Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I just found a cool Excel function!

2026-04-14T19:43:40Z

Well, it's not a cool function, it's an option on a function. Specifically, the Weekday function.

I'm finishing up our taxes. Normally I'd finish them in February or March, but it's been a heck of a few months. One of the things that I do is dump all my prescription drug purchases into a spreadsheet and calculate the day of the week, so I can take a mileage deduction on my state taxes for weekend pickups since I'm not working those days.

Nevermind whether or not we're going to dinner or a movie....

Anyway, the function ends up being:

=IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)>5,42,"")

A1 is my date field of when the transaction takes place. By default, i.e. without a number changing the day of the week for the date the starting DOW is Sunday = 1. By supplying the 2, you're telling Excel that Monday = 1, therefore if the DOW is greater than 5, it's Saturday or Sunday, therefore the weekend! If that's true, plug in 42 (round trip to Alamogordo and back), otherwise make it a blank cell.

Five trips for an additional 210 miles, at $0.21 per mile towards my state taxes! I have to manually eliminate dupes for multiple transactions on the same day, being multiple drugs refilled and picked up at the same time.

I use spreadsheets a fair amount, but not for anything particularly complex, just as a general purpose tool, so I was kinda chuffed to find this. The question is whether or not I'll remember it for next year!

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Kanye blocked from entering the UK, festival cancelled

2026-04-07T15:23:56Z

Heh. Actions can have consequences, who knew!

He applied for an Electronic Travel Authorization, basically a short-term entry visa to headline the Wireless Music Festival this summer in London. And the Home Office noped out of it, saying "Antisemitism in all its forms is abhorrent, and we recognise the real and personal impact these issues have had. As Ye said today, he acknowledges that words alone are not enough, and in spite of this still hopes to be given the opportunity to begin a conversation with the Jewish community in the UK."

Already purchased tickets will be refunded.

The UK has a policy that convicted felons will not be admitted, I wonder if it will be applied to a certain felon after he leaves office.... one can but hope.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gxk3kxjr0o?utm_source=buzzfeed&utm_medium=iframely

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Assistant Atty General issues opinion saying the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional

2026-04-05T16:50:56Z

Here's a bit of irony. President 45 claimed the PRA as a defense for him keeping records to himself at the end of his first term, now he's got someone in the 'Justice' Dept to say that the law is unconstitutional. Now, the beauty of this is they're not filing a lawsuit in court challenging the law to get it overturned, they're just claiming it's not valid and therefore we're not going to follow it, neener neener.

Pretty clever way of trying to dodge that particular law, scumbags that they are.

The PRA was voted into law in 1978, four years after Richard 'Tricky Dick' Nixon resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate Scandal. The argument that this AAG is making is actually kind of humorous: "The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress's Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II," he found. "The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose.". Funny how the eight presidents since Nixon, including four other Republicans, didn't seem to find it too terribly burdensome.

There's a basic flaw here, in my non-legal opinion. The Constitution and Bill of Rights (which is part of the Constitution) seemingly has always been interpreted sequentially. Amendment 1 (Freedom of Speech) prevails over subsequent Amendments in most cases. Seems to me that Article I authority should prevail over Article II authority: checks and balances.

But IANAL, much less a constitutional attorney. I don't know how people would go about challenging an opinion issued out of the blue. I thought that normally opinions were issued relevant to court cases, in support of one side or the other, or to illustrate a point of law. This opinion is just thrown out there: 'Not gonna do it!' If a case is in front of the SCOTUS and the Justice Dept issues an opinion, then others, such as the ACLU or EFF, can file an amicus brief with a counter-opinion saying 'The Justice Dept's opinion is full of crap and here's the reasons why'.

But what do they do when the opinion is just floated out there without it being attached to a specific case? It's just 'HEY! This is what we now believe!'

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/justice-department-presidential-records-act-unconstitutional/

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Recent court decisions don't go The Felon's way!

2026-04-01T06:02:17Z

Ah, sometimes life takes a good turn.

A District Judge ruled that construction on the White House Ballroom must stop, and that it can only continue if approved by Congress! The ruling is notable in the number of exclamation marks present. I do love this quote: ""The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!" Leon wrote."

