BuildTheRobots

The AR924's in question are POCSAG pagers; broadcast from base stations and receive only at the pager end. Two way pagers are a thing but use an entirely different protocol for communications.

It's the followup line that got me on a recent rewatch. For context Marty is trying to show a video, played back on a futuristic camcorder, and The Doc is more amazed by the camera.

"This is truly amazing, a portable television studio. No wonder your president has to be an actor, he's gotta look good on television."

If you use the web (or older java) console to share the ISO as a virtual drive then it tends to be dog slow. If you SSH into the iLO then you can point the virtual CD drive at a HTTP web server hosting the image which seems to be significantly quicker to read. It uses HTTP range requests for random IO too, so doesn't need to pre-read the entire ISO.

Makes backups cheap and easy. Also if you _know_ it won't restore, you stop worrying about whether it might or not.

That was one of the Jokes from David Gunson's "What goes up might come down" [1]; an after dinner speech given and recorded in the early 80's. It's 50 minutes long, which briefly takes you through his history as a fighter pilot, self employed civil servant doing ATC and then gives the listener some handy hints on how to fly, take-off and land a jumbo yourself (should you ever find yourself in that situation) as well as some musings on Concorde.

A truly hilarious and surprisingly educational listen, recommended to anyone who likes flying and Pythonesq humour. Stunningly quotable as well.

I caution that there are a couple of questionable and dated jokes made, but for early 1980's it's surprisingly PC.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCA5qpBWDcI

Where's the technical details for how this works? Are they just broadcasting wifi hotspots?

I'd be curious to know _why_ your wife felt it was playing too fast. Was it out of tune, out of tempo or something else?

Couple of thoughts

> The combination of the ICCID and the IMSI basically tells the mobile network, “hey, this person paid for a plan.”

As far as I remember, the ICCID never actually appears in standard network messaging. It might be possible for the network to request it, but it's not part of a standard 2/3/4/5g attach.

The piece seemed to miss two major uses for the IMEI (or I missed it when reading), which were working around vendor bugs and allowing emergency calling.

Radio firmware and state machines have always had weird bugs, and even when it conforms to standards (some of which are extremely interpretable), does very weird things in the real world. Pre-smartphone, being able to update phone and radio firmware was extremely rare, so it was common for the networks instead to implement workarounds on a manufacturer or handset basis. Having a hardware ID that identified this was extremely useful.

GSM (and onward) actually supports a handset attaching to a network, even without a SIM card, for the sake of emergency calling. It needs some form of unique identifier for this to work. As much as it could (potentially, entirely redefining the stack) generated UUIDs, it makes some sense for these unique IDs to persist across roaming/sessions/reboots.

The only time I think it makes sense if if you're doing a belt+braces with colo'd stuff in a datacentre.

The DC will have its own UPS system, but in the event it all goes wrong (which happens more often than I'd like) you probably want something in your cab that can give your equipment notification and time to shut down safely, and provide surge suppression and maybe some level of isolation from the inevitable back-emf caused by the rest of the hall going dark.

Can I be cheeky and ask what VF service and in what country?

I've been using their CityFibre backed broadband in the UK for about 3 years and really can't complain - £32/month for 900mbit synchronous (which mostly actually lives up) and 4g backup.

I had to call them to remove the "child safe" filters when I first got it, but that's been the case for every ISP or phone provider I've used in the last 20 years. I also run my own DNS which might help, as I've seen others complain about that, but other than those two it's been impressively ignorable.

The _biggest_ selling point with mumble (though I've not used it in anger in about a decade) was the way it tied in with the game you were playing and gave you in-game spacial audio.

Stand next to someone in game and they came through loud and clear. Move away from them sideway and it's now quieter and only through one headphone... I found it extremely novel and immersive when I used to play FPS games; everyone on mumble but absolutely not like being in a chatroom.

That was my first thought, but my takeaway from reading the article is that they weren't doing cremations in-house or on site, but had to pay another company for the work. It mentions that they were slapped with a judgement for failing to pay for approximately 200 other cremations already.

From an engineering "normalisation of deviance" pov, I really can't imagine how things cascade so badly you end up with 190 human bodies piled in a room.

> My understanding is that a device that converts heat into power would violate thermodynamics.

I'm probably missing the point entirely, but aren't we doing this already with Thermocouples as used in RTGs?

AnyDesk seems like the most obvious drop-in replacement. It's not awful either, I've used it for remote video editing quite successfully.

I'm less thrilled that for both AD and TV the client and server is the same application. I want to be able to connect to other people's computers without ever having something hook into or have the possibility to display my own desktop.

I've got an old NUC with Intel vPro support which allows out-of-band management including remote desktop, like you'd expect from drac/ilo on a dedicated server. Headless box living in a cupboard, sounded perfect.

It turns out that if the BIOS doesn't detect a monitor connected it puts the graphics card into power saving, so if you remote connect you get a blank screen rendering the whole thing useless. Took a while to work out what was going on too, I assumed firmware or networking issue to start. I also ended up buying a few of these dongles before finding one that actually worked.

> but unlike the extension cord case, nothing would catch literal fire

I might be taking this too literally (I fell down the Kunsberg Bridge rabbithole recently), but with only one input on nearly all extension cords, I don't see how you'd get into a position of "fire" rather than "nothing happening".

Even if you did have two ways of putting power into your extension lead, it wouldn't necessarily lead to fire; household "ring" circuits (still very common in UK houses) are by definition a loop.

I'm still baffled xz took off so massively in the first place. The USP seems to be existing LZMA compression but made significantly more fragile and prone to never decompressing again.

