"Is This the End of Geofence Warrants?"
Google is changing how they track user location data. The link is a breakdown by the EFF regarding these changes. As they say it, it isn't a full victory for privacy - but it is stepping in the right direction.
Google’s announcement outlined three changes to how it will treat Location History data. First, going forward, this data will be stored, by default, on a user’s device, instead of with Google in the cloud. Second, it will be set by default to delete after three months; currently Google stores the data for at least 18 months. Finally, if users choose to back up their data to the cloud, Google will “automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.”
[...]
However, we are not yet prepared to declare total victory. Google’s collection of users’ location data isn’t limited to just the “Location History” data searched in response to geofence warrants; Google collects additional location information as well. It remains to be seen whether law enforcement will find a way to access these other stores of location data on a mass basis in the future. Also, none of Google’s changes will prevent law enforcement from issuing targeted warrants for individual users’ location data if police have probable cause to support such a search.
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Introducing Michigan J. Frog
I didn't have a good sense of how long building it would actually take, but I figured it couldn't take as long as the movie marathon!
As I told a friend, I grew up building computers. I worked for my dad's business "sep Computers." (sep was dad's initialism for 'Specialized Engineering Products' but he eschewed capital letters and periods leading to many people thinking it was pronounced "sepp" rather than "Ess Ee Pee.") We did GeekSquad style work before GeekSquad was a thing. I built computers, pulled network cables, etc. But that was from roughly 1990-2005. I did build my last rig ("Marvin") but that was still around ten years ago. Things change, though not as much as I feared.
I was excited at the prospect of this new machine. After spending a few weeks evaluating options I settled on a build and got input from a few people. Once I had the build, I worked with a buddy of mine and traded Magic product for the parts. Over the past week-and-a-half the parts came in, and last night the final piece arrived.
So, I got up this morning, and starting around 7:00 am, I began putting it all together. I took it slow, and as soon as I hit something I wasn't completely confident in I pulled up manuals and double checked or found the answer. Overall, I'd say 95% of it was stuff I was familiar with, but there were a few things which were new and I had to learn.
First, this computer has a NVME SSD drive. Looking at the motherboard I couldn't find where it connected. I searched and hunted before eventually giving up. I referenced the manual and found where it was, under a plate which wasn't obviously labeled.
Second, I am utilizing an all-in-one watercooling unit from Corsair. My only previous experience had been heat-sinks and fans. This is largely the same concept, but I was very nervous to make sure I installed it correctly and had fans going the right directions, etc. This unit was also the last piece of hardware to arrive, because the original hardware spec used the upgraded version which had three fans - unfortunately that was too large for the case I had selected. So I had to order a replacement.
Otherwise though, it was all the same core concepts, plugging in wires. Screwing things down, etc.
I did make mistakes though.
- I had to unmount and remount the watercooling unit four times as I kept discovering it blocked access to things I needed access to.
- I also ended up removing the cover plate which goes around the motherboard's ports on the back of the machine, as I had mounted the motherboard and gotten very far in the build before I realized I hadn't set the motherboard correctly and some prongs intended to keep tension were unfortunately positioned inside of ports rather than on top of them. A minor issue overall.
- I installed the graphics card without removing covers on the video ports. The NVIDIA card had small covers on the three DP ports and the HDMI port, without realizing I had left them on, I mounted the card. Unfortunately the case was such that it held those covers in place and I couldn't remove them without removing the card. Again, a small issue.
One realization I had was how far computer cases have come. I can recall many times cutting myself on the cut metal inside cases, but the case I used was smooth and there was nowhere for me to cut myself. Not to mention the pathing to enable hidden wiring, etc. Just very cool steps forward in a very subtle area of the computer technology.
Once I had fully assembled and wired, I turned the machine on and it booted up first try. I have to admit, that felt pretty good.
As noted by a friend, I like themes with my naming schemas. The two Raspberry Pi computers I use in the house are both named for professional soccer coaches. So when it came time to name this machine, for a while, I was going to use 'Foghorn' but this morning it came to me to name it after the top-hat wearing frog.