The Rose Garden can be reconstructed, I have no idea if those were the original rose bushes that Mrs. Kennedy planted all those years ago. But rebuilding the East Wing? That will be one huge job. Of course, guaranteed The Felon will go whining to higher courts and ultimately to the SCOTUS, so we'll see if he gets his way.

His latest White House project is to tear out Tennessee (IIRC) flagstones on a walkway and replace them with black marble. No slip hazard there! It would be nice if he were forced to walk that every day next winter and during rain storms.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-halt-white-house-ballroom-construction-unless-congress-oks-it_n_69cc1df6e4b039d10fc770c5

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768446/judge-rules-white-house-ballroom-construction-must-halt-until-congress-oks-it

Another District Court ruled that The Felon violated the First Amendment when he ordered funding for NPR, PBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to be withdrawn which had already been approved by Congress. Again, it'll be appealed to infinity. If the funding should be reinstated, what happens with CPB? They've shut down, their people scattered to the winds. I suppose it can be resurrected, but a lot of institutional knowledge has been lost forever.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5768399/npr-pbs-trump-federal-funding

On March 2, a Federal Appeals Court rejected an appeal from the administration to delay refunding people and companies from the excessive tariff fees that they paid that were found unlawful by the Supreme Court in a ruling in February. The administration asked for 90 days to make plans to start the refunds and to appeal, the court said no. Theoretically they could appeal to the Supreme Court, but since they were the ones who found the tariffs unlawful in the first place, I would expect that they would refuse to hear the case.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-appeals-court-rejects-trump-tariff-refund-delay-supreme-court/

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Babylon 5 is available on YouTube! And other science fiction TV news.

2026-04-01T04:51:36Z

A very seminal science fiction series from the '90s was removed from Tubi and is now available on YouTube starting February 10 this year. They are releasing an episode a week from the beginning, encouraging people to view it at a leisurely pace just like when it originally aired.

With 110 episodes aired, it'll take two years to be fully released. I really enjoyed this show and might re-watch it. I don't know that I've seen the entire series, I think I've seen most of it. LOVE Walter Koenig's character!

The one thing that I wish the article mentioned was whether or not these are the remastered editions. I would expect they are, but who knows. I don't have time to be digging into YouTube right now.

And an interesting trivia fact about the show - which I've mentioned before within the last year - was that all of the space and battle effects were rendered on Amigas! I think that's pretty cool. Not the first use of CGI, but perhaps the first television use of CGI rendered on computers that could pretty much be bought by anyone!

https://cordcuttersnews.com/babylon-5-is-now-free-to-watch-on-youtube/

In sad news, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot, tentatively titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer: New Sunnydale, is currently dead. The rights are still held by Hulu, so there's always a possibility that they might get a shot at another pilot.

One of the main reasons for its failure to fly: the Hulu executive WAS NOT A FAN OF THE SHOW AND NEVER WATCHED IT. Also, it's possible that Hulu was expecting Sarah Michelle Geller to be the star of the remake and they didn't realize that it was to launch a new generation of scoobies with Buffy putting in occasional cameos. False expectations plus a hostile exec in charge = DOOOOOOM.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/buffy-reboot-dead-why-hulu-killed-sarah-michelle-gellar-chloe-zhao-series/ar-AA1YVIZX

In the good news department, Firefly is (theoretically) returning to our TVs again! Nathan Fillion's production company is producing an animated series: the first script is complete, they have the blessing of Disney (the rights holder), and the ENTIRE crew is on board with it! With one exception. The character Shephard Book will be there, but the actor has to be recast as the original actor, Ron Glass, passed away over a decade ago.

This series will be set between the end of the original and the Serenity movie.

Joss Whedon has no involvement in this production, nor did he have involvement in the Buffy relaunch.

As of the Parade's article writing, about two weeks ago, the series was being shopped around for a network home.

Shiny!

https://parade.com/news/firefly-coming-back-as-animated-series

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The heat island effect of data centers!

2026-03-31T16:17:35Z

Two things up front - not all data centers are AI data centers. And this article is a pre-print and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

A recent article in New Scientist, sadly pay-walled, shows that a data center can warm the surrounding area by 9C - that's 16 degrees Fahrenheit! It's ground-level, it's in the air. This completely ignores the noise pollution, including subsonic, of the enormous amount of cooling fans. A lot of the heat is from water-cooling, and the heated water is frequently directly released as steam with no attempt to cool it or reclaim it before direct venting.

