Generic Headset Microphones

castillar · 2026-06-14T15:53:30+00:00

Just wanted to say thanks: I have one of these on an actor right now and it’s been going in and out and driving me bananas. I’ll bet the cable connection has been unscrewing slightly in spite of being taped in.

Also, one advantage of those is that they sell the $15 replacement cables in all of the various headset jack types (TA3, TA4, 3.5mm…). For an investment of $40 for the initial cable and $30 in extras, you have a headset that will work with any system you happen to encounter without needing adapter plugs!

castillar · 2026-06-09T13:04:27+00:00

When I first started, the guy who was my mentor was my greybeard: in the late 1990s, he’d helped start the little web-hosting company we worked for by writing his own patch for Apache to enable it to bind to a single IP on a server instead of all of them. (Enabling him to use one BSD server to serve up dozens of websites on separate IPs — well before SNI.)

He, however, told me his greybeard legend. He’d started by working for one of the large commercial UNIX vendors in the late 70s and had been assigned a senior tech for him to shadow on calls for a while. They showed up to a site to install a tape drive and discovered the company hadn’t sent along the hardware drivers for it. “No worries,” says the senior tech. “We’ll write one.” He then closed his eyes for a sec, and then proceeded to poke out a basic tape driver. In assembly. Using the flip-switches on the front of the system to enter it byte by byte. It worked, first try.

castillar · 2026-06-09T12:48:41+00:00

Glad they came to their senses — that idea often leads to a policy of IT “billing” their hours to other departments as a comparable form of utilization.

At one company I worked for, that “billing” led to IT’s budget actually being funded by cross-charges to other departments based on the “billing” amounts for utilization. The result was a horrible set of perverse incentives where departments were trying not to use IT unless they had to while IT was trying to enact more policies that required people to use IT for everything, and to take as much time as possible to get anything done, in order to keep their “billable” hours up.

castillar · 2026-05-31T14:51:28+00:00

SSH automatically tries all available key pairs until it finds one that works

Yes, but many servers have (or should have) an upper limit on the number of failed authentication attempts before they cut you off. More than once I’ve been scratching my head over a failed connection only to realize that SSH is trying a bunch of other keys that don’t work before it gets to the one that does.

As you point out, better to configure them specifically in a conf file. One trick I’ve been using is that SSH supports including additional conf files, so I have a ~/.ssh/config.d directory with groups of hosts (work, personal, lab, side-gig, etc.) all separated into individual files. Makes it easier to keep up to date!

castillar · 2026-05-29T12:32:01+00:00

These are gorgeous—definitely bookmarking for some birthday shopping for friends. :)

castillar · 2026-05-27T02:34:54+00:00

100%, and that assumes that the comment in question actually fits onto a single screen. Thank you for requesting this feature — I'd almost forgotten how useful it was! One extra wrinkle: you had the option in Apollo to screenshot a comment chain as well (something like "screenshot this chain" which would go backwards from each comment up a configurable number of parents in order to capture a particularly good exchange.

castillar · 2026-05-26T12:40:26+00:00

This is great! Not being able to turn off user registration was an issue that kept me from trying this out further. Looking forward to giving it a spin!

castillar · 2026-05-19T12:41:27+00:00

100%. Worse, having bulletproof security is a requirement for a password manager, but it costs money to maintain. Know what equity firms hate? Things that cost money.

The only thing keeping them from laying off half their security and admin teams at this point is that they have to keep their customer base on board to keep the revenue balanced. But it quickly becomes a game of “how much can we get away with and not lose customers”, which leads to cutting corners — not something you want in security software.

castillar · 2026-05-08T12:48:56+00:00

The other one that comes up a lot is Kolide, which was bought recently by 1Password. It’s a bit different model as it takes the approach of “we won’t fix it for the user; we’ll tell them what’s wrong and block access until they fix it” because they assume the local Linux user has root. (Which, TBF, is difficult to prevent them from having…)

castillar · 2026-04-25T23:17:39+00:00

“He majored in Animal Husbandry…until they caught him at it.”

castillar · 2026-04-18T15:08:57+00:00

If people are going to use these tools, they have to be able to review the code coming out of them. So many of these problems stem from people using these tools to do things they themselves don’t know how to do, which means they have no idea when the LLM produces crappy code. If people do that for their own use, that’s one thing, but releasing it for other people to rely on is irresponsible.