I've spent a good bit of today getting Michigan updated, installing software, etc. It's using wifi and I'm seeing decent speeds, but I am wondering if I should run a network cable to this corner of the house for the machine. We'll see. Maybe a summer project. I'm also considering upgrading the keyboard from my Microsoft ergonomic one to something more nerdy, a split-hand ergonomic keyboard like the Glove80 or the Voyager but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on any of those purchases yet. We'll see.
Aside from getting Michigan up and running, I also had to spend some time relocating Marvin (the old machine) to its new home, out near the router. It's going to live-on as our dedicated media server. The move was simple enough, the biggest has was I had to spend some time sorting out its ethernet networking as it had been running on wifi and the ethernet had to be manually re-enabled. But, some googling and working on it got it solved and it's all set up.
As for gaming... Last week, I was discussing this build with a friend. I joked that one of my metrics for judging the computer's speed would be how fast it could make a new world of Dwarf Fortress. I just set Michigan to run with the maximum history and other settings which would make it really work. I watched the processor and it never went above 25%, which I was somewhat surprised by - I would have assumed it would just peg the processor during the world building phase. Now that I think about it, I'm assuming it only uses so many threads, etc. Concurrency doesn't really work for that and thus it can't take advantage of the extra cores in the processor. Which makes sense.
That said, it did work amazingly fast compared to the other machines I've played Dwarf Fortress on.
The Specs
PS - Only twelve more hours of downloading Baldur's Gate III.
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A look at the history of QWERTY
I had a conversation very similar to the custom keyboard portion of this video with coworkers a few evenings ago, discussing how I had also experimented with a custom keyboard arrangement - but, for me, the biggest issue was that it was not the only keyboard I used so I had to both learn a new layout and actively use a standard key arrangement.
The evolution of the keyboard was fascinating as I hadn't heard about those earlier designs before qwerty. Though, I will say, parts of the video were a slog as the presenter has an odd pacing to how he speaks at times.
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Asynchronous audio with friends
When I was a kid, back before cellphones, my mother and her best friend used to mail each other audio tapes to listen to. Modern technology would make it voicemails etc. And now... this.
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Right to repair in California gets major boost as Apple comes out in support
Apple told a California legislator that it is formally supporting a right to repair bill in California, a landmark move that suggests big tech manufacturers understand they have lost the battle to monopolize repair, and need to allow consumers and independent repair shops to fix their own electronics.
"Apple writes in support of SB 244, and urges members of the California legislature to pass the bill as currently drafted," Apple wrote to Susan Eggman, the sponsor of the bill, in a letter obtained by 404 Media. "We support SB 244 because it includes requirements that protect individual users' safety and security, as well as product manufacturers' intellectual property. We will continue to support the bill, so long as it continues to provide protections for customers and innovators."
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AI tool for phone calls with AI
The linked company is a VC-funded start up offering their phone call AI for broad demo availability. Reading the website I was reminded of a project I did back in college.
It was my 3rd year, in my lecture with Ian Bogost (now a semi-well known game academic.) He had us play with a technology which allowed us to call a number and have a programmable back end. The assignment was to make something from that technology.
The coding was, as I recall, fairly rudimentary. Most people made very basic trivia games or things like that. Instead what I did was, I discovered that the system had the ability to make HTTP calls to the broader internet. So mine wasn't a game so much as I made it a system where I could update my location over the phone. This was before iPhones and always-on GPS. So I could call the number and say I was at home, or at work, or at school. During the late night coding session I added a final option, "abducted by aliens."
Super simple, super rudimentary. But it was also a project done over the course of a week, nothing major. And mine was the only one in the lecture which reached outside of the system to the wider Internet. I recall it did have a bug which it always returned an error, even though it would successfully update the location. I hadn't been able to figure it out when I submitted it.