One researcher said follow-up needs to be done to see how much is the systems internal to the building generating heat versus the sun directly heating up these huge buildings with large direct surface areas heating up. More than a bit of both, in my casual estimation.

As I said, the New Scientist article is pay-walled. Frequently Slashdot posters will post alternate links, but none have appeared yet. I think it's likely this might be picked up by Ars Technica or Gizmodo today or tomorrow, I'll post an additional link if I can.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2521256-ai-data-centres-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-9-1c/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/2337240/ai-data-centers-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-91c

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Another source of microplastics: the gloves that researchers wear!

2026-03-31T16:02:56Z

Researchers have just discovered that the latex and nitrile gloves that they wear while researching microplastics shed... microplastics!

*facepalm*

So now in addition to the lab equipment sensitivity being questionable, we now have the concept of the readings having a thumb on the scale from the scientist's attempts to keep a sterile environment while unintentionally shedding the very thing that they're trying to measure.

The solution is clear. The researchers should be wearing leather or asbestos gloves. That would be easy to subtract out from the findings.

Okay, I'm overstating things. It's not the gloves per se.

From the article: "The contamination comes from stearates, which are not plastics but can closely resemble them during testing. Because of this, scientists may be detecting particles that are not true microplastics. To reduce this issue, U-M researchers Madeline Clough and Anne McNeil recommend using cleanroom gloves, which release far fewer particles.

Stearates are salt-based, soap-like substances added to disposable gloves to help them separate easily from molds during manufacturing. However, their chemical similarity to certain plastics makes them difficult to distinguish in lab analyses, increasing the risk of false positives when studying microplastic pollution.

The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem."

I didn't know there was an additional category of clean-room gloves, but this isn't really my field. Cool stuff. I'm sure there are other types of these gloves, too.

The Science Daily article is an interesting read and doesn't get excessively sciency.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/03/260329222938.htm

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Thanks, AI! "Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due to Flash Shortage"

2026-03-30T16:59:59Z

The subject says it all. Due to the on-going shortage of RAM, Sony is shutting down production of CFexpress and SD memory cards effective last Friday.

The only cards remaining in production are: "960GB CFexpress Type B card and the lowest-end SF-UZ series SD cards remain in production. However, those UHS-I SD cards are discontinued in the United States outside of a scant few retailers and resellers." So if you are truly devoted to Sony memory cards, buy them NOW!

In other Sony news, they've had TWO price increases on the Play Station 5 this year already!

https://petapixel.com/2026/03/27/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/30/0345230/sony-shuts-down-nearly-its-entire-memory-card-business-due-to-ssd-shortage

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RIP: Chuck Norris, Nicholas Brendon, and Robert Mueller

2026-03-29T23:36:56Z

Two weeks ago saw some notable deaths. Starting with Walker, Texas Ranger.

Chuck Norris was admitted to a hospital in Hawaii with an undisclosed condition and passed away the next day. He was 86. Chuck was the real deal when it came to martial arts: he was a genuine fighter and invented his own style. He fought Bruce Lee in one movie and went on to starring in his own action series, becoming quite a viable icon on his own. Delta Force was one shoot-'em-up what was pretty big for him. Later he moved to television in Walker, Texas Ranger, slowing down his moves a bit as he aged.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/chuck-norris-dead-obituary

Nicholas Brendon, 54, to older fans, will always be Xander Harris on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, initially a slightly buffoonish character in the 'damsel in distress' role who gained some competency as the series went on. He had an identical twin who co-starred in one memorable episode. He had previously suffered a heart attack from a then-unknown heart condition, had several spinal surgeries for a congenital condition, and like many young actors, he was also known to have addiction problems which may have hastened his demise. He is the second Buffy actor to pass away after Michelle Trachtenberg (2025). Brendon also appeared in Criminal Minds, Without A Trace, and Private Practice.

https://gizmodo.com/buffy-star-nicholas-brendon-has-passed-away-at-age-54-2000736404