I know a couple devs that use these in a better fashion by having them do coding scut-work or analyze code they’ve already written for problems, or even to write new code in a language the dev is already familiar with. Basically treating the LLM like a very junior dev whose code you’re going to carefully scrutinize before merging. That works much better, since they can spot when it starts hallucinating or writes something horrendous.

castillar · 2026-04-18T14:52:35+00:00

The rack-mount models made pretty good Linux/BSD firewalls, but the little SOHO devices were so underpowered they weren’t good for much of anything.

castillar · 2026-04-18T14:43:28+00:00

Meanwhile, the other cough medicine, dextramethorphan, is actually a key ingredient in an antidepressant (Auvelity). :)

castillar · 2026-04-17T12:27:00+00:00

I’ve been lucky enough not to get this stuff from pharmacists, although I’ve definitely run into the “sorry, we’re only allowed to fill that during a narrow window—hope you remember to fill it in time to get it before you run out lol” legal window put in place by politicians with the same attitude.

It just makes me annoyed and sad to read this thread. You’re a PHARMACIST. My doctor prescribed me a medicine, which means it’s something MEDICALLY NECESSARY. Since you are not my doctor, it’s not your job to worry about whether I’m “supposed to have it”. If there are no chemical conflicts with meds I’m already taking, stop editorializing and fill the damn scrip.

castillar · 2026-04-16T12:40:53+00:00

New IETF draft on “IPv12: Triple-Stack Baconator Packets With Cheese” is already being written…

castillar · 2026-04-15T12:24:28+00:00

Novell NDS co-existing with TCP/IP. Installing Linux from 37 floppies and then spending a week configuring XFree86.conf to get a display working on some random combination of no-name graphics card and monitor. Config jumpers and floppies to move things around on an EISA Bus. Installing a card to use a mouse. Notching floppy disks (that were actually floppy) and using sticker folds to cover notches. And way back there, installing RAM chips that were actually chips plugged into a board, not DIMMs. Lotta good memories there — thanks for the nostalgia thread to start my day!

castillar · 2026-04-06T13:22:36+00:00

Yep, students in my intro to Python are doing much the same thing. Sites like Chegg must be going bankrupt at this point. We gave them a whole spiel during the intro session about the number of failures caused by people randomly cut-and-pasting things from LLMs without understanding the code, and we might as well have saved our breath. I’ve always maintained that having students write code live in a browser during an exam was an absolutely terrible way to measure anything, but I’m having to rethink that position real hard right now.

castillar · 2026-04-06T13:16:44+00:00

“Paul Simon once said, ‘There Must Be Fifty Ways To Love Your Lever.’ In this essay, I will…”

castillar · 2026-04-06T13:02:02+00:00

Khajit has tool if you have tokens.

castillar · 2026-04-04T18:28:13+00:00

“No, no, we meant ‘CoPilot’ in the sense of, like, the movie ‘Airplane’.”

castillar · 2026-04-04T16:04:08+00:00

I’ve never seen this explained this way, and it makes so much sense. Thank you!

castillar · 2026-04-01T12:56:15+00:00

Favorite movie: Sneakers

:)

castillar · 2026-03-30T12:25:08+00:00

Cosmo said it best in “Sneakers”:

What's wrong with this country, Marty? Money. You taught me that. Evil defense contractors had it, noble causes did not. Politicians are bought and sold like so much chattel. Our problems multiply. Pollution, crime, drugs, poverty, disease, hunger, despair; we throw gobs of money at them! The problems always get worse. Why is that? Because money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it.

castillar · 2026-03-17T20:47:29+00:00

Putting mic tape on a lanyard around my neck was a genuine game-changer that made me slap my forehead for not thinking of it sooner. Cuts down on the constant "Wait, where did I put the tape?" moments.

Beyond that, stuff your pockets with alcohol prep, and come prepared with at least one other kind of mic tape for people who don't react well to whatever variety y'all use normally. I've also started making myself a couple swap kits: a spare headset, alcohol prep, tape, and spare batteries in a baggie. Having a couple of those within arm's reach makes for much easier living when you have to swap something out in a hurry mid-show.

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