I got an A on it despite the bug. He appreciated the fact that I reached outside the platform.
That would have been probably 2005. Eighteen years later we've moved to serious AI / LLM functionality over the phone with coding capabilities. It's going to be interesting.
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"The ancient technology keeping space missions alive"
Designed to fly in formation to investigate the interaction between charged particles from the Sun – the solar wind – and the magnetic bubble surrounding the Earth, known as the magnetosphere, Cluster II ranks as one of the most successful and long-lasting science missions ever flown. The satellites (named Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango, since you ask) have just celebrated 23 years in orbit.
I just love the name of the four satellites. But the article is a great read overall, highly recommend.
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An ode and history of internet cafes
When the world's first internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia, first opened its doors in London's West End in September 1994, its founders could never have imagined what they'd unleashed.
Internet cafes — cheap, accessible venues where just about anyone could explore cyberspace in its infancy — spread slowly across the world at first, and then snowballed in popularity. In the spring of 1996, Sri Lanka got its first two internet cafes: the Cyber Cafe, and the Surf Board. A few months later, Kuwait's first internet cafe launched with 16 PCs. In 1999, a travel guide promised readers a list of 2,000 cafes in 113 countries.
Within a couple years, it was estimated that there were more than 100 internet cafes in Ghana alone. BusyInternet opened the largest internet cafe in Accra, boasting 100 screens. By 2002, there were more than 200,000 licensed internet cafes in China, and still more operating under the table.
The article goes on to discuss what role they played in various countries to the technology that led to their decline (3G and cheapening technology.) Most interesting to me though is the very personal look at specific cafes in countries like Nepal and Lagos.
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IMAX requires a 21-year old Palm Pilot to run in theaters
Several fascinating tidbits in this article, primarily around the use of the 21-year old Palm Pilot, but also just around the fact that only 30 theaters in the world can actually project the film as Christopher Nolan intended.
The Palm-powered QTRU system is actually a relatively high-tech part of an otherwise extremely manual process. Yves Leibowitz, a longtime projectionist, has made a number of popular YouTube videos documenting the process of loading a film, which requires setting up the enormous reels in exactly the right place, manually threading film through a number of rollers and platters, and constantly checking and rechecking to make sure everything's lined up and ready to go.
In most of his videos, you actually get a brief glimpse of a Palm device set up next to the QTRU, but Leibowitz never seems to need to touch it. In every case we've seen, though, it's an actual physical device. The emulator appears to be a new phenomenon, and in fact, IMAX told Vice it was created specifically for Oppenheimer. "IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator that mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists," the company said. The emulator, if you're curious, appears to be running on a Winmate W10IB3S-PCH2AC-POE Panel PC, a 10.1-inch Windows tablet that appears to have been designed to live outside of conference rooms and help people control schedules and video conferencing.
The obvious question here is, why in the world would IMAX still run its systems on a 21-year-old device? And why, when faced with the need to update it, would it choose to simply emulate said 21-year-old device on a crappy Windows tablet? Other QTRU systems have a controller built into the machine itself, which seems better in every imaginable way.
For IMAX, like so many other companies that rely on generations-old technology, the answer is simple: it works. And it's not like it's a booming industry in need of reinvention. There are only 30 theaters worldwide that can even show a full 70mm print like Oppenheimer, 19 of them in the US. Most IMAX experiences are digital now, like most moviegoing experiences in general.
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Why DisplayPort was a game changer after HDMI
I use DisplayPort on my home PC, but had no idea where it came from or why. This was a fascinating look into it and what it enables.
The DisplayPort (shortened as DP) interface was explicitly designed to be a successor to VGA and DVI, originating from the VESA group – an organization created by multiple computer-display-related players in technology space, which has previously brought us a number of smaller-scale computer display standards like EDID, DDC and the well-known VESA mount. Nevertheless, despite the smaller scale of previous standards, DisplayPort has since become a hit in computer display space for a number of reasons, and is more ubiquitous than you might realize.