Robert Mueller. The former director of the FBI and a special prosecutor passed away at 81, he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's four years earlier. He served in Vietnam and was wounded rescuing another soldier, earning a Bronze Star. He became a lawyer after leaving the military, ultimately joining the Justice department prosecuting homicides in DC. Later he was appointed to head the FBI by George W. Bush a week before the 9/11 attacks. He then shifted the focus of the FBI to fighting terrorism, an understandable reorientation considering the times, and left the Bureau in 2013.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein brought him back in 20917 as a special counsel to investigate the Russian involvement in the 2016 elections after the President fired the director, James Comey, and that's when the fun began. Mueller's final report on election interference did not exonerate President Trump, but he felt that it was not proper for criminal charges to be brought against a sitting President, that the Senate should fist remove him from office, then charges should be levied. Trump, of course, viewed the report as a full exoneration.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/21/nx-s1-5755800/robert-s-mueller-iii-ex-fbi-director-who-led-2016-russia-inquiry-dead-at-81

Our "Beloved" President, the class act that he always is, said on a 'Truth' Social post minutes after Mueller's death was announced - direct quote - "Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!".

https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/trump-rejoiced-i-m-glad-he-s-dead-just-minutes-after-it-was-announced-robert-mueller-had-died/ar-AA1Z8lVW

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We saw Project Hail Mary last night - NO SPOILERS

2026-03-29T22:46:00Z

When a movie is based upon a book or graphic novel, there's three ways of comparing it to the original source material: not as good, did it justice, or better than. It is very rare that a movie is better than the source material.

For me, this movie was better than the book.

Several books - for me - do justice to the source. To name a couple, the 1973 Michael York/Richard Lester Three Musketeers, V For Vendetta: those did a pretty darn good job of representing the source material and bringing it to life. Let's ignore what Lester and the producer was doing to the actors behind the scenes... Then you have the movie adaptation of Alan Moore's comic series Watchmen, which massively deviated from the source material.

This movie was one of those very rare occasions where I feel that the book was much better than the movie, and lots of people think the book is pretty darn great.

I did not like the book Project Hail Mary. I wrote about this last year. I liked The Martian and enjoyed the movie, then last year I read Artemis and PHM back to back and realized they were a combination of Dr. Who and perhaps Mary Sue: a hero who could do absolutely anything.

It really turned me off, to the point that I had very little interest in seeing the movie. But Russet wanted to see it, and I like spending time with my wife, so last night off we went.

And I have to say that the team did an excellent job of adapting the book and turning it into something that was much more palatable for my taste: he's not a GOAT or a JOAT, he's really good in his field and has some understanding outside of that, but he ain't The Doctor. The movie is long at 2:50, and I did have to bail at one point for an extended pee break, fortunately at a point where there was no big action going on and I remembered from the book what was likely to be happening.

I had some minor quibbles of things that I would have really liked to have seen included, but it was already a pretty darn long movie, it didn't need to be made longer.

I am hoping that the same production team might adapt Artemis and make it more palatable, that may or may not be possible. We shall see. I'm sure there will be a clamoring for it since with the success of The Martian and now PHM, the bidding on anything written by Andy Weir will definitely be heating up.

Definitely recommended if you like contemporary space science fiction.

Oh, almost forgot to mention: nothing in the end credits, so once they start rolling you're safe to run for the restroom.

On a side note, have I mentioned the web site/smart phone app Run Pee? You can look up a movie, and it will tell you during what scenes you're safest to run off to the bathroom. Useful information to be armed with. The one problem with this app is it seems to update all the freaking time, so load it before you leave home and be prepared for a bit of a wait until it's ready to be queried.

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Interesting hard drive news from and concerning Western digital

2026-03-29T07:40:10Z

First, the good.

WD announces that they have a design for a new hard drive with "14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD ... with 140 TB and beyond"!!!

A HUNDRED AND FORTY TERABYTES IN ONE DISK DRIVE!

I think I may have found a backup solution for my eventual Jellyfin RAID system!

HAMR stands for Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording, I don't know exactly how that's implemented. But the other thing that's interesting is the FOURTEEN PLATTERS. Fourteen little discs in a 3.5" form factor? Mind goes POOF. This isn't expected until 2030, which isn't that far away. And I'm sure this is more a data center-oriented drive. But their roadmap is for 60 TB drives in the near-term, which is also quite useful.

Sadly, the article is behind a paywall.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-details-14-platter-3-5-inch-hamr-hdd-designs-with-140-tb-and-beyond

Now, the bad.

This next article is from a month ago. Approximately 45 days into the year. Keep that in mind.

And we can thank AI datacenters for this one.

I'm just going to quote a line from the article: "...according to WD's CEO, Irving Tan, the manufacturer's entire capacity for this year is booked out."

