This video about a fake psychic using social media to influence his targets was made over a decade ago as an ad for safe internet banking.
They were using very primitive social media of the time with no AI – today it’s much easier. It’s a good reminder your data can be weaponized against you (and probably why I got off all social media years ago).
Guyed towers (I thought they were called ‘guide’ towers for a long time) are tall thin vertical structures that depends on guy lines for stability. The physics of these towers are very interesting and related to trispastos cranes in ancient Greece/Rome and a sailing ship’s shroud and stay lines.
I found this quote from a German describing his fellow countrymen to be helpful in understanding some of my interactions when I was working there:
Germans are not efficient, they’re thorough. In fact, they’re often focused on being thorough to the point of being blatantly inefficient
Yes – this is an AI bot calling to arrange a trucker to deliver a load.
Giulioz gives a sequel to last year’s talk “Proprietary silicon ICs and dubious marketing claims? Let’s fight those with a microscope!“, where he showed how he reverse engineered a pretty old device by looking at microscope silicon pics alone, with manual tracing and some custom tools.
Fast forward, he shows how he reverse engineered a much modern chip: the custom Roland/Toshiba TC170C140 ESP chip (1995). Completing this task required a different approach, as doing it manually would have required too much time. He used a guided, automated approach that combines clever microscopy with computer vision to automatically classify standard cells in the chip, saving us most of the manual work.
They then sped things up even further by directly probing the chip: by exploiting test routines and sending random data to the chip he figured out how the internal registers worked to create a bit-accurate emulator. He even gives the source code out on github so you can emulate the devices yourself.
Listen to the result at 32:19 where they play Darude Sandstorm.
Links:
I loved the movie Short Circuit. It was filmed here in Oregon in various locations, but mostly in Astoria, OR (the same place Goonies, Kidnergarden Cop, and a few other films were made).
For it’s 40th anniversary during the Astoria Film Celebration, June 5-7, 2026 there will be Cast & Crew appearances, Panel Talks, Licensed Merchandise, Film Screenings, Workshops, Trivia, an 80’s Prom and more across multiple venues.
If you’re feeling the urge, you can Airbnb Stephanie Speck’s house, visit the Goonies home, and learn all about the filming locations at the Oregon Film Museum.
Windows Sandbox is a great little completely isolated environment in which to test out software you’re not sure is safe or for experiments that might corrupt your environment/installations. It pops up a virtual machine running Windows 10/11, is completely isolated, and then deletes everything when shut down.
However, it’s not always easy to get started. Even after installing the latest Windows 10 updates and turning all on virtualization features in bios, I still could not see the Windows Sandbox feature in the Turn Windows Features On and Off program.
It turns out you may need to do some extra setup, and the entire process is here in tenforums. They have a script (below) that helps, but there may even be other steps to follow and they’re all outlined on the post.
@echo off
echo Checking for permissions
>nul 2>&1 "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\cacls.exe" "%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\system"
echo Permission check result: %errorlevel%
REM --> If error flag set, we do not have admin.
if '%errorlevel%' NEQ '0' (
echo Requesting administrative privileges...
goto UACPrompt
) else ( goto gotAdmin )
:UACPrompt
echo Set UAC = CreateObject^("Shell.Application"^) > "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
echo UAC.ShellExecute "%~s0", "", "", "runas", 1 >> "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
echo Running created temporary "%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
timeout /T 2
"%temp%\getadmin.vbs"
exit /B
:gotAdmin
if exist "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" ( del "%temp%\getadmin.vbs" )
pushd "%CD%"
CD /D "%~dp0"
echo Batch was successfully started with admin privileges
echo .
cls
Title Sandbox Installer
pushd "%~dp0"
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\*Containers*.mum >sandbox.txt
for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . sandbox.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"
del sandbox.txt
Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Containers-DisposableClientVM /LimitAccess /ALL
pause
adf
If you grew up in the 80’s, you knew the amazing Superfriends cartoon. The opening nearly always showed them at the Hall of Justice.
But did you know it is based on a real place? Union Terminal in Cincinnati.
Fourth Place does a great job describing some history and tour around this Art Deco icon.
RTX port of Doom 2 on E1M1 with Voxels.
Download DooM 2 RTX (original Doom 2 wad file required):
Have you spent untold hours adventuring and building up your digital online pad and want to sell it?
Zillow for Warcraft allows you to sell your virtual properties in the real world.
