Corn-y demo heralded as right-to-repair win //

"Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems." //

And he also wondered aloud whether John Deere has complied with the terms of the GPL, now that it appears the company incorporates GPL code into its products without meeting its source code disclosure obligations.

Exploit now provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment. ///

Also, JD in violation of the GPL?

We killed the last thylacine about a century ago. Can we correct that mistake?

Of all the species that humanity has wiped off the face of the Earth, the thylacine is possibly the most tragic loss. A wolf-sized marsupial sometimes called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine met its end in part because the government paid its citizens a bounty for every animal killed. That end came recently enough that we have photographs and film clips of the last thylacines ending their days in zoos. Late enough that in just a few decades, countries would start writing laws to prevent other species from seeing the same fate.

On Tuesday, a company called Colossal, which has already said it wants to bring the mammoth back, is announcing a partnership with an Australian lab that it says will de-extinct the thylacine with the goal of re-introducing it into the wild. A number of features of marsupial biology make this a more realistic goal than the mammoth, although there's still a lot of work to do before we even start the debate about whether reintroducing the species is a good idea.

Middle-earth has seen more than its share of trials and challenges, but perhaps none more pressing today than a lack of mechanical keyboards that any of its various peoples can actually read. For ages, everyone from elves to dwarves had to make do with keyboards carrying legends of unknown languages. Today, keyboard and audio brand Drop released two prebuilt mechanical keyboards to rule them all—or at least speakers of Elvish and Dwarvish.

The Drop + The Lord of the Rings Dwarvish and Elvish Keyboards ($169) are the first to gain official Lord of the Rings licensing, Drop said in its announcement today. The keyboards build on Drop's November release of The Lord of the Rings keycap sets, also written in Elvish and Dwarvish, and follow Drop's Lord of the Rings artisan keycaps made from resin.

Drop's new prebuilt keyboards target people who want a keyboard J.R.R. Tolkien would be proud of but don't necessarily want to go on a Tolkien-style epic journey to build their own.

Drop's Elvish keyboard has legends written in actual translations of the Tolkien-created languages of Sindarin Elvish and, for the modifier keys, Tengwar, the form of Elvish found in that oh-so-special ring. //

{Comments:}
Ten keys to bring the numbers together
And on the right side of the keyboard bind them //

If there isn't super nerd pedantry going on in the comments of a Lord of the Rings article, you know something is seriously wrong with the world. Or half of Ars' readers disappeared. //

https://drop.com/buy/drop-the-lord-of-the-rings-mt3-elvish-keycap-set?defaultSelectionIds=964667

Landmark stones recorded low-water levels during droughts to warn future generations.

Printer makers have a history of invasive practices that hurt user repairability, experience.

21 Wrenches: Snap On, SK Tools, MAC Tools, FACOM, Sunex, Gedore, Proto, Wright Tools, Matco, GearWrench, Williams, Klein Tools, Kobalt, Crescent, Tekton, Craftsman, Performance Tool, GearWrench 6 point and 12 point, Pittsburgh and a vintage S K wrench. The box end of the combination wrenches are compared for performance on a rusty fastener with limited contact area and on ½ inch low and high carbon steel with full box end contact.. The open end of the wrench is compared for performance on a low carbon steel fastener as well as on high carbon steel.

• Slipping torque on rusty bolt head: https://youtu.be/LtrgSOnGoCI?t=398
  ** Snap On, Mac Tools, Husky (USA, Taiwan)
• Open end slip torque: https://youtu.be/LtrgSOnGoCI?t=512
  ** Mac Tools, Snap On... (USA, Taiwan)

The batteries tested include the Duracell, Energizer, Amazon Basics, Harbor Freight Thunderbolt, Duracell Quantum, Dollar Store, Rayovac, Eveready, and Energizer Lithium.

Energizer Lithium = 3300mAH @ 300mA
Energizer = 1800mAH @ 300mA

mAH per penny = Amazon Basics 1st, Energizer, Rayovac & Eveready Silver 2nd

10 brands of rechargeable batteries tested for nearly a year. Additional set of rechargeable batteries tested for shelf life (battery self-discharge) after nearly a year. Initial voltage, internal resistance, and milliamp hour capacity tested. Brands: Panasonic Eneloop, Amazon Basics Silver and Black, EBL, Rayovac, PowerEx, Harbor Freight Thunderbolt, IKEA LADDA, Duracell, and Energizer.

mAh after 300 charge/discharge cycles:

• IKEA Ladda 2450 = 2017 mAh
• Duracell 2450 = 2007 mAh
• Silver Amazon Basics 2400 = 1864 mAh
• Black Amazon Basics 1900 = 1526 mAh
• Eneloop 1900 = 1400 mAh

Internal Resistance:

• IKEA Ladda = 70u Ohms
• Duracall = 71
• Eneloop = 78

IKEA Ladda: https://amzn.to/3j43iz6

Charger/Tester: Powerex MH-C9000
Testing internal resistance: Opus BT-C3400 Charger

Software containers are taking modern business and broadcast infrastructure to the next level. Register for upcoming industry-leading learning sessions or view past sessions on-demand. Designed to educate and empower broadcast engineers, Container University is your hub to learn about this proven reliable technology and hear how it’s exactly right for broadcast operations.

Young, skilled workers can be free, financially and intellectually, in a way that indebted and indoctrinated former college students aren’t.

