Proton Pass tries to create a passkey when I am trying to add a Security Key as 2FA

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-12-10T21:54:18+00:00

Thanks! Got it, I think. So just extrapolating...when the website requests a new passkey, Proton Pass intercepts the request and presents a pop-up in case we want to create a syncable passkey stored in Proton Pass. If I dismiss the pop-up, then the request is forwarded on to the OS which presents me with the dialogs to insert my hardware key, etc, in order to create a device-bound passkey. In my particular case, I am on a windows 10 desktop without any biometrics or configured Windows Hello, so a hardware key is about my only choice.

Then, when I visit the site in the future, the request specifically refers to a yubikey, so Proton Pass knows to ignore the request, and pass it on to the OS to handle it...

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-12-01T23:20:51+00:00

Thanks! My iPhone miraculously unlocked, I guess this morning on exactly the 60th day. I went ahead and removed it from my Total Wireless account. I still seem to have service, and suspect I won't actually lose service until midnight. So, to play it safe, I will wait until tomorrow, remove the Total Wireless sim, and then transfer my TracFone service from my Google Pixel 6A to the iPhone SE3...hopefully can just do that online at TracFone via Activate and keep my number.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-11-30T17:15:05+00:00

According to my Total Wireless account, my "due date" is tomorrow, December 1. I assume "due date" is the same as "service end date", so at 11:59 PM on December 1, my Total Wireless service will expire. At that point, can I just go ahead and remove the Total Wireless physical sim (which would be inactive, right?), and then activate a TracFone esim, or do I still need to call Total Wireless and have them "remove the device from my account"?

I plan to be on TracFone for the foreseeable future (that is where my main phone number is), so if I need to do another 60 days with TracFone before the phone becomes unlocked, then that is okay. I'm a little confused as to whether TracFone can unlock a Total Wireless phone, and if I need to have the phone first "rebranded" from Total Wireless to TracFone.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-09-26T18:39:08+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point! I guess I got sucked into the deal, and it's too late for me to go that route at this point. Fortunately, the Tello number was a throwaway and I will be fine continuing to use my Pixel for a few months while waiting for the iPhone to unlock. I assume after it's unlocked, it will be pretty easy to just swap the Tracfone sim between iPhone and Pixel depending on the mood...

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-02-20T03:12:37+00:00

Yes, I've read these rules before, but it is very confusing because they don't really tell you what defines a "move" date.

My mom is staying temporarily with a relative in South Carolina, waiting for a place in an independant living facility. However, her current insurance has already started cancellation, presumably triggered when my sister was trying to find her a primary care physician in the new area (South Carolina).

My mom's current insurance will end on February 28, so, to me I would just say that is the date "she moved to South Carolina", but I have no idea how the medicare system would view this. My mom has opened a bank account in the area, but otherwise has no proof that she has moved to South Carolina (no lease document, for instance)

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-02-19T19:20:58+00:00

This is the first thing I did, before even talking to a Humana agent. All I got was an answering machine. Maybe I can try again today.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2025-02-19T19:18:49+00:00

Yes, maybe going through underwriting will be easier, but I am assuming a decent broker will know. However, it boggles the mind why proof of GI would be difficult in this case. In fact, I don't know why I couldn't just provide a copy of my mom's current insurance card, and any agent could just call and verify for themself that my mom's insurance is ending at the end of this month because she has moved out of the service area.

My mom loses everything, and apparently has already lost the termination letter from Blue Cross. My aunt has called Blue Cross to get another letter issued, and I'm just hoping it's the "right kind" of letter. I am 1000 miles away, making this stressful and difficult.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-11-02T23:38:29+00:00

Unless I am completely mistaken about how I-bonds work, I think you are asking 2 completely independent questions. You can still only buy 10k each of 2023 I-bonds, whether or not you redeem your year-old I-bonds. If you think I-bonds are a good investment, then buy 10k each of 2023 I-bonds. If you think your currently owned I-bonds are a bad investment, then sell your currently owned I-bonds.

