air gap over 802.11 @eqe@aleph.land

Irregular reminder that if you see me interacting with problematic people on here, I'd appreciate a DM heads up.

I appreciate and treasure every thought I see about days like this, most especially the hard ones from folks who suffered or are suffering bad parenting. There's no excuse for abuse and you deserve better.

A sequence of events will occur
and afterwards
Some things will be the same
and some things will be different.

Imagine living in a country with a working public health system...

"RT @xuchuanmei@twitter.com

There's a CN idiom 大海捞针（Looking for a needle in the ocean). Shenzhen's 72hr routine PCR test feels like that. But they've just found a needle!
Early morning of 18 Jun a case was +, so whole Futian district is having PCR test on the same day."

https://mastodon.social/@SexyCyborg/108498833108256586

What's the difference between femboy and sissy?

:boost_ok:

Saw a couple of meteors tonight! Remarkably, a clear night in the Sunset.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Herculids
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/update-on-a-possible-outburst-of-meteors/

Given the choice between reading about a scientific advance in a journalism outlet (bigthink, quanta, scientific american, space.com, etc) or reading the scientific paper as a preprint, which do you prefer?

Please boost for more signal!

I feel remarkably Ill-served by the response recently. This article captures my concerns well.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-covid-capitulation?s=r

There's a funny postscript to the surplus auction glass tty, too. I actually got two, a matched pair of whatever ancient obscure thing it was, for like $10. I think I may have had a vague plan to make a chat network with them? Or hook them up to the Mac while it was running BSD or A/UX and log in that way? MacBSD didn't have framebuffer drivers working well/at all so maybe it was going to be my system console? Dunno, teen hackers make weird choices.

Ages after I bought them, I got a phone call. The consultant who'd installed them at the school in the 80s was looking for them! He had a dairy farm client with an automation system that ONLY ran at 110 baud, and the ancient thing I had was the only terminal he knew of that supported rates that low. He offered to buy one for $50, but I held out for more -- what was I going to do with just ONE tty?

So we ended up working out a trade, I got a new Digital vt520 (iirc) in exchange for one of my relics.

Never did get macBSD running.

Around 2018 I happened to live on the same block as Kurt here in SF, but I never got to tell him this story and now we've all moved on.

Actually I'm not sure I ever told him I was an old fan, I didn't realize who he was until at least 6 months into our "nod at the other goth dad I remember seeing at DNA back in the day" neighborhoodly relationship when he happened to be wearing an InSoc shirt and I had a "holy shit" moment. And then I did a cross check with a publicity photo and lolled.

2/2

I wanted to decode the data track, but how to get the modem to listen to the CD? Well, first thing first, I had to get the null modem cables and whatnot working between the tty and the modem (a 28.8 that cost me north of $300 as I recall). Just getting the OK back on the tty screen when I sent +++AT was quite a thrill!

The modem's paper manual documented most of the AT commands that it accepted, so I found the right settings to pick up and decode 300 baud without negotiation. But I still had an audio to POTS problem...

I'd done a tiny bit of phreaking, not much there but I knew what to dial to get an open but dead line, and I knew that the several phone extensions in the house could hear each other in that situation.

So with the modem plugged into the rj11 in the living room, I took the boom box to the kitchen, dialed for the dead line, set the handset in front of the speaker and hit play, and ran back to the tty to type ATA.

And Curitiba scrolled amber.

I was in high school when I got my first CD player, some boom box from JVC or suchlike. CDs were expensive and music I wanted to listen to was scarce around home, but I occasionally got to go to Let It Be or Cheapo in Minneapolis and that made things better.

Picked up InSoc's "Peace and Love, Inc." and it had an intriguing track titled "300bps N, 8, 1".

I had a modem which I used with the family Mac to dial up to various online services (I can't recall if this was the summer before or the summer after a local ISP started up), and I'd acquired a dumb terminal (some incredibly ancient thing) at a surplus auction for reasons that were unclear to me then just as now.

My parents were generally tolerant of my computer nonsense, but they set limits; I wasn't allowed to "go on the computer" before evening. I was obedient but bored, that afternoon. So I interpreted that the tty and modem were not a computer and thus not prohibited.

1/2

TiL about sqlite-utils

https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/05/12/sqlite-utils--a-nice-way-to-import-data-into-sqlite/