Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Case in point, late April I mailed out a double DVD, The Curse and The Curse 2, a flippy DVD. I doubt it's a very good movie, but whatever. If someone wants it and I have it, it gets mailed.

Now, we initially cataloged this movie in 2013, so that's when we acquired it. Since then, and I don't know exactly when, we changed cataloging systems and lending history prior to that change was lost. It was, I'd guess, a decade ago. Since that 'decade'-ago conversion, it has had one in-house use plus me mailing it out once.

Very high-traffic item. :-)

Since I sent it out three weeks ago or so?

I've received two or three requests for it! I'm guessing it was featured/mentioned in a podcast or something.

Unfortunately I can't pull up cancelled requests in WorldShare. I could in our previous ILL program, ILLiad, but that cost a fair chunk of money annually whereas WorldShare is free because we already pay a goodly amount of change to OCLC for other programs that we need.

It'll be interesting to see if there's still demand for it once it's returned from the borrowing library.

After digging into IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB gives it a 5.1 out of a 1-10 scale and RT gives it a 27% score. I also found out that it's based on a HP Lovecraft story. So definitely sounds like a very bad movie. I didn't bother looking up Curse 2.

And IMDB had a footnote comment that Wil Wheaton, teen star of the film, noted that he and his sister were horribly abused during the production of this film and he talked about it on his blog in 2022(?).

This is a really good piece, called Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, KV648, a trio about 12 minutes long. It was discovered "...in the collection of the Leipzig Municipal Library while researchers were completing a new edition of the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works." This premiere performance was last year, late September or early October in Salzburg. The musicians are excellent!

The article has two embedded videos, the top-most one is a 30 second clip, the bottom one is from where I got this YouTube link.

https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/new-work-leipzig-municipal-library/

LG exited the smart phone market four years ago, and they're about to pull the plug with a final update for Android 12. If you're still using one, or have a spare sitting in a drawer, you need to update it and think seriously about replacing it.

Alternatively, according to Slashdot comments, there's the Lineage OS for some models that can be flashed that may keep it running for a while. Batteries and other components may be of variable availability.

https://9to5google.com/2025/04/28/lg-shut-down-update-servers-june-2025/

croptoptux is coming over from Tumblr and seems to have quite the knowledge of Classic Chinese and Japanese, and unless I'm missing my guess, is an anime fan and also involved in AO3?

I look forward to future blog posts, even if I don't understand them. :-)

There's a new hack that has become widespread. It's actually been around for a while, it was previously kind of tightly targeted. But now you can compromise a web site and install this crap and you have a good chance of infecting all sorts of people who stop by!

It starts looking like a form of CAPTCHA: prove that you're a human. It wants you to do three things:
1. Press the Windows button plus R
2. Press Control-V
3. Press Enter.

What you've just done is open a command prompt and pasted some code that the compromised web page has placed inside your computer's paste buffer. That code installs a remote-access toolkit (RAT), key capture program(s), things to further compromise your PC's security, etc. You no longer own your computer.

Things like this is why we can't have nice things. You'll most commonly see these on lookalike web sites impersonating known sites through typosquatting, etc.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/03/clickfix-how-to-infect-your-pc-in-three-easy-steps/

(yes, I'm cleaning out browser windows)

Microsoft has cancelled or revised data center plans to the tune of $13,000,000,000 recently, projects that were mainly for AI centers. The reason? AI/LLM is not panning out as projected. As newer models are coming out, hallucination rates are rising rather than falling. This bodes ill.

In some cases lease options are being kept and the sites will continue being used as farmland until if/when MS decides to actually build the data centers.

Meta has recently likewise started cancelling data center plans.

Article may be paywalled:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-26/microsoft-abandons-more-data-center-projects-td-cowen-says

The Slashdot summary:
"Microsoft has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence. From a report:
The analysts, who rattled investors with a February note highlighting leases Microsoft had abandoned in the US, said the latest move also reflected the company's choice to forgo some new business from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which it has backed with some $13 billion. Microsoft and the startup earlier this year said they had altered their multiyear agreement, letting OpenAI use cloud-computing services from other companies, provided Microsoft didn't want the business itself.

Microsoft's retrenchment in the last six months included lease cancellations and deferrals, the TD Cowen analysts said in their latest research note, dated Wednesday. Alphabet's Google had stepped in to grab some leases Microsoft abandoned in Europe, the analysts wrote, while Meta Platforms had scooped up some of the freed capacity in Europe."

https://slashdot.org/story/25/03/26/1832216/microsoft-abandons-data-center-projects-td-cowen-says


Meanwhile in China, two years ago a huge data center construction boom took place in an attempt to catch up in the AI/LLM race. And then the Chinese had a breakthrough and found a way around the GPU chip embargo and discovered that there wasn't nearly as much need for huge numbers of data centers and GPU farms.