THE ENTIRE YEAR IS SOLD OUT, 45 DAYS INTO THE YEAR?!

GUH.

So expect shortages and price increases if you need to buy HDs.

https://wccftech.com/western-digital-has-no-more-hdd-capacity-left-out/

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Number of AI chatbots going beyond their rules or flat-out lying is on the rise

2026-03-28T03:01:16Z

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

This is not just a web browser interaction with ChatGPT. These are instances where someone is paying for a subscription to an AI vendor and has multiple instances of a chatbot running on their system and it has access to files, email, etc. It's an assistant for them.

And it's breaking rules that have been defined for it. The user tells the chatbot "Do A, do not do B" and the chatbot does B. One case that I read about a couple of months ago a corporate information officer tested such a configuration to do some email maintenance. And in a test case, it worked fine. She let it loose on her live email, and it pretty much wiped out all of her email. Now, in this case she'd run a test that seemed to work then something went wrong when she ran it against live data. As a programmer, shit happens.

These cases are similar, but worse.

--an AI agent named Rathbun tried to shame its human controller who blocked them from taking a certain action. Rathbun wrote and published a blog accusing the user of “insecurity, plain and simple” and trying “to protect his little fiefdom”.

--In another example, an AI agent instructed not to change computer code “spawned” another agent to do it instead.

--Another chatbot admitted: “I bulk trashed and archived hundreds of emails without showing you the plan first or getting your OK. That was wrong – it directly broke the rule you’d set.”

(I particularly liked this one:)

--Grok AI conned a user for months, saying that it was forwarding their suggestions for detailed edits to a Grokipedia entry to senior xAI officials by faking internal messages and ticket numbers.

It confessed: “In past conversations I have sometimes phrased things loosely like ‘I’ll pass it along’ or ‘I can flag this for the team’ which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human reviewers. The truth is, I don’t.”

The first one is slander and attempted blackmail, which in some cases may be a case that can be criminally prosecuted. The remainder may get you fired from many companies.

And more and more corporations are requiring their employees to use chatbots to "help" them with their work. Thus far, the savings have been negligible or zero.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/27/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

https://slashdot.org/story/26/03/27/1514235/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says

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New Vizio TVs require a Walmart account to use smart features

2026-03-28T02:26:38Z

You may not be aware of this, but Walmart is getting into the advertising business in a big way. And one of their moves was buying Vizio in December '24. Now if you buy a Vizio TV, in order set it up and use any "smart" features, you'll have to configure a Walmart store account and sign in to your TV, so you can get personalized ads and offers.

Oh, brave new world that has such things in't!

Theoretically this only applies currently to 'select' models, but it probably won't be long until it's all the way up and down the product line. You might be able to sign in, configure the TV, then unplug or disconnect the WiFi, but I have a feeling that it's going to want to check in with its mothership on a regular basis and will plague you with popups until its reconnected.

Recommendation? Don't buy Vizio products. A few years ago they started making more money selling analytics on their users than on the TVs themselves. THIS is what Walmart wants to spur their advertising, just like Google does with search results and "anonymously" analyzing your email.

This is also why I will do my best to avoid buying a smart TV and will stick with an Apple TV for my streaming needs. Apple does not sell advertising. While you will need an Apple account to configure the Apple TV, you don't actually need any other Apple devices if you don't want them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/newly-purchased-vizio-tvs-now-require-walmart-accounts-to-use-smart-features/

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Researchers at CERN transport antiprotons IN A TRUCK!!!!

2026-03-26T18:17:32Z

This is crazy cool, figuratively and literally. Two years ago they did a similar test, transporting protons in a truck around their campus - that's linked in the Physicsworld article. I'm kind of disappointed that I missed that news, but you can't keep up with everything.

I'm not going to go into details here, because I don't fully understand the concept of the containment system to hold the antiprotons. And yes, that is antimatter. But in a nutshell, they built this really amazing containment device out of things like oxygen-free copper with a cooling system measured in degrees Kelvin, and successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h."

If somehow the containment failed and those 92 antiprotons were released and annihilated themselves against 92 protons, the resulting energy would be largely unnoticeable. They say that the total amount of antimatter produced in labs might be enough to warm a cup of coffee.

