Is your friend alright?

I could see the credits for “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” in Deezer, but I am not sure about how exactly Deezer determines this: https://www.deezer.com/us/album/951602381

I would make use of a VPS to serve a directory with the files using Nginx. The VPS is ~$5 /month. You can share the ip or buy a domain name for ~$10/year. If you are not opposed to vibe-coding, you can probably generate the Nginx + HTML config to play through the songs without having to click them individually with little effort.

Wait what, how do you know my code?

Also: I use the timer very often, and I find setting a timer on a phone to be more awkward.

Sport watches.

Combination of two tings: I used to think that wearing a watch was irrelevant because I could always see the time in my phone. And I did not want to have an app knowing how many steps I take.

What changed a few years ago: I stopped having a phone on me most of the time, so a watch became extremely handy for knowing what time it is, and I found out that Garmin watches work perfectly well without an app. So, now, I really like my watch. I am considering getting a fancier one with solar charging, and I even got a chest strap to improve measurement accuracy while running.

Very interesting! Thank you a lot for finding and sharing that, I couldn’t find any good info myself via online searches.

The song Everything’s Gonna Be Alright is a cover of the song from Sweetbox (1997) that goes by the same name and is based on Bach’s Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3…

I think that the rest are originals. Not 100% sure. I am surprised by how little information they made available, they just randomly dropped this with no context after almost a decade since the previous one. I ordered the physical album so hopefully it comes with some additional info haha.

What is the justification for selecting the range 2022 - 2025? I suspect that this is cherry picking.

One of the data sources they reference is: https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/data-research/cases/index.html, this site has data up to 2023 (I could not find 2024 - 2025). Here is the plot of the total hantavirus cases in the US vs year:

The number of cases vs year is rather noisy, and 2022 was a particularly low year. Saying that there is a ‘192% increase’ might be technically true but misleading.

All volunteer efforts are welcome, and using AI tools to support volunteer work is completely reasonable to me.

I personally value well-crafted human-made art more highly than AI-generated art. If someone wants to invest the time to create original icons and donate them, I am always very happy to see that!

That said, requiring unpaid contributors to meet a craftsmanship standard before they are allowed to help does not seem constructive to me. Volunteer communities usually work best when people contribute with the time, skills, and tools they actually have available.

A middle-ground alternative to AI-generated work is searching through Creative Commons assets, but even that still takes time to source, filter, adapt, and integrate. Expecting volunteers to always provide fully custom artwork or spend significant additional time curating assets does not seem like a fair expectation to me.

Since my work involves sensors, I set up a continuous testing setup on a raspberry pi and got its IP whitelisted. I ssh into it when something is annoying to do in the Windows laptop.

I think that the TinyTapeout concept is super cool (https://tinytapeout.com/). In the past, it was not really feasible to design and manufacture a semiconductor device as a hobbyist… Unless maybe an extremely wealthy one.

Now, we have open source design tools, open process design kit, and the ability but small part of a manufactured wafer.

There are also now multi-project wafer runs for photonic chips at reasonable prices for startup/academia. I think these developments are pretty cool.

Thanks a lot for the examples! I have been looking through these, and, as far as I can tell:

1. In SSL stripping, the site would appear to your client as HTTP, not HTTPS. If that’s the case, I think SSL stripping is blocked when using ‘HTTPS-Only’ mode
2. For DNS spoofing, the visited site would show up as insecure because they would not be able to generate a valid certificate for the target website

I still have not had the chance to look into leaky metadata. But, generally, I think metadata issues can in part be addressed by not generating much metadata.

Probably the biggest vulnerability is the captive portal. There is no way to verify you’re connecting to an official Starbucks router. I think that when connecting to a public router it is wise to assume that it is malicious.

I’m curious about an example that comes to your mind as you say this. In your view, what is a privacy risk associated with public WiFi use that is not easily mitigated?

By hand. We are only two people, and we usually clean after we cook/eat. When one is cleaning only 2 plates + a pot/pan at a time, it is easy to use little water. Spray of soap, metal scrub, sponge scrub, and then turn the tap on to rinse for a few seconds. Utensils get individually scrubbed and then all rinsed together for a few seconds.

Maybe when we have kids a dish washer will make sense.

I have been happy with my Garmin. It is functional without having to connect to anything, and data can be easily exported to a computer for more advanced processing. It is a handy GPS receiver that lets me monitor heart rate and log running metrics.

Hopefully the English language is developed and Rick Astley gets to make his song before anyone figures it out!

I’d rather pay for preventing the front passenger from reclining into me.

I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:

• As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
• Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
• When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
• Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
• When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again

I speak spanish natively and at during uni I would hang out with a group of Brazillian friends. I would speak a mixture of portuguese and spanish with them.

The mom of one of these friends made a Brazilian dish for us (Feijoada) and asked me how it was as it was the first time I tried it. I answered that the dish as ‘exquisito’, which in Spanish means delicious (similar ‘exquisite’). She seemed somewhat disappointed and upset by my response so I probed a little and found out that ‘esquisito’ in Portuguese actually means ‘weird’. She thought I was calling her dish weird tasting. I found quickly enough to clarify, but I did feel bad about making her fell that way… She was very excited about sharing her cooking and she thought I called it weird.