When you’re through detaining them, drop them off on the other side of the border. Clearly they don’t like it here.

Since this is Texas, I’m guessing that the next time a masked gang enters the museum, there will be a more direct response.

I was vaguely curious about the shopping experience in the Alibaba empire. After all, they’re doing so well that they’re kicking us out of our building. What’s the first thing I see on AliExpress?

First suggested category is bondage, which makes me a bit nervous about the one labeled “ring men”…

Someone posted two comments to the previous entry that were filled with links to his (or his customer’s) web site. File that under bafflingly stupid, since search engines don’t execute Javascript when they index content, and my comment system is JS-only.

It was adorable, too, with every letter a separate link to a page on the site. Judging from the URLs, it’s a clickbait site aimed at an English-speaking Indian audience. Must not be very good clickbait, if they’re desperate enough to hire an inept pagerank scammer.

Silly Amazon, you can’t weave politics and social science; you have to spin it first!

On Win10 machines with relatively modest CPUs, perhaps you shouldn’t run security scans on downloads in parallel. And maybe set an upper bound on the scan time based on file size, so that if it gets deeply confused (by, say, the MSI for Amazon Corretto), it doesn’t lock up the system to the point where it takes two minutes just to recognize a three-finger-salute.

The BBC has announced a VR-only kinetic novel featuring the voice of Jodie Whittaker and the writing talents of Yet Another SF Newbie, Victoria Asare-Archer.

“Let me get this straight. You took all the money you made franchising your name and bet it against the Harlem Globetrotters?”

"Oh, I thought the Generals were due!"

Bought a shiny new Series 4 Apple Watch (finally reasonably functional, useful for recording my current diet/workout plan, and promising decent battery life) on Monday.

Battery was surprisingly drained when I got home last night. (farewell dinner for a member of our already-understaffed IT department, joy!)

This morning? It went from 100% to 18% in just over 3 hours, and all I’m doing is sitting at my laptop working. Maybe I get up occasionally, stretch, and grab a (diet) soda.

W.T.F.

Naturally, Apple offers no visibility into what could be draining the battery, but force-killing the few apps I have and turning off pretty much all background activity and notifications haven’t slowed the drain.

In the time it took me to type this, it dropped another 3%.

“Dear Apple, stop mining bitcoin on my wrist”

Update

Good: Power-cycling the watch seems to have fixed it (for now).

Bad: I power-cycled my watch. This is not the future I was promised.

… the short form.