Bishma

Originally set to return in mid-June, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams may be on the station until February, 2025.

During a press conference today, NASA representatives confirmed they have a contingency plan to bring astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams home from the International Space Station (ISS) early next year. If they’re unable to leave sooner aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that brought them there

Tests conducted at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility pointed to deformed Teflon seals being a potential cause of the Starliner’s thrusters failing, but the agency isn’t expected to make a final decision on whether or not Williams and Wilmore will return using Boeing’s spacecraft until mid-August.

I used the phrase "the unusual one" this morning, and half way through I started to hear it in Jen's voice.

What are some other favorite Jen moments?

Back in the 00s there was a Canadian nature show called The Nature Nut (hosted by John Acorn) that did an episode of dedicated to beavers. It featured a catchy kids tune Big Wet Rodent Day that got some internet attention back then... mostly in kids music circles- never mind what age I was. At some point people decided this celebratory day was July 26th and we'd celebrate the beavers, nutria, coypu, and alike every year.

Full Episode of the Nature Nut episode in question
Same episode, timestamped to the original song

With beavers large and muskrats small
We stop to celebrate them all
The glory of a beaver dam
That makes you say I am (that makes me say I am)
A big wet rodent fan.

Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office outlining his decision not to seek reelection, his first on-camera remarks since making that announcement on Sunday. In addition to explaining why he is ending his candidacy, he listed off his priorities for his remaining time as president.

“And I’m going to call for Supreme Court reform, because this is critical to our democracy,” Biden said.

Multiple outlets have reported that Biden is considering proposals to establish term limits for Supreme Court justices and an enforceable ethics code for those on the high court.

As an AWS focused solutions/systems architect, I've been feeling this for the last 10ish months too. I attended the first 9 re:Invent conferences (up until Covid upended things) but I was glad I didn't attend last year; and re:Inforce sounds like it was even worse.

These lots will sit empty while 12,000-plus people try to attend the event,” Eugene Pride President Brooks McLain writes in an emailed statement to Eugene Weekly. “Parking is being blocked starting before our festival begins.”0

Pride’s parking needs are “superseded” by an August 10 Ween concert at the Cuthbert Amphitheater, which is owned and operated by Kesey Enterprises, according to a press release from Pride organizers.

Per a 2006 concession agreement — a contract — between Kesey Enterprises and the city of Eugene, the private entertainment company has first right of refusal for parking around Cuthbert between May 1 and Oct. 31 annually.

I guess this means we've entered smoke season.

These days, our biometric data is valuable to businesses for security purposes, to enhance customer experience or to improve their own efficiency.

Facial recognition technology [...] scans images or videos from devices including CCTV cameras and picks out faces.

From supermarkets to car parks and railway stations, CCTV cameras are everywhere, silently doing their job. But what exactly is their job now?

Businesses may justify collecting biometric data, but with power comes responsibility and the use of facial recognition raises significant transparency, ethical, and privacy concerns.

If your password gets stolen, you can change it. If your credit card is compromised, you can cancel it. But your face? That’s permanent. Biometric data is incredibly sensitive because it cannot be altered once it’s compromised. This makes it a high-stakes game when it comes to security.

"We are thrilled that after an absence of around 400 years we now have beavers back and breeding."

She added: "The beavers have put a lot of effort into building and maintaining their lodges and getting their family settled, showing great perseverance and resilience during their relocation and then during the floods we’ve had over the last year,"

... sentencing guidelines suggest a from eight to 14 months in prison. His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Back on June 25:

Former Bob’s Burgers voice actor Jay Johnston agreed today to plead guilty to federal charges stemming from his participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The 55-year-old actor [...] faces multiple charges including civil disorder and disorderly or disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds.

A lawsuit filed in California by concert giant AXS has revealed a legal and technological battle between ticket scalpers and platforms like Ticketmaster and AXS, in which scalpers have figured out how to extract “untransferable” tickets from their accounts by generating entry barcodes on parallel infrastructure that the scalpers control and which can then be sold and transferred to customers.

By reverse-engineering how Ticketmaster and AXS actually make their electronic tickets, scalpers have essentially figured out how to regenerate specific, genuine tickets that they have legally purchased from scratch onto infrastructure that they control. In doing so, they are removing the anti-scalping restrictions put on the tickets by Ticketmaster and AXS.

So Ticketmaster and AXS are suing to maintain their monopoly on scalping?

We recently had an unfortunate situation where an external magnetic hard drive was dropped while spinning. I knew before we even checked that the heads were gonners, and sure enough the drive seems dead. Unfortunately this was a drive inherited from a deceased relative that were starting to backup at the time the accident happened and now a lot of family photos are inaccessible if not gone forever.

I'm just getting my feet wet trying to find potential recovery services to get quotes, but I thought it was worth asking you fine folks if you have any experience that might help out. Companies to avoid or who may be worth it even if their quote is high.

One specific question I have pertains to what's recovered (since most of these services seem to charge based on the amount recovered): We're only concerned with photos but this was, at one point, the single drive in Mac, so there's tons of OS and other files we don't want or need. Are we likely to get charged for it anyway?