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort's sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn't just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days.
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The Scope that Changed the World
A few years ago on a long flight across the North Atlantic, the perfect choice for a good read was iWoz, the autobiographical account of [Steve Wozniak]’s life. In it, he described his work replicating the wildly successful Pong video game and then that of designing the 8-bit Apple computers. A memorable passage involves his development of the Apple II’s color generation circuitry, which exploited some of the artifacts of the NTSC color system to produce a color display in a far simpler manner than might be expected. Now anyone seeking a connection with both Pong and the Apple II can have one of their very own if they have enough money because [Al Alcorn]’s Tektronix 465 oscilloscope is for sale. He’s the designer of the original Pong and used the instrument in its genesis, and then a few years later, he lent it to [Woz] for his work on the Apple II.
What a remarkable piece of modern history. The same device which created the first massively successful video game and also was critical to the development of the Apple II.
The post goes on to note that the device is up for sale and I wish I had the means to acquire it as I'd love such an artifact in my collection.
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A chess computer from 111 years ago
Alright, so computer might be overstating it. But it's some ingenious engineering.
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Of Mice and Men
My bluetooth mouse has stopped working with my Ubuntu laptop and I can say with great confidence, dealing with Bluetooth and Ubuntu is a special level of hell on this laptop. I have had to troubleshoot if the issue was with the mouse driver on the machine, the Bluetooth driver on the machine, the mouse itself, or what.
As of now, it appears to be the mouse. As other Bluetooth devices work on this machine. And my trackpad works.
[Several reboots later]
Okay, it appears to be working again. I don't honestly know what is to blame. I ended up repairing the laptop through the Logitech unifying receiver rather than just Bluetooth. I also discovered the 'solaar' app for Linux which does some of the customizations for Logitech that you can do in Windows.
So that's nice. I guess.
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The History of the Power Grid
A fascinating read on the whole as it gives a good overview of the history of electricity and its growth from World's Fair attraction to home mainstay.
I found this tidbit fascinating:
To put this in perspective, the average yearly outage time in the US is around 475 minutes per year, which is considered especially unreliable despite representing ~99.9% uptime. By comparison, Germany averaged just 12.7 minutes of power outages per year in 2021—a remarkable 99.998% uptime.
Of course the US is much larger than Germany and serves a great deal more people. I would be curious to compare outage time averages for countries of both similar geographical size to the US (Canada, Brazil, China), and also comparing for countries of commensurate population (China, India.) Though China, India, and Brazil are not as "industrialized" yet.
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Spacetop, a laptop with no screen
Instead of a screen it uses tethered AR glasses. Interesting concept from this article. At $2,000 it's a steep purchase for early adopters, and with only 1,000 initially available it's definitely not going to be showing up everywhere. But I think this concept has some interesting space for technology to play in. Screens burn a lot of battery and add a lot of cost to machines. I'll be curious to see how those who get the real device report around things like battery life.
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Ken Thompson on his music box project
Ken Thompson is one of the creators of Unix and here he is giving a talk about a longterm project of his for making a music machine. It's a good journey through the evolution of technology through this ongoing project.
I had, back in college, the vision for a similar project which I had called 'Ainur' after the singing demigods of Tolkien mythology. At the time, the idea was a portable computer which I could take to parties or conventions and it would run a wifi mp3 streaming service entirely autonomously, and also be available as a file sharing FTP server. It's still an idea I have, and would probably be Raspberry Pi built these days - but in the era of music streaming, it feels like a less and less needed project.
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Mark Rober on drone deliveries
What a cool bit of technology in this video. I loved seeing how Zipline does it in Rwanda, and while I'm more dubious of the technology for home deliveries in urban and suburban environments - I still think the technology is awesome.
Also, I appreciate him making sure to delve into Rwanda more as a country.
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A thread about Dominos Pizza Tracker
It works largely the way I expected, but interesting to see it broken down.