And 80% of these data centers are sitting around unused!

From the article: “The growing pain China’s AI industry is going through is largely a result of inexperienced players—corporations and local governments—jumping on the hype train, building facilities that aren’t optimal for today’s need,” says Jimmy Goodrich, senior advisor for technology to the RAND Corporation.

The upshot is that projects are failing, energy is being wasted, and data centers have become “distressed assets” whose investors are keen to unload them at below-market rates. The situation may eventually prompt government intervention, he says: “The Chinese government is likely to step in, take over, and hand them off to more capable operators.”

Something on the order of over 500 were announced in 2023/2024, which means only 100 or so are in use?! The problem was that nobody knew what they were doing with AI, but by damn, we've got to get on that bandwagon!

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/26/1113802/china-ai-data-centers-unused/

It's moving back into the beta preview builds, which means they're hoping for a public release in coming months.

As if we need a reminder, here's some reasons as to why it's bad.

1. It will eat approximately 15% of your TOTAL disk space.
2. If you're running a solid-state disk, it will increase your disk wear. This means your disk will fail sooner than it should. This is not as problematic as your traditional spinning rust hard drive.
3. Increased CPU use, possibly laggier system. We don't know how much CPU resource it will use IRL.
4. While it is theoretically secured behind your login, we don't know how secure it is. The last time around for it, it was capturing banking information, medical info, SSNs, etc.
5. We don't know if it might be reporting things upstream to someone. Guaranteed that once it gets into the beta program, much less general release, there will be privacy and security boffins who will be watching their firewall logs for what activity it is generating.

I expect we can anticipate further privacy issues with this thing on-going. And if you're not running it, and you send sensitive or confidential information to someone who is running it, well, your information will be hoovered up by their system.

Broadly speaking, it's probably not a good idea for a lot of people. I certainly do not recommend it. The article has recommendations on how to disable it, I don't think we have solid information on how to uninstall it at this time since it is not an actual released feature yet.

https://gizmodo.com/windows-controversial-recall-is-back-heres-how-to-control-it-2000589002

I told her late last year that it would be a good idea to order a new one because of the probability of serious inflation hitting next year. This was one of the reasons why I got my Asus laptop repaired/replaced. Our Mac laptops should be good for another 5 years or more, we'll see if OS revisions makes them stale before then.

Anyway, had some problems ordering her a new base 16 yesterday, but resolved it this morning and she'll have a new phone sometime Tuesday. We're keeping her 13 Mini as a backup and for international travel in case of border trouble. I replaced my 13 Mini shortly after the 16 released last year as it had a couple of problems that were defying easy diagnosis. Thus far, OS-problems aside, it's been an excellent phone. Takes great photos even though it's not the Pro model.

Apple apparently shipped threefive planes-full of phones from India to the U.S. in three days last weekendmonth to avoid tariffs. And I note that the FedEx shipping confirmation for the new phone has it shipped from California: frequently when I buy big ticket items from Apple, they ship from China. This morning I saw an article that Apple stores were slammed over the weekend with people seeking new equipment before anticipated price hikes.


So. Tariffs and inflation. I'm going to talk about inflation first, in relation to Canada and Mexico since they were the first targets.

What do I think will happen. Well, we're already seeing pain in red states because Canadian businesses are stopping buying from them before last week's launch of the international trade war (including Penguin Island). With Canadian stores clearly labeling Canadian-manufactured products, it was easy for their citizens to avoid buying American products with very little effort on their part. This especially hit the liquor industry, which has lots of manufacturing in the south. Their products are slowly losing shelf space because it's not moving, so that's unsold inventory that is gathering dust. Not only is their revenue down because stores are not buying more product, at some point, stores are going to start wanting refunds on unsold merchandise from distributors.

But that's just sales, which can be a component of inflation. Let's talk about what the tariffs might do to what we see in shelf pricing. Bob and Tom are American manufacturers and they make largely the same product. Bob's source materials are American-made, and cost a little more than Tom's. Tom's source materials are now getting slammed by the tariffs and he has to pay more for his goods. To maintain profits, he has to charge more, so now his goods are a lot more expensive than Bob's. Clearly Bob, who already has decent sales, is going to sell more goods.

But is Bob going to keep the same price? Hell no! He'll raise his price, not as high as Tom's, but there's an opportunity here to make more money! Just like hurricane season and the aftermath when some lumber yards and such raise prices. There's no reason to leave money on the table if consumers must buy the product, as long as he keeps his prices lower than Tom's, who is stuck with the tariff, he's in great shape and everyone else is not only paying Tom's tariff if they buy Tom's because they like Tom, but they're also lining Bob's pocket.