As a minimalist, I can easily fit everything I need into one carry-on bag. Here’s how I do it.

The calculations show that a 100 percent renewable electricity grid is affordable. At current costs, it’s slightly more than 8 cents per kilowatt-hour. The results also show that achieving 100 percent renewable energy using battery storage is significantly more expensive than using power-to-gas technology.

For decades, the general aviation industry has struggled with finding a replacement for leaded avgas without success. The biggest driver of this failure is that there’s no reason to do so because the industry has been given an exemption to continue using lead. In this two-part series, AVweb’s Paul Bertorelli explains how industry inertia and bureaucratic foot dragging killed efforts to eliminate lead from aviation fuel. See Part 2 here.

Invasive species can damage the ecosystems they wind up in. But in parts of the world, endangered predators make hearty meals out of them.

One of my friends participated in a nuclear air burst test in Nevada. He was flying an instrumented T-33 jet at about 40,000 feet, some miles away. He wrote: “I was flying the plane … I had put a patch over my left eye and was to be looking down, with my head down, into the cockpit. I can remember that I was holding my breath as I heard 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1! Then, everything went white. I mean it was so bright that you could not see the floor of the plane. Then a very odd thing happened, I could actually see through the floor of the cockpit and see the ground below us! Yes, I could see the ground THROUGH the floor of the plane. I could see a bright light even in the eye over which I had put the patch. I find it hard to describe the brightness of the bomb blast. It was not like anything I had ever seen. It was much like how I had envisioned the brightness one would experience if in the presence of God.” //

He told me that during debriefing he reported being able to see through the floor of the airplane. They told him that several other people had reported the same phenomena.’

Gordon concludes;

‘I think this may be related to the “Livermore Light” that has been reported — but only in a few cases, because not many people have been looking anywhere near the fireball. In the book, “You must be joking, Mr. Fineman”, he was at a nuclear test in the Pacific. He had misplaced his dark glasses, so he just looked away from the blast – at all the other people who were wearing the very dark glasses. He said he could see them as skeletons, with the bones showing. I think there is a lot more to the Livermore Light than we know now….’

I made this monstrosity and it's mostly useless.

I have a few boxes of old optical media that I've been wanting to transfer to my NAS for years. I've dreaded the labor it takes to transfer so many disks so I had an idea to make a big stack of super cheap upcycled CD/DVD/BR drives connected to a 16x powered USB3.0 hub. My naive theory was that parallelizing this task would make it easier.

Boy I was wrong! It turns out that it does not reduce the labor involved, quite the opposite actually. I have no idea which drive is which and disk reading fails frequently due to disk damage. I dunno maybe some drives are busted too. It's pure chaos. Moreover, these drives are pretty fast when the ripping process works I don't have the time to use more 5-6 drives simultaneously. I guess I was expecting it to take much much longer.

So I don't know what to do with this contraption now.

Edit: yes, that is duct tape.

The A.R.M. (Automatic Ripping Machine) detects the insertion of an optical disc, identifies the type of media, and autonomously performs the appropriate action:

• DVD / Blu-ray -> Rip with MakeMKV and Transcode with Handbrake
• Audio CD -> Rip and Encode to FLAC and Tag the files if possible.
• Data Disc -> Make an ISO backup
  It runs on Linux, it’s completely headless and fully automatic requiring no interaction or manual input to complete its tasks (other than inserting the disk).  Once it completes a rip it ejects the disc for you and you can pop in another one.

If you already have an OAuth2 access token, you can pass it in the "Authorization" header:

wget --header "Authorization: Bearer <your access token>" -O file "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/LONG_ID_STRING/export?gid=0&format=csv"

Unfortunately, that's the simple part. Getting an OAuth2 access token on the command line is more challenging.

You should first create your own project in the API Console or Cloud Platform console, which will give you your own OAuth2 client id and client secret.

Next, from the Google OAuth2 Developer Playground at https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/, you could then get an access token (and more importantly, a refresh token) with offline access, for the scopes https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets (and probably https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive), using your Client Id and Client Secret under the "OAuth 2.0 configuration" (it's the Settings icon - the little gear in the top right), by checking "Use your own OAuth credentials".

After you've added your client id and client secret, you can work through the steps on the left to ultimately get an access token and the refresh token.

“This is how I’m praying,” Hibbs told Perkins. “Dear God, please expose the lies and falsehood that is tearing our nation apart. Reveal those; bring them to the surface. The Scripture says for us to expose wickedness. There’s no greater way than for God to do that. And so, I lean to Him to do that.”

“Secondly,” Hibbs continued, “pray that our leaders who know the truth stand up and speak up and use the God-given authority that they have inherited from the Lord as an elected official, to use that that opportunity rightly. And thirdly, I would say this: When we pray, we need to pray for God’s will to be done.”

Placing our nation in God’s hands risks receiving an answer we might not prefer. “You and I love the Constitution. We understand its origins, and how it honors God and honors the individual rights of every person,” Hibbs told Perkins. “But Tony, clearly, we have people in power today who do not believe in the Constitution, and this has been going on for a long time now. Is it possible, Tony, that we as believers are watching the death throes, as it were, of our republic? Lincoln made it very clear that we’re too strong to be destroyed from the outside, that if we’re ever going to be destroyed, it would be from within.”

“So, I’m praying, ‘Lord, expose the wickedness, but at the same time strengthen our leaders who are right with You. And Lord, please send revival to our nation,’” Hibbs summarized.