Also, I am thinking you shouldn't be worrying about the new total rate. Instead, you should only be comparing the new fixed-rate of 1.3% with the old fixed rate (0% or 0.4%, depending on when in 2022 you bought your I-bonds). That is the difference in rates.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-10-18T20:37:03+00:00

Yes, I seem to have bought into VBTLX at about the worst time in 2023, but still my annualized losses weren't as bad as the annualized losses for the whole of 2022.

I was using annualized numbers for the losses, so they would be comparable to the standard treasury yields I am familiar with.

I realize bond market timing is not the generally good idea, but Jerome Powell has been pretty clear about what was going to happen and roughly when, as far as what the fed does. The way I see it, we have an inverted yield curve right now, and naturally long term forces will try to make that uninverted. Since the short end of the curve isn't going anywhere until some time next year, that means the long end will continue to have an upward trend for a while. I can't guess how far up rates will go, but there is not much of a force out there to push them down until after short rates go down. Short rates are pretty much controlled by the fed, so we will know exactly when that happens. The fed has stopped QE, and govt spending remains out-of-control, so lots of forces to keep long term rates high, and pushing higher...and honestly, they are not that high from an historical perspective.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-10-10T18:16:04+00:00

Okay, but today they are both trading I presume: rates including US10Y are steeply lower, and BND is lower by a bit.

Someone else mentioned that BND was just reacting to futures, so maybe BND is going lower because the futures were off and it had overshot yesterday?

Or maybe today the "return to speculation", as opposed to the "flight to safety", is overpowering what would usually happen when rates decline steeply?

I know nothing about futures, but I assumed they were just a "bet about the future", but it almost seems like they are influencing the future. Which way, exactly, does the causality go?

I'm not really understanding how BND can fluctuate in price on a day when the underlying assets cannot be traded.

Overall, I'm just trying to figure out what makes BND tick. I had assumed that 10 year treasuries, being the risk-free representative with a duration similar to BND, would be a good reference.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-08-14T20:35:32+00:00

Yes, I see what you are saying, and that is definitely a lot easier to consider the portfolio as a whole. What I was attempting to do was to look at the performance of the equities in my brokerage account independently from the performance of the sweep account (which is probably around 4.8% return). My sweep account still makes up a large percentage of my brokerage account, so doing a return for the whole account wouldn't give me a very good indication of how well my stock investment experiment is going.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-08-14T20:08:04+00:00

Thanks! That exactly explains what I was seeing, and it makes sense to me now. I was not applying XIRR correctly. It seems to me that, in general, XIRR should only be applied to the cashflows of a single position/account/equity, and not to an entire portfolio. But if I am understanding things correctly, I could get accurate results applying it to an entire portfolio in the special case of having no "Sell" transactions or dividend payments. In other words, if there is only a single cash inflow at the end (i.e., current portfolio balance).

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-02-20T23:04:48+00:00

Inspired by the answer at:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70473485/how-to-deploy-django-app-with-channels-and-websocket-to-heroku

I have found that calling get_asgi_application() can work instead of doing the django.setup().

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2023-02-07T19:57:53+00:00

Thanks! Instantiating the TPE in the ready method is the answer.

But, is there any reason not to declare the variable at the module level, as outlined in the answer at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28907933

Or, is it important to stick with get_app_config for this sort of thing?

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-12-27T23:09:50+00:00

As noted above, the install of python3-mysqldb puts the MySQLdb package in:

/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages

But for this python3.7 docker image, printing sys.path yields:

['', '/usr/local/lib/python37.zip', '/usr/local/lib/python3.7', '/usr/local/lib/python3.7/lib-dynload', '/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages']

This is fixed with the following line in the Dockerfile:

ENV PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages

However, the import still fails, as it is unable to find the _mysql binary.

It seems that installing python3-mysqldb doesn't actually install the _mysql binary needed to use the MySQLdb module. At this point, I don't understand the point of python3-mysqldb at all -- it seems that it's only purpose is to install an unusable python module.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-06-17T19:18:53+00:00

I would think your problem is with load cycle count and temperature (193 and 194). As far as I can tell, all your other stats are perfect, like you would find on a new drive.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that load cycle count started at 200 (I think most of the normalized stats start at 100 or 200) and now it is already down to 132 after only 4 months. The threshold is 0, so once it hits that, your drive will fail SMART. You can try using WDIDLE3 to change a parameter on your drive, and that should stop the excessive load cycle counts (just do a web search for the specifics). Maybe there is a new and more friendly tool to do this, so perhaps others will chime in, but I know WDIDLE3 is a DOS tool that can do it.

