HP is trying to force consumer PC and print customers to use online and other digital support channels by setting a minimum 15-minute wait time for anyone that phones the call center to get answers to troublesome queries.
And then they immediately backtracked once it became public.
I recently acquired not one, but 2, 8″ floppy drives. Behold a Data System’s Design DSD 440:
To get this all working in my experiments, I used the following guides
Parts and equipment
Ahron Wayne succeeded at something he (and every kid in every convenience store or game shop) has been trying to accomplish for some time: figuring out what’s inside a sealed Pokémon card packet without opening it.
His method was a lot more…advanced that holding the package up to the light in every direction known to man. He bought a x-ray microCT scanner off eBay, refurbished and calibrated it, then putting a load of work into testing and trying countless scanning techniques and methods to determine what was in the packet.
He even tried using AI to help determine the cards from the shadowy images he got.
Bonus points, he was able to detect counterfeit cards:
The article is worth a read and he made a video about it:
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David Gewirtz reviews a bunch of AI tools for coding; and does some ranking.
Article:
EA has decided to hand out the code to Command and Conquer series.
Games included: Command and Conquer Renegade, Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Generals Zero Hour, and their modding support code.
“Something has to change in Oregon schools,” Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University told the Joint Ways and Means Subcommittee on Education last month. “More money did not produce any kind of bumper increase in student outcomes. ”
Despite passing record taxes and that nearly doubled school funding to some of the highest per-student funding (from $9,543 per student to $17,161 per student), Oregon has had 10 years of continually declining student outcomes across all metrics.
The cherry on top came from the National Report Card. It was a damning report for Oregon. Oregon student achievement has declined for 10 straight years until it is now nearly dead last. It’s a sad continuation of one of the most dysfunctional school systems in the country despite over 20 years of completely Democratically controlled policies.
How bad are these scores in real terms?
Oregon fourth graders who were tested in early 2024 ranked second worst in the country in math and tied with 10 other states for third worst in reading. Eighth graders tested in the same time period, who are now halfway through their first year in high school, performed far below the national average in math but close to the middle of the pack in reading.
A full third of Oregon’s then-fourth graders who took the federal test scored “below basic” on the math section, meaning that they could not complete foundational tasks like identifying whole numbers on a number line or locate the lines of symmetry in shapes like triangles and rhombuses.
Forty-eight percent scored “below basic” in reading, meaning that they could not yet determine the sequence of events described in a passage, nor could they fully determine the meaning of a familiar word using context clues. The national average was 41%.
It drew silence from countless Oregon school and government leaders that have been doubling down on supposedly progressive policies – policies that we now have over 10 years of data show are failing dramatically.
Articles:
The glowing brown paper bags that adorn Southwestern walkways, churches, and homes during the Christmas holiday season are called luminarias. They’re also sometimes called farolitos, or “little lanterns,” and date back more than 300 years. The New Mexican tradition began when Spanish villages along the Rio Grande displayed the unique and easy-to-make lanterns to welcome the Christ child into the world.
I loved seeing these when I lived in Albuquerque. They’re largely only found in the dry winters of the southwest as they would be buried in East coast snows, blow 100 miles away in Midwest winter winds and snow, or would be rained into a soggy mess in the Pacific Northwest.
Visit Albuquerque has a little write-up on them that’s pretty cool on how to make them yourself.
There I Ruined It uses AI to make crazy mashups of the most unlikely singers singing completely opposite songs. Check out Hank Williams singing Straight Out of Compton.
A sad side effect of a very permissive city-wide camping policy means that public sanitation has reached dangerous levels. To the level that we’re having outbreaks of communicable diseases related to feces.
Bans on urban camping and home codes have been a thing since Hooverville days. Public sanitation can become life and death health concern for urban residents. Sadly, it appears Portland has reached that tipping point, despite spending $75,000 a month on 130 public toilets (that were all destroyed or stolen)
Articles:
Software engineer Robert Heaton posted the entire story behind his open-source PySkyWiFi project— or how he achieved free Wi-Fi on an airplane by painstakingly subverting the existing firewall.
The process started when he realized that his Airmiles account page, not blocked by the firewall, was still connected to the broader Internet, and this gap could be exploited.
After a lot of funny hacking, he got it working to the tune of “several bytes per second.” Yeah – BYTES per second.
So right now it’s probably still best to just pay for the wifi, take a nap, or read a book.
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