Chi-town’s Chicagohenge
Japan’s Rude Resteraunt
During the day The Bake House in Nagoya is a pretty normal cafe. At night however, it turns into The Lazy House – a dining experience turned on its head. In direct conflict with highly etiquette oriented Japan, The Lazy House (Instagram) is filled with cranky and petulant staff dishing out insults while tossing dinner plates.
It reminds me of the retro diner Ed Debevic’s in Chicago where the staff can be snarky as well as put on a song and dance every now and again.
How is the restaurant fairing in Japan? It immediately started selling out for weeks in advance. It has slowed a bit since Dec 2023 but is still selling out on weekends.
North Korea steals American identities to get remote tech jobs at Fortune 500 companies
The Justice Department announced the arrests of three people in a stolen identity scheme that involved thousands of North Korean information technology workers sent to China and Russia who relied on the stolen identities of Americans to obtain remote employment at U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies. It generated $6.8 million in revenue for the North Korean government and gave them access to sensitive corporate data to funnel back to North Korea..
One of the arrested includes an Arizona woman, Christina Marie Chapman. Chapman ran a “laptop farm” where U.S. companies sent computers and paychecks to IT workers they did not realize were overseas. She connected them and allowed overseas IT workers log in remotely so they could connect to company networks and appear the logins were coming from the United States. She also is alleged to have received paychecks for the overseas IT workers at her home, forging the beneficiaries’ signatures for transfer abroad and enriching herself by charging monthly fees.
“More and more often, compliance programs at American companies and organizations are on the front lines of protecting our national security,”
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TeamLabs
I’ve written about Teamlab’s amazing work before. Here’s one of their new creations – a light sculpture.
Sound cards for a retro PC build
I was recently making my own retro 486 DX 66 PC build and needed to add an ISA sound card that supported both DOS and Windows games. A genuine Sound Blaster card would definitely work, but buying an genuine Sound Blaster Pro will run you well over $150+ (over $200 with it’s box)
In googling around, I found this great thread on Vogons where someone asked the same question: Is there a cheaper alternative than finding a Sound Blaster/Sound Blaster Pro? It turns out there is – the really excellent ESS AudioDrive ES1868.
I had not heard of the ESS AudioDrive ES1868 ISA sound card before, but it is considered one of the best Sound Blaster clone cards. It has tons of features such as Sound Blaster Pro 2 compatibility (something even the Sound Blaster 16 doesn’t have!). It is extremely easy to set up for DOS and Windows, has mixer inputs for line-in, microphone, CD input, wavetable, and is a really quiet card (as opposed to Sound Blaster 16’s that suffered from chronic hum and pop issues to the point it was often called the ‘NoiseBlaster’). The drivers are easy to set up and even support non-PnP configuration. It makes the card work with 99% of DOS games. Even better, the cards are readily available for around $25-$30.
I bought a card for $25 off eBay and installed it without issue. The ESS drivers are available on Phil’s Computer Lab link (below). I download the drivers, ran the installer, and set the parameters during install to the same as a default Sound Blaster card: A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
Address: 220h
IRQ: 7
DMA: 1
Port: 330h
Type: 6
I then popped up my copy of Wolfenstein 3D, chose the Sound Blaster output option with default parameters and got all the awesome audio of yesteryear.
Learning everything there is to know about the different Sound Blaster and clone sound cards:
DOS Days has really excellent write-ups on all the various Sound Blaster cards with pros and cons of each. I’m really glad I read up on the different models before buying a generic Sound Blaster 16. There’s a tremendous wealth of information about issues unique to each card. Definitely a site worth reading before buying a card from eBay.
They also have an exhaustive list of all kinds of other sound cards which includes info on the ESS Audiodrive cards. There’s a ton of great information about the different models and where they fit in the sound card landscape. A definite must read.
Links:
- Vogon’s thread on retro sound cards: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=64189
- Ebay source for $26
- Phil’s computer lab link with info and drivers for the ESS AudioDrive ES1868 / ES1868F
- Vogon’s driver page: https://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=7
- DOS Days info on Sound Blaster cards
- DOS Days list of all sound cards
- DOS Days info on the ES1868 card
Oregon at highest levels of Covid infections in the US
Oregon is one of seven states with highest levels of COVID-19 detected in its wastewater. Monitoring wastewater is a reliable method of determining the COVID-19 infection rates in the general population for a given area.
The CDC’s most recent figures from July 11 show an activity level of 10 across 23 wastewater treatment plants in Oregon with recorded data. Activity is classified as “very high” once it exceeds level eight. Oregon Health Authority’s respiratory virus databoard recorded an 8.9% rate of positive COVID-19 tests. The rate hadn’t been that high since mid-February.
45% of Oregon communities have COVID-19 wastewater levels in an increasing or sustained increasing pattern.
At the turn of 2024, new strain JN.1. — a variant of Omicron — made up 86% of Oregon’s COVID-19 cases
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Live (model) horseracing!
<Watson reading newspaper to Sherlock Holmes>
Sherlock Holmes (2009 movie -with Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law)
Watson: Lady Radford reports… Oh, her emerald bracelet has disappeared!
Holmes: Insurance swindle. Lord Radford likes fast woman and slow ponies.
I love old games – be they video games or physical games. The inventiveness of those early days was astounding.
One of the fun little rabbit holes I got into was the strange world of physical horse racing gambling games. No, these are not the big race tracks with real thoroughbreds, mint julips, and women wearing outrageous summer hats. These races happen happen on a large tabletop with horses that are less than 6 inches tall.
My first introduction to this kind of game was at Anata no Warehouse in Kawasaki Japan. On one of the upper floors, I saw this magnificent machine: GI-Horsepark Judgement by Konami. It featured miniature horse figures that physically raced around the track.
The GI series of numerous game models (GI-Horsepack Judgement, GI-World Classic, GI-Victory Road, GI-GranDesire) consisted of grand seasons with lots of races – and appears to have run from 1995 until 2011. Many of the machines lost the physical miniature horses and went to digital video races.
Modern versions of these racing games still exist today in Las Vegas – such as Konami’s Fortune Cup:
Here it is in action:
But before that, these electro-mechanical wonders existed as far back as 1985. Sigma Derby was created by a Japanese company Sigma Entertainment. Currently, there is only one remaining functional machine in the D Casino in Las Vegas – but what a treat that it’s been kept working.
Training an AI model on its own generated output destroys the model
Describing a situation much like the dangers of genetic inbreeding, computer scientists Matyas Bohacek and Hany Farid wrote a paper that describes how AI image generators that start training with their own generated data quickly start deteriorating.
‘Nepotistically Trained Generative-AI Models Collapse‘ shows that training an AI image generator on AI generated images quickly leads to a deterioration in the quality of output which can only be fixed by re-introducing real images.
In Nature, a more recent study found a similar effect in text generation, with the use of synthetic data leading to increasingly nonsensical results.
Artifactory:
Make your own Supersuit with Edna
Airbnb has brought Edna’s mansion to life to celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of my favorite movies: The Incredibles (definitely a favorite movie of mine).
Check out the cool experience:
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