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Technology built to last
I spent some time this morning relaxing and watching this video by my friend Marshall. In it, he services a Rolex watch that its owner had worn daily for 53 years before it stopped running. And as I watch it, I look over at my Galaxy 4 watch charging next to me. I greatly enjoy and use it, but I also realize I'll be lucky to get a tenth of that life time out of it.
Obviously, a big problem is the continual climb of technology.
Analog watches hit a relative plateau decades ago, where the innovations (largely speaking) stopped and so the differentiating factors became build quality and life. We are still far from that as far as digital technology goes with data, wireless, screens, processors, all continuing to improve and change.
There is little reason to build a computer, or a smart watch, to last 50 years outside of industrial and governmental uses. Especially for an accessory like a watch, it will always rely on another service to provide updates, screens, applications, etc. It would require an incredible feat of engineering to future proof a smart watch such that it would be able to easily be ported to any future platform. Not impossible, but certainly difficult.
That said, if someone came along and sold a smartwatch able to last fifty years with a robust futureproofing documentation, and it satisfied my needs for its functionality as well as aesthetics, I'd heavily consider purchasing it almost regardless of price.
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"Device transmits radio waves with almost no power"
So, this definitely feels like it's fake. Like a perpetual motion device, another scam, or maybe an innocent mistake. If it proves true, this could be a serious game changer. But I remain dubious of its claims.
It is possible to wirelessly transmit information simply by opening and closing a switch that connects a resistor to an antenna. No need to send power to the antenna.
Our system, combined with techniques for harvesting energy from the environment, could lead to all manner of devices that transmit data, including tiny sensors and implanted medical devices, without needing batteries or other power sources.
The article, to its credit, does an excellent job explaining the technology and why it works and why it differs from other things out there.
I still remain skeptical simply because it seems too good to be true.
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Most Microwaves in the US are manufactured by Midea
Found courtesy of Jason over at kottke.org:
We found evidence that most countertop microwaves sold in the US are manufactured by just one company, Midea. We confirmed with Midea that it makes and sells Toshiba, Comfee, and Black+Decker ovens. We're also confident that GE, Whirlpool, Sharp, Breville, Insignia, Magic Chef, Hamilton Beach, and others also sell microwaves that were originally built and probably designed in large part by Midea, though all parties that we contacted declined to comment. But here's why we think Midea is the original manufacturer.
The first clue is that at a given capacity, there are usually at least four different models with the same wattage and dimensions. They have identical contours inside the oven and identical patterns in their ventilation grates, too. They sometimes have the same FCC ID (to be sold in the US, any piece of hardware that can create radio interference, like a magnetron, needs one). And some of them say plainly on the rear label that they're manufactured by Midea.
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David C. Lowery defines the exact problem with our current era of AI
OpenAI: The same Silicon Valley monopoly pseudo capitalists that have given you all the other monopoly platforms. Start with Sequoia capital. Go from there. Now it's important for the scam to present it as something that is "open" to the public as if they are creating something like a public park or library (one of SVs favorite Trojan horses). Because what they are really doing is taking private property (copyrights, TM, ROP) that rightfully belong to artists (big and small, professional and hobbyist) without permission and converting it to a private company owned by the same people who brought you the current monopoly platforms. The trick works cause commentators (especially tech journalists) willfully repeat the framing that a public good is being created. Not the next Google.
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Sounds like corrupt file to blame for FAA's flight stoppage today
I can't help but wonder about the backend of the system. I have to assume it is arcane and too expansive to simply update, however if a single corrupt file can cause today's issue I grow very concerned over redundancy and general stability.
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Oh Linux
I had the gall to dare to run apt-get update & upgrade, thinking it would be simple. But, I believe, it updated my video drivers and caused the computer to lock up in boot UNLESS -- and the stupidity of this boggles my mind -- I unplugged the third monitor from the computer and suddenly it booted correctly.
To say I am annoyed is an understatement. For now, I am just living the 2 monitor life, and rather than chase down the problem, I am inclined to continue to do so.
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