It might be worth contacting NameCheap who the domain is registered though. I'm not actually sure if they'd be in a position to (legally) act at this point though.

Root beer is another one of those flavours you either love or hate, and Bundaberg's is particularly excellent. Sadly it's the only one I've found that contains liquorice, making all others seem lacking by comparison.

Slightly surprised to find Bundaberg is actually drunk by Aussie's - cynical me always assumed it was marketing like Fosters.

For people who like that sort of thing, it might be worth looking at Euthymol toothpaste. It tastes like a mix of root beer, jagermeister, germolene antiseptic and pink.

I remember saving up for and spending money on a VAIO in the very late 90's or early 2000's and being bitterly disappointed. It looked OK from the outside but was horribly underpowered on the inside. Stunning amounts of cost cutting as well; I don't think I've known any other laptop with only 4 copper pins on the 100mbit ethernet port.

> Our postgres db is about 2TB and pgdump stopped being viable a long time ago.

Due to the time it takes to export, or because it can't handle a database of that size at all?

They seem to have removed pirate too. Pieces of something at any rate :\

SMS also suffers massively from sender id spoofing and quite happily lets senders use an arbitrary text string as the "from" address.

If you want to use an actual analogue phone, then you'll probably want to connect it to something using an ATA (Analogue Telephone Adapter). Modems are expecting a powered phone line which can be worked around but I wouldn't recommend it (and haven't tried it in decades and don't remember the details).

The ATA converts analogue telephone into SIP, if you then want voicemail recorded on a Pi install FreeSwitch or Asterisk as your voicemail server. The magic you want from the ATA is "Offhook Auto-Dial"; as in, when it detects the handset being picked up (going off-hook) it automagically dials a number for you - in this case your voicemail extension on your Pi based SIP server.

Unless you're specifically trying to relive the analogue days, I'd probably go digital earlier rather than later in the chain (handset to ata, rather than handset to fake phone line, to modem coopted to do something most people aren't) as it'll make things easier and make no difference to the end user.

This might not be the most elegant way, but it's the tools I'm used to using, so :\

Out of curiosity, what's the plan for the recordings after you've made them?

username[at]gmail if you need any specific advice; this sounds weird enough I'm interested and should be easy :)

> If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan?

not wanting to take away from the ops work, but on FreeSwitch you could do the SIP side of this with the default config and a free or cheap sip provider. As default it'll provide voicemail services to offline phones, so if you add your sip provider and direct all incoming calls to (eg) extension 1000 but never connect a sip handset to that extension, everyone gets sent to voicemail and you end up with a folder of wav files. What you then do with the front end is beyond me, though at home I just have apache serving an index of that directory.

If the SIP side of it is the mystery and you're interested in it, I'd really recommend installing Asterisk or FreeSwitch and having a play. You'll be stuck writing weird INI files or XML for config and there's a lot of new terminology, but it can be cheap and fun to play with. And a terminally deep rabbit hole if you actually want to fall down it.

Personally, the only reason I still run my pbx (aside from something to faff with, and a platform for testing silliness) is the fact I can easily record phone calls. Most of the time it's only because I have a bad memory and take useless notes, but there doesn't seem to be a single modern mobile phone on market that allows me to record both sides of the audio when making a voice call.

I'm amazed more people aren't talking about the "off list" part or asking Colin if he's willing to provide those emails/conversations.

Well it is April Fools; it's nice to see some companies still have a sense of humour.

The XZ attack is (seemingly) exclusively targeting openssh.

Considering it's a library that isn't even a direct dependency of ssh and someone was willing to put in over two years of effort, it doesn't seem crazy to start wondering what other (small) projects have been suffering maintainer fatigue or are even just big enough where a "lgtm" response is almost guaranteed by a sane looking PR.

"Smuggle in unexpected code/blobs as test files", "bastardise make scripts to inject your code into the build" and then "have your code preferentially override [decryption] routines" aren't just (as of last week) unexpected, but would also seemingly be usable against any other project out there.

I'd suggest it's more like finding and killing a cockroach in your bathroom. Thinking that the roach problem is now gone for good and was only confined to the one room seems... optimistic at best.

I also think it's fun to wildly speculate on what else could be affected - or to play the game another way, "if I had control over sshd, what else would I want?"

From an outside point of view, I'd quite like web servers. They're often externally accessible when ssh isn't, are doing cert validation/compression/decryption and I'd wager on most boxes, could easily give you an ssl wrapped tunnel to (the vulnerable) sshd running on the servers loopback address without selinux blocking you.

Actually, having written that, has anyone looked at the SSH _client_ process rather than server? Surely it needs to be able to parse certs in the same way as the server does, and getting clients to leak their private keys somewhere seems like it would be extremely useful as well.

I'm always amused by the joke "Of course Kubrick faked the moon landing, but being a perfectionist was only willing to film on location", when in reality he was nothing of the sort. A lot of his filming locations were within an hours travel from home. I suppose it makes sense, even without the 3 month break, FMJ would have been 11 months of filming.

The most immersion breaking part of Dr Strangelove for me is always the outside shot of the ground assault on the "American" base which architecturally is so obviously British it snaps me out of the film each time.

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

WinDirStat (which used to be my goto) took over 6 minutes and ate 625mb of ram.

TreeSize Free took over 30 seconds, I'm not sure how much ram as it doesn't report it. It also kept trying to upsell me.

WizTree took less than 8 seconds. What's wrong with it?

edit: 2tb nvme ssd, mostly full of rubbish, windows 10.