The porch cat has started stalking me around the house. He’s figured out that if he finds an open window near me (generally, sitting at the kitchen table or reading/gaming on the couch), jumps up onto the screen and hangs there by his claws, he can look me in the eye and meow for attention. Reminds me a bit of my first college girlfriend.

This week’s episode of Good Eats: Reloaded involved buttercream frosting. I too wish to frost delicious cake.

more...

It’s one thing to do recommendations based on user-supplied keywords, but when someone drills down into categories, like “Sports & Outdoors › Sports & Fitness › Exercise & Fitness › Strength Training Equipment › Pull-Up Bars”, it’s safe to say they’re not really looking for something else entirely. There’s a significant difference between “resistance training” and “restraint”…

Your algorithms could even spot-check the categorization of the items it’s often bought with, just to make sure the vendor isn’t trying to pull a fast one:

Vaguely related, my Amazon recommendations recently included the new Nancy Pelosi biography. Oh, wait, my mistake: it’s a Hunger Games prequel about Young President Snow.

Update

Walked out of a Safeway today. I refused to “change my attitude” after the clerk got upset that I put my items onto the (empty) conveyor belt before she’d given me permission (this is apparently a policy that’s been in place for weeks, despite not being enforced for the person before me, or for anyone else I’ve seen in that store in ever). I stopped putting things onto the belt when she ordered me, but then she called over two Senior Karens to administer a lecture.

I refrained from telling them precisely where to insert their policy and with how much force, said “fuck this bullshit” with just a touch of heat, and let them know I wouldn’t be returning.

Funny thing, they had two Senior Karens ready to deploy against policy violations, but nobody able to, say, open another lane and decrease the length of the very slow line that had frayed my patience and caused me to unpack my cart fifteen seconds before I had official approval.

This was the second-closest Safeway, so it doesn’t actually inconvenience me significantly to never return. Also, when I got to the one that was closer, there was no line because they had gasp more registers open.

Oregon Liberated From Corona-Chan Tyranny!

Judge told the governor to pound sand.

Oregon will now return to its normal Antifa tyranny. Unless the state Supreme Court chooses “swinging from lamp posts” as a lifestyle.

Tuesday update

The Oregon Supreme Court has tentatively chosen rope.

I have several items set up for Amazon’s “subscribe-and-save” service. They didn’t arrive on time last month, due to stocking and shipping oddities, in one case overlapping with the next month’s shipment date. Amazon did not plan for this problem, and I had to manually cancel to prevent getting 60 days of supplies at once.

As I was walking out of the grocery yesterday, the local paper had a headline about a man being killed in a shark attack, and all I could think was how his death certificate is going to blame it on Corona-chan.

This is right up there with the restaurant named “Translate Server Error”:

I once thought about starting a Tumblr called “Terrible Pictures of Beautiful Women”, and then remembered that 10,000 people already beat me to it.

Claims that the “CARES” act allows people impacted by Corona-chan to withdraw money from their 401k without penalty turn out to be true only if the employer who sponsors their plan files paperwork agreeing to permit it. Fortunately for me, I was just checking because it was mentioned in Transamerica’s latest email, not because I was one of the millions of out-of-work Americans who need it.

That is, I’m out of work, I just don’t need that money unless the zombie apocalypse is still playing in theaters after (“Lord willin’ an’ the creek don’t rise”) Trump’s second term begins.

The subreddit for Pokemon Sword and Shield consists of equal parts shinies, trades, and ads for temporary tattoos and cloud-based project management. The poorly-implemented “flairs” feature on reddit sometimes allows you to restrict the display to specific categories, but Discussion is “about my shiny trades”, Help is “how do I trade shinies”, News is “I’m trading shinies”, Image is “look at the shinies I’m trading”, etc. Oh, and every post asking “is this (shiny) pokemon hacked” is actually an ad for the hacking sites, with the URL prominently featured.

Actual questions about the game are automatically deleted every few hours by a moderation bot. In fairness, 99% of them would be better answered by learning to use Google to search Serebii.

Personally, I haven’t lit one up in weeks; I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on both of my Switches, for pretty much the same reason I was two-boxing Pokemon raids: my idea of social gaming is a controller in each hand.

I restarted on the second Switch until I got an island with the fruit I couldn’t get without another player. Then I turned it into a plantation enslaved to my main island, with the populace forced to work 48 hours per day creating goods to be consumed by my main island. So basically I’m playing as a Democrat.

Speaking of games, I have fond memories of the 3D-before-it-was-cool game Interstate 76. It is quite affordable on GoG, but not cheap, because it’s a pain in the ass to get it running on anything newer than Windows XP. It predates hardware 3D acceleration, depends on library calls that have passed beyond deprecation, and requires some pretty sketchy workarounds to get it kinda-sorta-running on 64-bit Windows 10.

Instead of going to all that effort, I just fired up the soundtrack CD, which includes enough of the game’s dialogue to revisist the story without putting up with the dated and glitchy don’t-mention-Car-Wars gameplay.

In my less cynical moments, I find myself wondering if Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Gretchen Whitmer aren’t secretly on Trump’s payroll, paid to destroy their party by acting like insane ruthless greedy petty dictators. My more cynical moments have been overtaken by reality.

I’m getting a bit tired of housework…

Costco, today

And yes, that’s $4.59 for 2 pounds, the equivalent of 129 standard yeast packets (7 grams) at 3.6 cents each.

