I used to have a TCL soundbar.

In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.

Yes!

I was just talking to my wife about, if not this idea, then the ramifications of splitting. We were discussing how someone like Putin can stay in power, or how I think it would be touchy to have joint protests against Trump in the U.S., even as his support falters across the board – because I couldn’t imagine republicans with morals, disaffected MAGA, democrats, and leftists on the same side of a picket line.

I’m glad I have ADHD and will forget about this by tomorrow, or else I’d spend my weekend trying to figure out what temperature and droplet size makes the slipperiest ice. You can probably use far less water with a mist sprayer, assuming the mist doesn’t freeze before it hits the ground. (Saving water means better coverage by the time you run out, being my thinking.)

Well, it’s likely the DOGE cuts haven’t shown their impact just yet.

Of roughly 30 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration workers dismissed in February as part of Musk’s campaign to shrink the federal workforce, many were in the “office of vehicle automation safety,” — Car safety experts at NHTSA, which regulates Tesla, axed by DOGE

Personally, I’m sort of hoping for the same karma as when Elaine Chao was secretary of transportation and let Tesla roll out an untested and confusing shifting system, which later helped kill her sister.

Having just read a comment about someone who actually went through the process of having a kid by employing stuff like cycle and fertility tracking, scheduling both sex and abstinence, as well as other not-fun stuff, your comment made me think of taking the kink to an extreme, where instead of lots of rambunctious boning, it was a couple nerds doing intense and fruitless science to find the optimal way to impregnate someone that was impossible to impregnate. (Unless they start looking at the mating habits of bedbugs, but that’s a third, separate, entirely unhinged thing.)

I mean, I’m pretty sure I know which interpretation you meant. But brains are weird and I’m sleep deprived.

As someone who isn’t going to have kids and doesn’t want them, I still get the growing old alone concern.

It’s not that I would have wanted children to take care of me, but that I don’t trust the social safety system in the U.S.
Even if things are going well, it’s still a terrifying proposition. My first job ever was as a dietary aid at a mid-level retirement home, and while some of the people there were thriving (namely the folks who somehow managed to go into the home with their partners), the majority were a study of what happens when the ability to live exceeds the will. It was a formative experience.

That’s why I’m in therapy and desperately scared that between neurodivergence and trauma, that I’m not going to be one of those really social old people with friends everywhere that care for them and keep them company. Although I think it’s not a given that kids will automatically be there for you as you age, I can see the appeal of doing what you can to hedge your bets. It’s a terrifying world out there, and we only have each other.

Her name is Juniper! We mostly call her June Bug, though.

I’m not sure if I’m sharing the link the right way, but here’s Juniper and her big brother.

Work took a meta turn today.

Someone reached out to ask if I was really in all the meetings I’m booked for, only to give up and schedule their meeting for sometime in February because I didn’t respond in a very timely fashion … because I was in a meeting.

Ooh. That makes sense. I read that on a side effects list and thought it was interesting, but didn’t realize that was the mechanism of action.

I would suppose if someone grows breast tissue from using testosterone, then they should use less. (Which kind of means my original comment is a bit circular, or rather, the surgery would perhaps be unnecessary if the correct amounts/dosage were used.)

We recently adopted a kitten that was fostered before she could be adopted out by the local animal shelter.

To say that she’s the best, most lovely, and well adjusted cat is an understatement. We have two dogs and a year old one orange brain cell cat (who is also very sweet, but he comes on strong).

She walked into our lives utterly fearlessly. She purrs so loudly at the slightest affection. She wrestles with our other cat, who is 10x her size. She’s getting confident with the dogs - she’s currently sleeping between my wife and our velcro heeler, touching both of them.

We’re really grateful for her, and for the love and care that was given to her. Although we adopted her from a local shelter, we know the people that fostered her, so we know she was found eating trash with her littermates in a neighbor’s yard. She was just a street kitten with no mom before she got scooped up and shown all the love, which we see every day.

It’s hard, sometimes unforgiving work, but not unnoticed, and not without impact. Thank you for caring.

Ironically, one of the side effects of using testosterone - commonly used for men with low testosterone - is breast tissue growth.

Surgery to remove it would be a double whammy of (CIS) gender affirming care.

Different than the person you responded to - as an adult I’ve lived in 3 states, in metropolitan areas, and the rule has always been that you must show up to exactly the polling location assigned to you. People at that location and that location only have your name on a list that they use to verify your voter registration.
In one of the cities, you could go to the election clerk’s office to receive a provisional ballot that would be counted only if they verified that a ballot was not cast in your name at your assigned polling location.

Oh, and the assigned polling place moves almost every election.

Editing to add: You often have to know what ward you represent, because the ballots can differ by ward and they combine several wards into one polling location. If you don’t know your ward (and the election folks aren’t nice), you have to wait in line for each ward until you accidentally find the person with your name in their book. (Each book represents a ward.)

It’s too socialistic by the standards of capitalists and has been run out of most cooking schools. It’s occasionally taught as an ‘alternative’ recipe, but for some reason, despite rendering a better pizza, it’s never widely adopted.

I think the joke is that might be AP style pizza.

In the U.S. milk comes in half gallon and gallon measures, which look like your 2L and 3L containers, respectively.

Sometimes you will find milk in waxed paper cartons, but that is not the norm. (It’s very common, however, for dairy products that are often bought by pint and quart — typically half and half, heavy cream, or coffee creamers.) Our fancier non-dairy creamers tend to be in tetrapaks or cartons, with less expensive (or at least distributed in higher volumes) creamers in plastic bottles.

It’s okay! You can buy an upgrade to use a stainless steel milk tube! 😒

It also has you pour coffee syrups into a little plastic dispenser so you have to clean that, too.

It appears there’s some sort of cleaning mode where you let the machine heat water into to a specially shaped tub that fits across the drip tray, where you also stick the siphon end of the milk tube. But it looks like the dirty milk water is ejected into the drip tray tub, so your wash starts off with clean boiling water before beginning to reuse cooled, dirty water.

Also, what’s the wisdom on encouraging customers to keep dairy at room temperature? You know people are just going to forget the dairy container on their counter. It’s like they tried to stand out but all their features add more complexity and failure points than solved problems.

I’ve been manipulated by people who do it on purpose, and it really screws with one’s threat response. (Especially if the manipulation occurred during formative years.)

I have to make an intentional effort to coach myself through these situations to have an appropriate level of empathy. It’s really fucking hard not to sound like an asshole sometimes - and really easy for others to misunderstand me because they don’t have the same frame of reference.

It can be pretty annoying. We wind up creating extranet sites or using other services. (We have some ftp-like file services that work for us.)