evranch

joined 1 year ago
[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hah you got it, I used to be a "Chevy guy" when it came to domestic trucks but this was the truck that finally made me say enough, it's riddled with embarrassing faults and bad design decisions in every system. The Ford truck we also have is an example of new tech that works well and the Chevy just can't compare.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago

Simply the stronger it is, the less you need to move, and the easier it is to smuggle.

Then you just cut it back to "standard" strength or attempt to do so. This is a big reason fentanyl displaced heroin, and why you see otherwise undesirable drugs like carfentanyl out there that are even stronger.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 21 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Don't forget classics like Fuck_this_shit1! Fuck_this_shit2!

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Exact same thing happening in Canada. Our systems are all strained to the breaking point, no housing, no jobs, no doctors, degrading infrastructure and nobody with the skills to maintain it. Nobody is even developing these skills thanks to a stagnant education system that rewards mediocrity.

And our population continues to skyrocket due to unrestrained immigration, depressing wages and pushing unemployment to historic highs.

Canada was built by immigrants. But I don't care what colour someone's skin is, they will not find Canada very welcoming right now. If this country can't even offer a future to those who were born here, how can it welcome others?

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Hopefully you don't do much driving in the dark, the backlight on our new work truck's console display glows so brightly even with the display "off" that it ruins your night vision.

Modern would be fine if even half a moment of thought went into non-typical situations, but it's always some stupid oversight like this. Or the 5000k LED dome lights with a visible PWM frequency. Literally painful.

I prefer to drive with old incandescent dash lights dimmed to nearly nothing, yes I live in a very dark area with no lighting and many road hazards. On a moonless night, the area lit by the headlights is literally all you can see. We run extra lightbars, turning lights etc.

More light outside the truck, not inside. That's my rant

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren't) as you'd need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.

Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren't on the public net, they don't even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.

Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For the readers that don't realize exactly how old school, Sam & Fuzzy has been around since the dialup era.

It's been through just about every phase a comic can go through, he used to write decade-long story arcs, lately he seems to be enjoying drawing simple cute dog comics. I suppose a guy needs a break sometimes from a career like that!

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn't know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago

If he follows through he'll be in on round 2 of the rapture I guess

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

You don't understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are "self-cleaning".

Kessler Syndrome doesn't even mean that we can't fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.

In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.

I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I'm able to post this. It's been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I'm all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I'm less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

It's a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

And yes, it's terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it's interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

It's also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I'm sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.

[–] evranch@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 weeks ago

That's practically all my cats eat! I only put cat food out in the winter or if they start to look slim. All summer they eat mice and sparrows and get fat. (Note that sparrows are a terrible invasive pest and removing them has a positive impact on the local ecosystem)

They are barn cats though and that's their job so it's a little different from the pet cat situation.

 

I've talked trash about Bluetooth for years (and rightfully so, often) but I finally did some detailed testing and determined that it appears to be my Android phone causing this particular effect. Android 10, Sonim XP8.

The best track I found to replicate the effect was Griz - Wicked due to the massive bass hits that come in around 1:00 really exaggerating it.

When the bass hits on Android, some sort of compressor kicks in and vocals and everything else get crushed FLAT, resulting in an awful effect where the volume fluctuates, the bass is weak, everything is garbage. This has resulted in crap audio in my vehicles for a couple years now unless I'm listening to the FM radio.

I paired several BT devices that I had blamed for the effect to my PC, and they sound fine playing this track. Both PC and Android are using the same codec, "High Fidelity" A2DP with SBC.

It doesn't matter which player I use on the phone, Ultrasonic and BubbleUPNP playing local copies or Youtube Music Vanced streaming, the compression is present on all of them.

Anyone know what's going on here or want to try to replicate it?

 

In the pre-streaming days I used to have a large collection of ripped and downloaded music. However as my taste in music is extremely wide and it became easier and more fun to use hacked streaming services (i.e. Youtube Music Vanced) to play music especially on the go, I decided to let my music collection go years ago. Plus... it was a big mess due to undiagnosed ADHD so let's be honest it wasn't a huge loss.

Now with the streaming ecosystem degrading and me now capable of keeping my things in order, I find myself wanting to start rebuilding a local music collection for the coming post-streaming era.

Wondering if there are any places I could find huge collection torrents that could be pared down to what I want, rather than spending my life downloading single albums or discographies? I'm ideally talking torrents that would be like 20GB of funk, but not just a shitload of tracks in a root directory with no tagging.

One of my favourite things about streaming services is getting to hear tracks or artists I haven't even thought of in ages, and it's hard to build a collection when you can't think of exactly what to put in it!

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