Punkie

I bought a set without holes. Like, for professional kitchen workers or nurses when you don’t want fluids getting on your foot.

Also does anyone still port knock these days?

If they did, would we know?

Basic setup for me is scripted on a new system. In regards to ssh, I make sure:

• Root account is disabled, sudo only
• ssh only by keys
• sshd blocks all users but a few, via AllowUsers
• All ‘default usernames’ are removed, like ec2-user or ubuntu for AWS ec2 systems
• The default ssh port moved if ssh has to be exposed to the Internet. No, this doesn’t make it “more secure” but damn, it reduces the script denials in my system logs, fight me.
• Services are only allowed connections by an allow list of IPs or subnets. Internal, when possible.

My systems are not “unhackable” but not low-hanging fruit, either. I assume everything I have out there can be hacked by someone SUPER determined, and have a vector of protection to mitigate backwash in case they gain full access.

I had a pool table, a professional tournament style, I couldn’t get rid of, even if I paid someone. It was maddening, because people didn’t understand that this was a plaster-laid, felted, slate top and the entire thing was 1300lbs. People thought a pool table was light like a dining room table. In order to move it, it had to be de-felted, have the plaster cracked, and the three huge 400+lb slate pieces moved individually, and then the huge wooden frame disassembled. No company would touch it. The place we got it from went out of business, so I had nobody to buy this monster of a table that took up half my rec room.

Luckily, some collector was found by my assistant some 17 years later, and finally, it was professionally removed. I paid $6000 for it, and while I only got $800 for it, I would have PAID to get it removed. So I was pleased to see it go and get my rec room back.

See, I think one of three scenarios might have happened:

• Luigi didn’t do it. He was framed and set up because out of the hundreds of prank tips, this guy looked “close enough.”
• Luigi did it, but the evidence was made up to make the case solid and the police look competent. Luigi wasn’t stupid, but he’s boned anyway.
• Luigi did it, and he really was that stupid.

As a writer, one of the aggravating tropes we have to follow is, “make the story believable,” when reality sometimes doesn’t align with “a good story.” Some criminals are really that stupid, and some armchair theory, based on decades of movies, books, and TV shows, you expect “hey, this is what they SHOULD have done is.” And they didn’t. It’s like when a chessmaster has to watch complete amateurs play chess. “Obvious strategies” are ignored, and basically both players are just not thinking past their last move.

I, too, have shitty wireless. In fact, for my work laptop, that’s exactly what I do. So much more reliable. Way too many wireless connections on too many channels close by.

I would argue that as god’s creation, sentences like that made by mortals are the true test of faith: what you know to be true versus what some angry person tells you. I’d like to think if this mythos is real, that those that stayed openly gay, for example, and didn’t hurt anyone were given the gold star upon arrival to heaven like, “You passed! You passed the test of faith! I knew you could do it, I believed in you!” And those that hid their gayness or condemned others, “Aw… sorry buddy. better luck next time, okay?”

Also, I keep seeing people quoting stuff outside of the bible like biblical truth, like The Rapture, and stuff from Dante’s Inferno which is, at best, Bible fan-fic.

I know this is a joke meme and all, but I get a pang about the “I keep having to feed it Benadryl” part because, while funny, some people are like that with kids and pets and that makes me sad.

I have been using Kubuntu as a daily driver for almost 10 year now, and never regretted it. I had one Windows box for things like special cases (like dumb website forms that won’t let me use Linux), Pearson Vue exams, and edge cases related to work, but it’s on standby as a secondary system I RDP into. I am not a gamer, so I didn’t need it for that. I saved so much money not having to buy hardware in the last decade or so.

Sadly, Windows 11 won’t work on anything I have (TPM issues, too old), so I recently got a cheap Windows 11 laptop before the tariffs hit and I pay more for dumb Windows-only reasons.

Linux all the way, man. Gave me a career, a life, and my hardware back.

One of the buildings around here had a piece of art commissioned (?) for their lobby, and it was “Georgia O’Keeffe” -esque. Not really an orchid, but an “abstract” of that style. Well, over the years, it sun-faded, and the colors that stood out it was pretty obvious what it looked like. Most common joke was “is this where my gynecologist’s office is?” Eventually, the building owner had it removed and replaced with sailboats.

Zenni was a game changer. I could get their top-of-the-line titanium frames with glass and auto-tinting for like $130 from them, or get the most basic birth control plastic frames with acrylic from my optometrist for no less than $900. Most of my glasses from Zenni are $80 or less, and yes, I have to wait 4-6 weeks. The optometrists are super-upset about this, too. Like some refuse to give me my prescription or pupillary distance, with high-pressure sales tactics and dire warnings. I have been told I’d ruin my eyes with “toxic metals” and “frames that will burn sunlight into my face and retinas.”

Well. It’s been nearly 20 years, and none of that has happened.

One revolution I have realized in baking is the recent trend to start talking about weight and not volume in recipes for certain dry ingredients like flour. Three cups of fluffy sifted flour is a lot less flour than three cups of densely packed flour. Same with brown sugar, or wondering if you need a “flat teaspoon” vs. a “heaping teaspoon” of something.

Trying getting out of that in your 50s with arthritis setting in. Oof.

Someone did a study at MIT about tin foil hats, and found that not only do they not screen radio interference, in some cases, can actually magnify them.

Conclusion: The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ‘‘radio location’’ (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Pro Cavity Creeps agenda:

The thing is that for a majority of cases, this is all one needs to know about git for their job. Knowing git add, git -m commit “Change text”, git push, git branch, git checkout , is most of what a lone programmer does on their code.

Where it gets complicated real fast is collaboration on the same branch. Merge conflicts, outdated pulls, “clever shortcuts,” hacks done by programmers who “kindof” know git at an advanced level, those who don’t understand “least surprise,” and those who cut and paste fixes from Stackexchange or ChatGPT. Plus who has admin access to “undo your changes” so all that work you did and pushed is erased and there’s no record of it anymore. And egos of programmers who refuse any changes you make for weird esoteric reasons. I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.” And his git comments were frustratingly vague and brief. “Fixed issue with ssl python libs,” or “Minor bugfixes.”

“I was fired from my previous job due to acts of drunken sloth and a little theft. Then I spent time on my couch, doing nothing but watching Starsky and Hutch reruns in my underwear, eating cold spaghetti-os from the can and drinking warm beer. Then when the welfare checks ran dry, I blackmailed a manager at the next job. He hired me, I did nothing, but he was replaced by someone who didn’t have anything I could dig up in his past quick enough. I can’t work with Tom Swift Jr. there, so I am applying here. Here is a list of my demands upon hire, and some background checks I ran on you. When do I start?”

– what these people think about a gap in your employment, possibly.

“… I was now… a fem-MAN!” [Orchestra music swells]

I married my first wife when she was 18 and I was 20. We went through a lot of hardship. It should not have worked out: we were both poor, from broken homes, in an LDR from different worlds. She was the popular girl, I was a shy and awkward nerd. When we got married, we had only been in one another’s presence for a few weeks total. I went into the marriage not expecting a path or plan, as my parents were toxic which ended with my mother’s suicide, and my mother in law had been married 4 times before she became single for the last time. None of us had healthy marriages to draw from. At our wedding, her relatives even said, “I give it two years, tops.” We were desperately poor, and struggled most of our marriage with health and money issues.

But we made it work for 25 years. We’d still be married, but she passed away ten years ago. We became “foxhole buddies,” us against the world.