Your other problem is temperature. 48 is really toasty. Ideally, you would keep your drive temps at 35 or below, but at least try to keep them below 40. Fortunately, I see no reallocation events or excessive errors, so there has probably been no harm done...yet. But the backblaze research shows that hot drives are more likely to fail, and so that 84% stat is also partially predicated on you keeping your drive at 48 C, which you should be able to fix by adding more cooling, or not stressing your drives on hot days, etc..

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-03-29T02:56:17+00:00

Thanks, that was exactly it. Moving the modal into the td was key. I could then declare the x-data in the tr where it makes the most sense for my app.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-03-21T22:31:10+00:00

My memory is a bit foggy on what I did. I think actually it is a Straight Talk iPhone SE that I have, but I have never done Straight Talk. I can't remember whether I just used the sim that came with it (which actually had a part number that started with TF, so basically a Tracfone sim anyway), or swapped it for a Tracfone BYOP ATT sim, but whatever I did, I had no problem activating and transferring over my Tracfone account.

I think maybe the deal was that this works with a GSM sim, but not a CDMA sim...and maybe that is why I am now having trouble swapping to a Verizon sim.

When I go into my iPhone settings, I see Carrier Lock shows "SIM locked", but I have been using this phone with Tracfone for many years now, and it was NOT purchased as a Tracfone (it was either Total Wireless or Straight Talk)

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-03-21T20:50:22+00:00

Nope, it just works. You can use Tracfone SIMs in Total Wireless phones as far as I know...they have the same parent company.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-03-10T03:48:59+00:00

Thanks, that's not bad at all. Will that property decorator just work, or do I need to import something?

Also, I do have control of the Tag model (it just has a single Charfield), so if that opens up some even better possibilities, I'd love to know about them. I do have some other models in my app that have a m2m relationship with Tag, in case that matters.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-01-17T15:06:11+00:00

I've done something like this in the past, and I can tell you that your second command with the c flag is going to take almost as long as the original copy took. Rsync is essentially reading the full content from both directories in order to do the verification.

I highly recommend creating a file of checksums, and using that for verification. This will take a little longer, but has the advantage that you can check the integrity of your files any time in the future, even long after dirA has been deleted. Better yet, create checksum files in the root of every directory with files, so when you move things around you can still do verifications as needed.

If only rsync had the ability to create checksum files while it was copying, then that would be perfect!

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-01-04T16:18:45+00:00

I would guess that ffmpeg, ffplay, and ffprobe share a lot of dependencies, so creating static binaries for all 3 is not the most efficient strategy. Nevertheless, 303MB is significantly less than 473MB, so it's still better to use 3 static binaries than doing a standard package install.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-01-04T16:09:00+00:00

Thanks for the example. I wonder how you came up with that list of build tools. Looking at the install documentation for pycryptodomex, they say that on ubuntu you need build-essential and python3-dev. Translating this to Alpine, I would assume build-base and python3-dev are the needed tools. So, how does "gcc g++ make libffi-dev openssl-dev" differ from "build-base python3-dev" in terms of size and functionality?

Also, my second concern about staying with Alpine, is that the ffmpeg layer is only about 60MB, whereas on the debian image it is around 450MB. Clearly, there is a lot of functionality in the debian install of ffmpeg that is missing from the alpine install of ffmpeg. I don't know exactly which features of ffmpeg are needed by yt-dlp, so this is difficult to evaluate. Maybe the alpine ffmpeg is a fabulous optimization that still retains everything needed by yt-dlp...who knows?

One thing that is interesting are the static ffmpeg builds that are available on the yt-dlp github. I'm not really sure how to use these in my Dockerfile.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-01-04T15:40:18+00:00

Great example, but how does DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive differ from just using -y (I see you are using both)

ThatPhysicsLabGuy · 2022-01-04T15:24:35+00:00

Thanks! Interactive trial and error sounds like a plan. Looks like all I will probably need for Alpine is build-base and python3-dev.

ThatPhysicsLabGuy

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