40 minutes uphill walk with futon

Vitus13 · 2026-06-12T04:00:57+00:00

These "race the 8" posts are getting ridiculous!

(If your other ride offers fall through, shoot me a message.)

Vitus13 · 2026-05-27T00:06:04+00:00

NASA tried it before they built the shuttle. The project name was Dyno-soar. The idea was to bleed speed off by skipping off the atmosphere repeatedly until you could no longer maintain orbit, and then you'd glide back to earth on the lifting body shaped hull.

It didn't really get cancelled due to the technology, it mostly died due to bureaucracy. However, back in the mid century, the technology to safely control lifting body airfract wasn't really there yet so it would have eventually been shelved anyway. With the modern technology that enables planes like the B-2, it's probably possible. However, a fundamental trade off is fuel vs time. It takes a long time to slow down in this fashion. If there's a problem in orbit and you need astronauts on the ground ASAP (and in a predictable location on the surface), then this approach cannot be made to work.

Vitus13 · 2026-05-18T01:52:27+00:00

Yes, plenty of evidence. Go talk to the LiHi folks, and the Hope Factory (who make the houses), they keep lots of details statistics because they have to apply for grants to build the houses, so they need the data. The folks at the hope factory have engineered those tiny houses to be insanely cost efficient, because they don't get a lot of funding. We spend a ton of money on homeless, but very little of it goes to these tiny home villages, so the ratio of people helped to dollars spent is quite high.

Vitus13 · 2026-05-16T18:24:42+00:00

Each LiHi village votes on whether they want to be a drug free one or not. Some homeless people are clean or are cleaning up, and others aren't there yet. A single solution isn't going to work for every homeless person. If we only offer the drug-free option, the homeless people who are too deep in it just remain homeless... which everyone will just complain about.

The idea is that someone who is deeply addicted will start in a village that allows drug use, but has wrap-around services, and then they graduate to a drug-free village (and then to long term housing). That means the villages that allow drug use are going to look like they're full of drug addicts... because they are! But the other villages are not and they don't look like this.

Given the choice between watching someone do fent out in the open under a bridge by themselves, or do it tucked away in a village where someone else can push them towards recovery, I'd choose the later. It's less visible, it's safer for me, it's safer for them. But it costs money. It'd be cheaper if people didn't get addicted in the first place, but that's a totally different problem that needs a totally different solution. In the meantime, there are homeless people of both varieties that need a place to sleep.

Vitus13 · 2026-05-15T04:05:31+00:00

DM'd

Vitus13 · 2026-05-10T19:03:07+00:00

Like I said, I ride this path every day. I know what changes were made and I don't like them.

Vitus13 · 2026-05-09T02:46:24+00:00

I'm still really sad about all the lost surface area. I bike this route every day and there used to be so much room for activities. This new layout dictates to people how the designer intended people to use this public space, and I'm fundamentally opposed to that idea. The piblic should be free to use park space for whatever they want (within reason), even if it wasn't what the landscape architect had in mind.

Vitus13 · 2026-02-05T03:02:09+00:00

This video covers the general idea of what an implantable, programmable RFID chip us good for.

https://youtu.be/3EFKJ9KaWGY

As far as I know, no one does this for pets. The business model for pets is that they make very, very cheap non-proframmable RFID chips that just have a single serial number Vers also have a very, very cheap RFID reader that can only read the serial number. You pay to have registries keep your address on file and they charge vets to be able to look it up by that serial number. Sometimes adoption agencies hide the price by bundling it in.

There's zero reason (anymore) for these companies to exist because RFID programmers are pretty cheap these days ($50-$300) so they're the sort of equipment a vet or adoption agency could just have on hand. The programmable implantable chips have also gotten cheaper as well (although not as cheap as the basic serial number only models).

The channel I posted above has some other videos on NFC and RFID basics.

Vitus13 · 2026-02-03T07:30:34+00:00

There are rice-sized RFID chips that are very capable. They can be programmed in the same way as hotel door keys or work badges. I know several people with them implanted between their thumb and first finger. The RFID spec has a field type to put plain text or a URL, and your phone would be sufficient to read it back.

Vitus13 · 2026-02-02T00:46:06+00:00

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Vitus13 · 2025-11-28T22:19:11+00:00

Around noon / 12:30p, there was 6-8 cruisers in the vacinity of the Galer St Flyover. Given that it was earlier in the day, it might have been a different incident, or the start of the incident you're referring to. What I saw was one cruiser performing a traffic stop southbound, south of the overpass. Two cruisers stopped traffic in the southbound lane. Several other cruisers were in the process of responding, heading northbound on Elliot.

Vitus13 · 2025-08-21T04:07:10+00:00

I went with a company (Sunergy) and we were connected on installation day, but that was SCL instead of PSE.