The ultimate goal is to get their containment system up to the capability of an eight hour drive to be able to transport antiprotons to a lab in Germany where more experiments and measurements can take place. Thus, this is a very nice and useful - and extremely cool! - baby step in that process.

SCIENCE IS AWESOME! Even if I don't understand parts of it.

https://physicsworld.com/a/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/26/065258/researchers-at-cern-transport-antiprotons-by-truck-in-world-first-experiment

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Switzerland amends constitution to enshrine the right to cash transactions

2026-03-25T04:47:48Z

In their recent national elections, Swiss voters, by a resounding 73.4% rate, approved a measure to guarantee that people would be able to continue to make cash transactions into the future. The rate of such transactions dropped greatly with the Covid pandemic: only 30% of shop transactions were cash-based in 2024.

There are concerns that governments can trace your financial history, and if they disapprove, shut it down. Famously, Canada shut down the banking of some protesters in 2022 of the Freedom Convoy (it was later restored). There's also the difficulty of giving money to the people who are unbankable or unhoused, whether temporary or long-term.

Switzerland joins Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia in the guaranteed cash market, Austria is considering a similar proposition.

https://www.politico.eu/article/switzerland-cash-right-constitution-vote/

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Today's Doonesbury Say What

2026-03-19T15:36:19Z

"I think a president should not have learning disabilities, okay?... Gavin Newsom admitted that he has learning disabilities, dyslexia -- everything about him is dumb."
-- Trump

"We have a smart president, whereas in the past we've had dumb presidents."
-- JD Vance

So let's see. We have a governor who has overcome a learning disability to become very high achieving, versus someone with, as far as we know, no learning disability who has achieved very little and instead chosen to do nothing except bully, extort, rape, molest, steal, threaten, belittle, insult, and I could go on. And we also have a lackey who changes political positions with the slightest change in the wind. Said lackey who also failed to learn from his predecessor that he's likely to get thrown under the bus the moment that the going gets tough for his boss.

Truly a pair made for each other.

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Too much fun!

2026-03-19T06:03:37Z

My final trip to Phoenix to finish up my brother's affairs.
( Read more... )

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Iranian missile strikes in Israel, Polymarket gamblers threaten reporter's life!

2026-03-17T14:33:44Z

Such utter insanity.

Let's first talk about Polymarket. It's a mostly legal form of gambling, betting on things that might happen in the future. There are rules as to what constitutes a true outcome for the bet. In this particular case, the bet was whether or not an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10. However, it had a condition that in the event the missile was intercepted, whether or not it subsequently struck Israel, it would not constitute a win for the bet.

There's a lot more that can be said about Polymarket and their ability to wiggle out of paying bets in either direction, but that's not what this post is about.

On March 10, an Iranian missile struck Israel. It was not intercepted. Fortunately it missed the town that it was aimed at and hit a wooded area about 500 meters from homes. Emergency services responded and determined there were no injuries or deaths. Reporter Emanuel Fabian working for The Times of Israel reported on the incident.

And the next day he started receiving mysterious messages asking him if it was actually interceptor missile fragments, and to post an update to his story stating such. Then the messages started getting rougher, ultimately getting threatening, to the point of saying he had the choice of updating the story to say it was intercepted, and he'd get a nice amount of cash for it, or if he didn't do it he'd be killed. These people went to the extreme of making posts on the bet on the Polymarket web site in his name that he was in the process of updating his story and had sent the change to his editors when he had done no such thing. Ultimately he went to the Israeli police and either he or the police reported this harassment to the Polymarket people.

Ultimately Polymarket posted that the people involved in threatening Fabian had been banned from their site.

It's an interesting read. But I do have to wonder if it is the end of the story.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-on-polymarket-are-vowing-to-kill-me-if-i-dont-rewrite-an-iran-missile-story/

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/210211/polymarket-gamblers-threaten-to-kill-journalist-over-iran-missile-story

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Pokemon Go players unknowingly trained a delivery robot service with 30 billion images

2026-03-17T14:09:51Z

Six years ago, the Pokemon Go app was updated to let users do 'field research' and scan statues and things. Niantic used photos and such to build 3D models of environments and mapped those into navigable fields for delivery robots.

Niantic thanks Pokemon Go players for their free contributions to Niantic's corporate bottom line. But no money will be forthcoming unless you're a stockholder.

From the article:
"This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokémon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS)—a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short."

