Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport
Daring Fireball: The Names They Call Themselves
#USpol
The case for my 28g QRP dual-ported (9:1 and 49:1) unun cracked from tightening one of the terminal screws too tight, and from having printed the box with too few perimeters, so it wasn't really strong enough. I had designed it so that the coax was integrated into the case, so I had to cut the case apart to remove the still-functional electrical components for re-use.
At least this gave me a chance to confirm that I hadn't blown up the ferrite from overheating it!
"…the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms & log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse & Mastodon.
Calls for public institutions to invest in digital sovereignty are increasing across civil society. The term digital sovereignty means that an institution has autonomy & control over the critical digital infrastructure, data, & services that make up their online prese…
American businesses and consumers absorbed nearly 90% of the 2025 tariffs’ economic burden.
The researchers weren’t working from theory: They tracked actual transaction-level import price data
and found that prices paid by U.S. importers rose nearly one-for-one with tariff rates.
These results confirm what research on the 2018-19 tariffs already established and echoes other studies of the last year.
The bottom line is that, faced with tariffs,
foreign exporte…
The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul
The digital landscape of 2026 was supposed to be a golden age for the independent author, a time when the friction between a creative vision and a global audience finally dissolved into a seamless stream of data. We were promised a world where high-quality production was accessible to anyone with a story to tell and the capital to invest in professional…
And here is my published dissertation @…, about quantifying the natural CO2 exhaust at the Starzach site in Southwest Germany (my result: ~10t/d):
http://hdl.handle.net/10900/176213…
S-cones (which respond to short wavelengths) are very few in the fovea center
so causing a so-called S-cone blind spot
(Williams et al., 1981)
but they peak in number on the foveal slope at about 12% of the population
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11515/
The Trump Administration Is Losing The Support Of Local Law Enforcement
The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded,
-- even those who may nominally support the end goal.
Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception,
especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.