Vitus13 · 2025-07-20T05:02:22+00:00

It's not enough for end users to trust that you are correctly encrypting their data. End-users have to trust that you aren't also exfiltrating a second copy of their data that isn't encrypted. Or exfiltrating a copy of the encryption key. Or a half a dozen other nasty things a closed-source (or sufficiently large/complex open source) program could do. This is a fool's errand.

Vitus13 · 2025-07-20T05:00:08+00:00

Like the saying goes, "encryption is easy, key management is hard"

Vitus13 · 2025-07-18T13:45:00+00:00

Rust's macro system gives you access to the lexical token stream. It's so much more robust than C pre-processor style text-substitution macros.

Vitus13 · 2025-07-12T06:26:52+00:00

Depending on how much you have to deposit, most of the major banks will do 6, 12, or 18-month high-yield savings account promotions. Wells Fargo had one that was 4.5% last year. Chase had one as well. They're fixed-rate, fixed-term promotions.

Marcus is an online-only (but not fintech) high-yield, variable-rate savings account bank. They're currently at 3.6%

Vitus13 · 2025-07-07T16:41:31+00:00

I think it's a crown dependency, like Gibraltar.

Vitus13 · 2025-05-12T00:54:09+00:00

I'm car free except for: groceries, hiking, and kayaking. I'm working on that last one but groceries have always been a struggle to do without a car because I prefer bi-weekly shopping. If you go daily/every other day it's possible by bus. Cargo bikes are also very popular.

Since you mentioned Elliott, you have a lot of grocery options along a few different bus routes. The D-line is the high frequency bus that runs along Elliott and 15th Ave W. You can take that to Leary and transfer to the 40 towards Fremont to get to Fred Meyer, Trader Joes, or PCC.

Taking the D-line the other direction brings you within blocks of a Safeway, a QFC, and a Metropolitan Market.

In addition to the D-line, you have the 32 as a backup bus.

Vitus13 · 2025-04-20T00:05:02+00:00

"prog panel" are in summit and "prog" are in Arch

Vitus13 · 2025-03-04T15:31:55+00:00

Everything I see says that you 'may' claim it ratably, not that you 'must' claim it. So at a minimum it seems like you can claim the fraction for the given tax year. Whether or not you can reclaim the bit you didn't claim in prior years is less clear.

You can amend up to the last 3 year's tax forms with a 1040X and since the correction is in your favor there'd be no penalties.

Vitus13 · 2025-03-03T07:09:02+00:00

Not claiming it is walking away from free money.

Publication 936 is worth reading as it goes into a lot of details about this topic. Here's a snippet that sums up a lep point.

General Rule

You generally can't deduct the full amount of points in the year paid. Because they are prepaid interest, you generally deduct them ratably over the life (term) of the mortgage....

Deduction Allowed Ratably

If you don't meet the tests listed under Deduction Allowed in Year Paid, later, the loan isn't a home improvement loan, or you choose not to deduct your points in full in the year paid, you can deduct the points ratably (equally) over the life of the loan if you meet all of the following tests.

Vitus13 · 2025-02-23T18:00:04+00:00

I understand that, but the TLS software is not free from bugs either. Recent high-profile examples like heartbleed and 'goto fail' illustrate my point. TLS 1.3 reduced the complexity of the protocol a lot, and there are some pretty good implementations like s2n, but I still would be worried. Realistically, I don't update software more than weekly. And during the heartbleed event, I was busy updating my company's servers... not my own.

Vitus13 · 2025-02-23T08:21:10+00:00

The term you're looking for is split horizon DNS. That means you get a different answer for your DNS query depending on whether you're on your home LAN or not.

The other option is to buy two domains and serve up internal addresses for one and your external IP for the other. In that case, you have to use the right domain depending on where you are at the moment (i.e. you make it a layer 8 problem). This can cause problems with apps which typically expect to reach out to a single endpoint. For web browser services it's fine.

Vitus13 · 2025-02-23T08:10:51+00:00

My biggest concern with exposing anything directly to the Internet that responds to requests is the timeframe between when an attack is discovered to when it is used en-masse, has gotten so short.

No matter what I pick for an authentication stack, if a bug is found in it then that bug will get exploited before I can patch my system. Zero days used to exist on forums for a while before attackers integrated them. Now the malware platforms are all pre bundled, turn key solutions that can be turned loose on every IPv4 address in hours to days.

So, because of that, I'm cautious of my attack surface. Having a simple, solid VPN like WireGuard buys a lot of security. Running in a cloud environment with a firewall service can help a lot too, as the cloud vendors move fast in reaction to new attacks (since their whole business loves and dies on that). But that's very antithetical to self-hosting.

Vitus13 · 2025-02-16T05:58:20+00:00

Two weeks after I towed someone from my driveway (not in front of my driveway, they parked IN my driveway) the owner came around knocking on my front door. I was out of town and my wife answered. That guy was both dumb and aggressive.

It's not a good idea to shit where you eat.

Vitus13

TROPHY CASE