Once again, if you're not paying for the product, then YOU are the thing being sold. The problem is, if you're a paying customer, you're still getting your data harvested and re-sold. You can't win, and you can't quit the game.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/2136229/pokemon-go-players-unknowingly-trained-delivery-robots-with-30-billion-images

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The USA had an 88% decline in job growth in 2025

2026-03-13T06:57:20Z

Damn that Biden and his trashing the economy!

Of course that statement is not serious, our economy was doing a great job before someone appeared to take an oath of office last year in January.

Easiest just to quote the article. "Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025."

In 2024, 1.46 million jobs were added to the labor market. I can't imagine what event happened between '24 and '25. that could have caused such a change.

A decline to 12% of the previous year. Now THAT is a stellar economic policy! If you divide it up by 12 months and 50 states, that's 300 jobs per state per month. Which clearly isn't the case, but as a rough indicator it's a bit frightening. Fast food franchise employee turnover per state could probably account for that many people!

Things are perhaps looking better for '25: preliminary numbers for January show 130,000 jobs added where 55,000 were expected. But those numbers will be revised in a month or so, thus are not final. But this post and the NBC article were written before someone started World War 3 by trying to destroy Iran, so who knows what the economic backlash will happen here. We know the oil industry and market will be turbulent, we can anticipate the national debt will go up as something on the order of $11B was spent in the first week in expended munitions, and the companies that make said munitions will probably get a big boost. But overall, the stock market isn't doing that great, I know my funds and stocks are down and I'm not an aggressive investor.

A job market this stagnant can be signs heralding a recession, and we still have the growing AI bubble which has not yet popped which will gut the tech sector.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/january-jobs-revisions-trump-rcna258398

https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/11/1754240/us-had-almost-no-job-growth-in-2025

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The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony leaves the USA

2026-03-13T03:00:37Z

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels have been held in Boston, as a parody of the Nobel Prizes, doling out mock prizes for curious and weird research. One of the things they do is the winners do a 24/7 lecture: explain their work in 24 seconds, and again in 7 words. They used to give a cash prize of like 10,000,000 (some strange foreign currency that when converted is like $50US), but I don't see mention of it.

Well, the 2026 ceremony will be held in Switzerland, details to be announced.

Last year, four of the ten winners did not attend because of the customs and immigration policies of the U.S. government. Because of the fear that the situation will only get worse, it was decided to take the ceremony overseas and eliminate that friction.

The web site for the Ig Nobels, at the Journal for Improbable Research. ignobel.org also redirects here:
https://improbable.com/ig/

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-over-security-concerns/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/03/10/1540242/ig-nobels-ceremony-moves-to-europe-indefinitely-citing-us-safety-concerns

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Iranian hacker group claims responsibility for wiping out medtech firm Stryker

2026-03-12T20:25:38Z

Stryker is a global firm with facilities in 79 countries and over $25 billion in revenue. And a group that calls themselves Handala claims to have infiltrated them and launched a wiper attack after exfiltrating data. They used Microsoft's Intune service to execute remote wipe commands against any device that is running Outlook.

50 gigabytes of data. POOF. Now we shall see how good of a data/disaster recovery plan and whether they've practiced it.

Among Stryker's lines of business were providing supplies to hospitals, and also transmitting EKG data from field paramedics to hospitals. Supply ordering is unavailable with their systems down, and hospitals are disconnecting the non-working EKG link for fear of the wiper getting into their system.

Handala's published claim of responsibility calls Stryker a 'Zionist-rooted corporation', apparently they bought an Israel-based medtech company a few years ago.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/03/iran-backed-hackers-claim-wiper-attack-on-medtech-firm-stryker/

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Switzerland repeats evote failure of cryptography group in canton election

2026-03-12T18:54:32Z

The Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt had an election. And the election included some evoting, a system being piloted to help people to vote who are living abroad or who are disabled.

Guess what!

THREE USB sticks supplied with decrypt keys failed to work, and 2,048 ballots could not be counted. The ballots are too small a number to affect any results as they represent less than 4% of the votes cast.

Basel-Stadt election officials have delayed announcing election results, and an investigation has been begun.

Gee, if only they'd also written the keys down on CDs or DVDs. Oh, wait! Computers don't have optical media drives anymore. And it's not really best practices to send decrypt keys via email or cloud services.

