he had to have quit writing and/or died back in like 1986.

Nope. Still alive, he's 89, and was apparently still writing as of 2 years ago.

also, my brain being what it is, I totally just googled for the book's cover image by entering "trans man of gor" which is NOT the title.

in my defense, how many book serieses look like this WITH THE SAMEAUTHOR FROM BOOK #1 to BOOK #35?


Anyway if you look at any this and think it's a suggestion that you should try reading any of these novels or learning anything about them, you are quite mistaken.

Gor is bad sci-fi and bad BDSM, and you should skip it for either reason.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
So I got out some CF cards and noticed something odd about this one. Do you see the weirdness?


How the fuck is a CF card "USB Enabled"?


So CF cards are a weird beast that act as either a PCMCIA card or an ATA/IDE card depending on a mode pin.

They're definitely not USB.

And it's not like that weird SanDisk card I have which you can fold in half and plug it in as a USB device.


It turns out the reason for "USB Enabled" is because it's a Lexar drive from the jumpSHOT era.
This is a normal CF card in most cases, you can use it in normal CF card readers and such
FUN
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foone
foone
@Foone
I like how mediawiki exports pages because there's nothing I enjoy more than parsing a 1 gigabyte XML file

and I'm doing simple-english-wiki! it's way smaller than english wikipedia
I can only imagine how impossibly unparsable that nightmare is

fun fact: when programmers need to write code to extract data from an XML file, the process usually goes like this:
1. find XML file
2. open it in a text editor, see what the structure is
3. write some code that parses that

do you really want to open a 1 gigabyte XML file in your text editor?

do you want to fucking die?

I used to run into this problem back when I worked for the government, because sometimes I'd click a database query log (don't ask why our logs were in XML, it's... complicated) and it would turn out to be 100mb
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
I was todays years old when I learned that Final Fantasy VII's Midgar Zolom is an exceptionally badly translated reference to Jörmungandr, the world serpent from Norse mythology.


The other name for Jörmungandr is Miðgarðsormr, which got rendered into katakana as ミドガルズオルム, or "Midogaruzuorumu".
But when it was translated back into English, the translator didn't get the reference.

So they split that into the city name Midgar and the rest as... "Zolom".
Which is not a word.

It was supposed to be a bit of a pun in Japanese. Midgar, the big city in FF7, is named after Midgard, the Old Norse name for the Earth (as opposed to the other realms of the Nine Worlds)

so obviously a big snake living near the city of Midgar would be the Miðgarðsormr, since that basically translate as "Midgard Serpent"
GAME
foone
foone
@Foone
Tomorrow is gonna be fun for anyone in charge of requisitions.

There's gonna be a bunch of SRE teams asking for lockpicks, crowbars, hydraulic rescue tools, chainsaws, and some breaching shotguns

new SRE exercise:
imagine all the digital locks have broken and are keeping you out, and you can't connect in via the network.

how long until you get a console on the main servers?

now figure out how much money you'd lose being down for that long. Multiply out hours-of-downtime by money-per-hour.
There's your budget for designing Creative Solutions to bypass all your security

Although before you go trying to kick down doors:
Remember that doors are secured between the uprights and aren't as easy to smash open as movies might lead you to believe.
But the wall next to the door is probably just drywall and a little insulation.

drywall is also pretty cheap to repair.
CATEGORYPDFMAKERAPP GRAB THISTHREADREADERAPP UNROLL PLEASE

More from Tech

DHH
DHH
@dhh
Facebook may well be exceptionally nasty and it’s leadership particularly deceitful, but the whole enterprise is the natural conclusion to an ad-powered social network. Ever greater surveillance, hyper targeting, and engagement baiting is what the basic incentives demand.

Facebook cannot change course. The best they can do is keep dishing out empty apologies, commit to inconsequential adjustments to its algorithms, and spend more money on positive PR and negative projection. The rot is at the core of its very being.

This is why we, consumers and citizens, must make the change for Facebook. Antitrust forcing a breakup of the business, and consumer revolt driving #DeleteFacebook. Zuckerberg will never conclude that what he built has become such a net negative for the world on his own.

That’s why its so tragic that WhatsApp sold out to Facebook in particular. Finally a challenger that had a different model and different ethics. But few would say no to $19B, which is why we need antitrust enforcers to do it for them.
TECH
WIRED
WIRED
@WIRED
On Wednesday, The New York Times published a blockbuster report on the failures of Facebook’s management team during the past three years. It's.... not flattering, to say the least. Here are six follow-up questions that merit more investigation. 1/

1) During the past year, most of the anger at Facebook has been directed at Mark Zuckerberg. The question now is whether Sheryl Sandberg, the executive charged with solving Facebook’s hardest problems, has caused a few too many of her own. 2/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


2) One of the juiciest sentences in @nytimes’ piece involves a research group called Definers Public Affairs, which Facebook hired to look into the funding of the company’s opposition. What other tech company was paying Definers to smear Apple? 3/ https://t.co/DTsc3g0hQf


3) The leadership of the Democratic Party has, generally, supported Facebook over the years. But as public opinion turns against the company, prominent Democrats have started to turn, too. What will that relationship look like now? 4/

4) According to the @nytimes, Facebook worked to paint its critics as anti-Semitic, while simultaneously working to spread the idea that George Soros was supporting its critics—a classic tactic of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. What exactly were they trying to do there? 5/
TECH
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Jonas L
Jonas L
@jonasLyk
Wanna disable Defender when enabled Isolated Core and Tamper protection?