Still looking, Mauser? I could mail you this one (packed in April, good for two years) and go back for another…

Safeway, today

Dear Amazon…

Actually, I prefer Mary Ann…

Unrelated

How do you sell a $329 toaster without revealing how big the interior dimensions are? The Japanese spec page has it; was that too hard to translate? Or would revealing that the largest item you can fit inside (the optional baking dish) is 7.6x9.5 inches make people realize just how overpriced it is?

By the way, the US price is $100 higher than the Japanese price…

The only reason even more people aren’t playing Animal Crossing and other Nintendo Switch games while in lockdown is that all new online inventory is being snapped up by bots and resold on eBay at a substantial markup. And with walk-in stores still closed in most places, online inventory is the only kind there is.

Switch scalpers make the busty cheesecake cry:

Q: What is 17x22x48 inches?

A: The box that two of these arrived in yesterday.

They were curled up in a corner like abandoned puppies. The box wasn’t terribly well-sealed, either, so I’m sure the UPS driver looked inside and had a good laugh about the giant box of air he carried up to my porch with one hand.

In other news, Los Angeles Target shoppers are less murder-y than Detroit Dollar General shoppers, but still pretty violent. Governors, if you want people to enforce mask orders, they’d better be on-duty cops. If you don’t have enough of those to go around, don’t criminalize breathing wrong and expect store clerks to risk their lives for you.

By the way, if they’re actually sick, shooting them is sure to spread the virus as it spatters their blood across the walls and floor…

Totally related, Corona-chan has been in Ohio since at least January. (and that site does something really evil, changing the contents of the URL bar as you scroll down, so that I almost posted a link to the story below it, which is bullshit)

Update

The Dayton Daily News story has more details: onset of currently first known case was January 7 in Miami County, and January 13 in Montgomery County, both women in their seventies. Unless they were on a senior cruise together, this suggests it was spreading in the community in late December. In Ohio.

This upends all the hypotheses about “asymptomatic transmission” that have helped justify the massive shutdown of the country. The only support for the claim that you could spread it without symptoms was the now-proven-incorrect belief that it was newly-arrived and spreading only from people with recent foreign travel history, who were contagious without knowing they were sick.

The reality is that people were coughing and sneezing all winter, thinking they just had the flu or a bad cold, while actually spreading the joy of Corona-chan to family, friends, and holiday shoppers.

The last time I visited the realm of Daisy Dukes And Other Delights, it was back when I was still pulling cheesecake from Gelbooru, using Steven’s extensive exclusion list to sift the vile haystack for shining needles.

This search was a lot easier.

Unrelated, A Wild Yeast Appears!

First sighting in weeks. The bread machine yeast was the only one left on the shelf (even the commercial stuff they’re repackaging in the bakery was all gone), but here’s a dirty little secret: bread machine yeast is just rapid-rise yeast, which is just instant yeast, which is just active dry yeast milled a bit finer to expose more surface area, so it starts rising sooner. No modern commercial dry yeast requires “proofing”, so the only significant difference is that a faster rise has less flavor. And you can always use a bit less and let it rise longer, to compensate.

They also had two bags of King Arthur All-Purpose flour, so I grabbed one.

Speaking of King Arthur, they’re listing both Red and Gold as in-stock today, along with Bread and Whole Wheat flour. And my 2 pounds of SAF Gold finally arrived Saturday, so I’m set for however long it takes California to open back up, with or without Benito Newsom’s blessing.

Churches across the state have announced that they’re more into forgiveness than permission, no matter what some judge says.

Back to the cheesecake, or at least a crepe:

more...

The latest “branded” vulnerability that’s getting hysterical coverage is “Thunderspy”, in which all your data are belong to us if your computer has a Thunderbolt port. In less than five minutes. With only $400 in off-the-shelf hardware.

Except the details of the story contradict that. First is the assumption that your powered-down computer is available to the attacker for long enough that they can crack the case and reflash the Thunderbolt port’s firmware; five minutes on a desktop, maybe, but most laptops? A quick look at the sites that crack them open and test for repairability suggests that it’s not going to be as easy as the claimed “unscrew the backplate, attach a device momentarily, reprogram the firmware, reattach the backplate”.

Second is the assumption that the attacker will be able to return when your computer is sleeping and exfiltrate your data through the compromised port. Admittedly, Thunderbolt is fast at data transfer, but how many trips do you have to make before you find it in the right state?

The mitigation strategy is simply “power down or hibernate”. Even after compromising your ports, physical access to a powered-up or sleeping computer is required to access your encrypted data. (if your data wasn’t encrypted, they didn’t need a hardware hack to steal it in the first place)

The researcher branding agent does offer a second scenario that’s at least plausible: find a not-currently-plugged-in Thunderbolt peripheral (monitor, etc) that has previously been connected to your computer, steal the 64-bit ID code that was used to establish a trust arrangement, flash that to a naughty data-exfiltration device, and then plug it into your awake-or-sleeping computer.

Mitigation strategy? “power down or hibernate”.

Or use a Mac, which apparently is only vulnerable if it’s been rebooted into Windows with Boot Camp and then put to sleep.

So, if you care enough about security to fully encrypt your laptop, but care so little about security that you casually leave it running unattended or just put it to sleep for convenience, and you don’t notice when it was power-cycled while you were out of the room, then this can be used to steal all your data.

That pretty much restricts the vulnerable population to senior executives at tech companies. The rest of us are safe.

(and, yes, state actors can easily accomplish this, but we already knew that they were compromising unattended phones and laptops to spy on foreign executives and politicians, especially in Corona-chan’s motherland)