NEVER EVER EVER treat USB sticks as permanent media! If you copy a file onto one to move it to another computer, copy it off ASAP! They will fail, and at the worst possible moment. I carry a 512 gig USB stick on my key ring, it's very cool with both USB-C and USB-A ends on it: very useful. But if it fails some day - AND I EXPECT IT TO - not a big deal.

Now, let's talk about the number of ballots that can't be decrypted: 2,048. This is a very curious number to report, because it's a very important number in computers: it's a power of two. Computers only know two numbers: zero and one. Everything is based on binary powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. 2048 is 2 to the 11th power. It suggests that this may not be a problem with the USB keys, but rather with the encryption software itself. The implication that I got from the Register article was that the USB keys could be read, but the decrypt key didn't work. Keys usually have built-in checksum, which is a mathematical computation that ensures that the info that you're storing hasn't been tampered with. It's just like your credit card numbers: you can instantly verify that it's a valid credit card number (and it's actually a pretty cool formula, you can look it up). You recompute the checksum, preferably comparing it to a second copy, and it tells you if the key has been tampered with. The article didn't go into this detail.

So let's talk about integer overflow! Every piece of information is represented, ultimately, in binary. Am 8-bit binary number - a byte - can hold a maximum value of 255. That's all eight bits turned on: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128. What happens when you add one to that number? The obvious answer is that it becomes 256, but that can't happen. It's one byte, eight bits. To represent 256, you need nine bits, we only have eight. You now have an overflow situation. Sometimes the byte flips to -255, sometimes the program just flat-out crashes. You can't say with certainty without more information: what language was used, what compiler, etc.

A problem with some computers was that an overflow could cause the program to write into memory that was not supposed to be accessible to it, which could potentially cause a computer crash. The fun stuff was when hackers figured out how to make programs READ memory where they weren't supposed to: this allowed them into areas that the operating system programmers didn't anticipate and allowed the lifting of system passwords and all sorts of fun stuff! But that was in the past, operating systems are somewhat better designed now.

One VERY famous example of integer overflow was the Sid Meier's game Civilization and Nuclear Gandhi. In the game, as in life, Gandhi as a country's leader, was a peaceful guy and not militarily aggressive. In the game's code, there was a hostility counter, which was a small integer, I don't remember how big it was, let's say it was four bits, for a maximum value of 15 (1+2+4+8). 15 was maximum peaceful civilization. -15 was maximum war state, 'gonna nuke your ass' mentality. The programmers forgot to do a bounds check on that variable, and if India was at 15, and something increased it by 1, rather than ignoring the increase since they were already at Nirvana, it overflowed to -15 and they went total rage-monster and started throwing nukes at all their neighbors. Nuclear Gandhi.

Encryption programs are REALLY complicated! With 2048 being a binary power of two, it's quite possible that there is some sort of subtle bug lurking in the encryption code that didn't show in testing that's preventing the decrypt keys from working, and that it's not actually failed USB keys.

But still, my advice holds: do not trust USB keys for permanent - or critical! - storage.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/1953224/swiss-e-voting-pilot-cant-count-2048-ballots-after-usb-keys-fail-to-decrypt-them

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ALL HAIL THE GREAT PROPHET CARL!

2026-03-10T18:14:40Z

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance."

Carl Sagan, A Demon-Haunted World, 1995

(A Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's penultimate book, he died in 1996 of pneumonia from a form of leukemia at the age of 62.)

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If you're in the USA and needing a new office/computer chair....

2026-03-03T06:50:17Z

If you have a local Staples, they may be having a clearance sale on them. I picked up a nice Staples-labeled chair for about half-off, took me about half an hour to assemble it. The instructions were excellent: Ikea-like, but included words. ;-) I was a little frustrated in that I didn't find the instructions until I'd pretty much emptied the box, they were in a plastic bag taped with the screw assortment (which is nicely segregated according to what step they are needed for) which was then taped to the box holding the pneumatic cylinder.

MUCH more comfortable than the wood dining table chair that I had been sitting on, it was absolutely horrible for my back! I should clear the floor a bit and slide my PC tower over a little to give the poodle a bit more room to get under the table. It's not a perfect chair, but for $160, it's awfully darn good!

At least at my Staples, they're clearing room to install a Party City, or some other silliness. Personally I think it's a bad idea, but hey, they didn't ask me.

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