Over at IM-1776, there's a post on stepping back from more immediate media such as video, sound, and even photos, to provide some distance, to make it more difficult to be swayed by false rhetoric and propaganda. Not only has digital technology accelerated the dissemination of news events, it has allowed higher fidelity in their transmission, achieving a realism that was lacking in the twentieth century. For these reasons, modern news coverage has an unprecedented rhetorical power to shape the viewer’s world. But this power is now routinely abused. Corporate media entities aren’t satisfied to simply bring the…
All posts in tech
(see the updates below) I was watching the Rittenhouse trial. For those interested in commentary on the trial, I recommend you read Branca's summaries at Legal Insurrection, look at the summaries at Viva Frei's youtube channel, or, if you want all of the insight and commentary, the epic streams at Rekeita's channel. Instead, I want to point out something I think was overlooked or not well presented by the defense in objecting to evidence being presented by the defense for rebuttal. Now - Corey Chirafasi did a good job, and I expected no less, as he appears to be the…
I haven't delved deep enough into the channel to recommend the entirety on the whole, but both of these videos are worth your while. The first is an in-depth look about how the most basic of fuel feed systems, the carburetor, works, complete with high speed photography. One interesting note - the throttle plastic starts to flex under the force of the gas flow. At first it's thought it may be the plastic breaking down due to contact with the gasoline (in my childhood I'd made the mistake of pouring gasoline into a styrofoam cup, some plastics don't last long…
In Part 1 I covered the basic setup to get foundry running on your own server running Ubuntu. Now, don't get me wrong. A lot of people just won't want to mess with stuff like this, or won't have/want to start a private server up. I get it. For a few bucks a month you can pay the guys at Forge, punch in your license code to foundry, and get a feature set far better than Roll 20 for a lot less, in the long run, without having to maintain your own server. Anyway - where we left off,…
Over at MoTW, The Didact posts some good and solid information on getting yourself protected and unplugged from as much constant monitoring by Big Tech as possible. It's a good start. A few notes to add once you've processed all of that. One, VPNs. I won't knock Surfshark - I haven't used it, and it seems to hold up OK review-wise. I've leaned more on NordVPN, and am seriously eyeing ProtonVPN by the same guys who bring you Protonmail. Speaking of which - and in alignment with getting away from the cult of "free" - a paid protonmail account is…
Even before hearing the term "antifragile" I was prone to point out that it didn't matter how efficient or inexpensive something was, if it wasn't capable of doing the job when you need it. Resiliency, plans for the worst case, etc. So. Texas. There's a lot to unpack here. Shockingly, Ars Technica actually had a decent article on the issues above and beyond the wind turbines getting locked up - about which they point out that, yes, it's possible to build heating elements into the blades and mechanisms (guess what powers that?), and Texas hadn't. Then they go into some…
The Didact, in his excellent Memorial Day wrapup for Monday, reminded me that I wanted to cover this commentary by Razorfist on Intellectual Property. The Didact notes: I used to be a libertardian, so I had a lot of sympathy for the idea of doing away with IP rights entirely, but I was never fully convinced by the arguments against IP. Looking at the arguments given by the Razorfist, he makes a very compelling case that the product of a man's mind is indeed his property. And I agree with him. I do think that reasonable limits have to be…
A While back I'd written a post on safety being important, but not the most important thing. Safety has to serve repeatably getting things done, and is not an ultimate virtue in and of itself. Put another way, there is a difference between staying alive, and living. Every choice involves risks, and one of the most common causes of death is slipping in the shower or bathtub. A guy can die as a result of simply falling over in his house and hitting his head. While I'm not in the "just a flu" or "it doesn't exist" crowd - there's…