Its a bit more trouble- but doable, without ruining Isolated Core/Secureboot etc.

Defenders process will run as a unkillable protected service- so new tricks needed.

Here we go:

Ok- tamper protection is easy, just make .bat - run as adm:
:again
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WdFilter\Instances\WdFilter Instance" /v altitude /t REG_SZ /d -1 /f
goto again

Then unload minifilter with process hacker:


The registry key will be changed while the minifilter do not protect it, when tamper protection makes the driver load again it cannot attach to volumes nor protect registry keys.

Removing it will make it recreate, but invalid altitude do the trick

Notice now the service is: Protected light(antimalware)
Now we cant do anything to the service/process- not even see its open handles.


Lets start by elevating to SYSTEM- just launch a command prompt, then close process hacker- and run it again from the command prompt.
Now process hacker runs as SYSTEM
INTERNET , TECH
Brad Kaellner - Stock Compounder
Brad Kaellner - Stock ...
@bkaellner
Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution
TECH
James Felton
James Felton
@JimMFelton
Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ


For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.


Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.
TECH

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
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Gal Gur \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f1
Gal Gur 🇮🇱...
@GalGur_
1/
Hello, my name is Gal,
I am an Israeli citizen, and I want to convey this urgent message to the world: Contrary to what you are told, Israel has not "returned to normal" in any way >>

2/ Moreover, despite the desire to create a setting as if there was a full and normal routine here - the Israeli Ministry of Health JUST RECOMMENDED TODAY TO EXTENT THE DECLARATION OF A “STATE OF EMERGENCY” in Israel >>

3/ to which is the foundation for coercion, violation of basic rights, severe discrimination under a "green mark (pass)", prolonged closure (Of about 5 months overall) and a lot of undemocratic and not “routine" restrictions. >

4/ If the situation in Israel had "returned to routine thanks to the astounding success of vaccines" then the "state of emergency" would not have continued.

5/ In fact, since the beginning of the "vaccination project" there has been only more intimidation and in many ways - even though the closure has been lifted, much more coercion.
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Raman Shalupau
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Maker movement is doing to startups what startups did to corporations.

Here is why 👇

Startups fixed the problem of innovation, that corporations lack.

In big, slow corporations, innovation is a RISK and distraction from the core $$$ profitable business.

Agile startups could launch, iterate fast and eventually stumble upon new growing market opportunities.

However,

When a startup reaches product-market-fit, it has to 🚀 "grow at all costs" and reach market dominance before some giant corporation can replicate their new product and distribute it to their existing giant customer base.

Startup's "growth at all costs" often means growth at the expense of charging customers $$$ money.

Hence, to be sustainable, startups have to constantly chase investor money.

Startup teams spend more time finding and pleasing investors, than finding and pleasing customers.

95% of startups die because they run out of (investor) money + no business model + crazy investor expectations.

Same way corporations die, when unable to adjust to new technology and market shifts.
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Chuck Wendig
Chuck Wendig
@ChuckWendig
TRUMP: "I've decided to eat babies."

PEOPLE: "He can't eat babies, that's super illegal."

TRUMP, on TV, eating babies, not even cooking them first: "People are saying that I really am the best baby-eater, folks."

NYT: "Trump Vs. Babies: The Rhetoric On Both Sides Must Stop"

Jeff Flake tweets: "It is a sad day in America when this callous man can eat babies live on TV"

Jeff Flake, 10 seconds later, votes to help him install a series of 4,000 new judges that are very, very pro-babyphagia.

Judge Kavanaugh, found drunk in a Capitol Hill closet: "I LIKE BEER. OKAY? I LIKE BEER AND I LIKE BABIES AND THAT'S NOT SO WRONG. THAT'S RIGHT. I LIKE BABIES DIPPED IN BEER. I JUST DIP EM. IN THE BEER. THE BABIES. THE BABIES I EAT. OKAY? THAT'S AMERICA."

Mike Pence, wringing his hands about the baby-eating: "We must take care of our children. Our youngest must be protected on this troubling day."

Mike Pence then invites a Baby Chef to say a prayer.

Twitter Users: "It's a distraction technique! Trump eating babies is trying to DISTRACT YOU from ALL THE OTHER HORRORS, which are themselves distractions from the BABY-EATING. It's DISTRACTIONS ALL THE WAY DOWN."

Trump: *eats tons of babies at a rally*

*literal tons of babies*
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Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
KANIPAKAM VINAYAKA, CHITOOR (AP)
#bharatmandir

Kani means wetland and Pakam means flow of water into wetland.
Kanipakam Vinayaka is swayambhu (self-manifested). The murti is in a well which is always full of water.


Once, there were three brothers. Each one had a handicap- Dumb, Deaf and Blind. They had a small piece of land for livelihood. For their field, they drew water from a well. One day, they found that the well had dried up so one of them started digging in the well.


His tool hit something and blood oozed out. They found a swayambhu murti of Ganesha here.
Villagers started offering coconut water which overflew into a channel. Hence the name Kanipakam.


The murti is still growing in size. At present, we see the knees and the abdomen only. The Kavacham (Armour) offered to Vinayaka 50 years ago doesn’t fit today.
Vinayaka is believed to be the upholder of truth. So people come here and swear before him to prove their innocence.
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