And then there's poor Fred, who gets his source materials from China. He's just flat-out screwed. There's limits to how much you can raise your price and be competitive, and if he lowers his price to close to Tom's or Bob's, he may be losing money, which is no way to run a railroad.

What you'll see is manufacturers directly affected by the tariffs will raise their prices. Maybe not on current stock already made that's in the shipping pipeline, but they'll have to raise it on new stuff being made. And everyone other supplier or manufacturer is going to turn that dial up a couple of notches - not because they have to, but because the public will get used to paying more because they have no choice, and they're doing it because they don't want to leave any money on the table that they can't get ahold of.

That's my take on what we'll see on inflation. There's no way to say how high it will go or how wildly it will vary. But we are in for a wild ride.


Last week's tariffs. The most bat-shit insanity of it is that there was no sound mathematics behind it. It did not take into account the service industry, thus did not accurately reflect any potential trade imbalance. For example, Australia is a net importer of American goods (they have no automobile manufacturing there, etc.) yet were hit with a 10% tariff. There's also that arctic island that has no humans living on it, entirely populated by penguins and such, that has tariffs levied against it. It has been noted that the countries seem to have been selected/targeted by their internet Top Level Domain (.us, .uk, .de, etc). Absolutely non-sensical.

AND, just like when Premier Ford threatened an energy export tax to the USA, the piggie squealed when China threw a 34% tariff against American goods. He tried to hide behind the bluster of 'Big mistake!', but the fact is that he's never been able to handle strong opposition. He expects everyone to kowtow to him, viewing everything as a zero-sum game in which he must always win. Ignore the fact that in international trade, well-executed treaties can have everyone benefiting.

The most curious thing about his relationship with China is that all of the merchandise crap that he hawks is made there! But it's probably all paid out of a slush fund, so he probably never sees the costs and doesn't care as long as his suckers voters continue buying it.

My expectation: the billionaire class, behind the scene, will apply pressure to reverse the tariffs and it'll get done while victory will be declared. Too much money has been wiped from the exchanges for them to be happy with this uncontrolled and turbulent situation, and they're telling the news that they don't like it. "We got what we wanted, everyone is coming to negotiate a fair deal. WE WON! MAGA!"


One last note. I was so amused that his best pal forever, until he throws him under the bus, Leon Ketamine-head, was screaming that the 5 million or so protestors Saturday were all being paid by George Soros. Uh, bud, who was handing out checks in Wisconsin last week?

And Leon was screaming about losing $30 BILLION due to the tariffs. That is, until someone told him to delete his tweets. Which he did.


So there you have it. I'm probably wrong on everything, but that's my take on what's going on and what I expect to happen.


EDIT: to update Apple shipping phones from India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/mobiles-tabs/how-apple-flew-5-flights-full-of-iphones-from-india-and-china-in-3-days-to-beat-trump-tariffs/articleshow/120044321.cms

Aged 65. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer a decade ago, but had reportedly recovered from that. Pneumonia did him in, which is normally fairly treatable, says the man who is immune-compromised and had it five times in seven months in his late 40s.

He did a lot of very good work, definitely a career cut short.

This obit is rather short as a Rolling Stone Breaking News arrived in my email only half an hour ago.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/val-kilmer-dead-obit_n_67ecb4d4e4b0923ef8b48f70

(i.e. four decades ago)

What brought it to mind was a friend bought a new laptop that was giving him weird problems, and I showed him a program called Furmark that really stresses graphics cards and GPUs by drawing a super hi-res eyeball on your screen.

Back in the days of the original PC and PC-XT, I came upon a Dos program that drew a giant eyeball on the screen. It was slightly bloodshot, it would occasionally blink, and it would slowly and randomly scan back and forth across the screen, it was sort of a screen saver to prevent monitor burn-in as that was a real problem back then. This was around '86-'88, I was working for a pension plan/actuarial company doing database development.

I shared my office with the woman who did almost all the word processing for the company, I also did a lot of contract processing along with time keeping. Our office was kinda high-traffic. One day I left that eyeball program running when I went to lunch. I took a late lunch, around 3pm or so, as I worked 10-7. Normally I'd have a screen saver like flying toasters or whatever, or I'd turn the monitor off.si

I came back, and this guy who was fairly credulous came up and asked me about the giant eyeball. I told him it was a security program and that if anyone messed with my keyboard, it would take a picture of them.

And he bought it.

In the mid '80s. We didn't have web cams at that time. For that matter, we didn't have the world wide web at that time! Barely had the internet!

My alignment is chaotic silly, why do you ask?