Tootfinder

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 Names They Call Themselves
*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

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!

60 years ago tonight, the merry pranksters' first informal acid test, held at ken babbs's place outside santa cruz, where the grateful dead did not play (& all purported flyers are almost certainly fake). below text from dennis mcnally's bio & i wrote about it for the 50th.

"…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…

The world needs social sovereignty
The world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

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…

Who Is Paying for the 2025 U.S. Tariffs? - Liberty Street Economics
Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.

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…

The Great Audio Laundering: How AI Scammers are Highjacking the ACX Premium Market and Defrauding the Human Soul | David Boles, Blogs
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 …

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/

S-Cone Pathways by Helga Kolb
There are differences in the genetic structure and locus of the S-cone visual pigment compared with the L- and M-cone pigments (Nathans et al., 1986), yet the S-cones are common to all vertebrate retinas and always form a consistent 8-10% of the cone photoreceptor population (Marc, 1982; Kolb and Lipetz, 1991).The S-cones are however, 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 popu…

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.

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…