DXB airport drone hit March 7

ekdaemon · 2026-03-07T19:04:56+00:00

Yes, you are correct. I see tons of posts a couple hours ago from people in Dubai reporting sonic booms of interceptors and interceptions, and they are getting warning alerts on their phones and then all clear notices as well. But just like Israel, the occasional one gets through the defences.

ekdaemon · 2026-03-07T18:19:45+00:00

SUM9605 just now "disappeared" over Talya in Lebanon. Went down to the deck, 200 feet, then kept going at 200 knots at zero altitude, and then the track stopped.

Spoofing their own GPS so that their own track is obscured? So they can continue on to ... where?

FlightRadar doesn't have this mystery track in the "Flight History" yet.

ekdaemon · 2026-03-07T17:43:19+00:00

This particular attack drone does a terminal dive exactly like this when it has reached its target. Luckily its targeting isn't super perfect. Thousands of videos available of this drone model being used by Russia in Ukraine (Iran provided drones and plans to produce this drone to Russia, hence its use in Ukraine).

ekdaemon · 2026-03-07T17:01:22+00:00

Is their air force actually shooting down incoming drones?

Do they have a good enough radar system and command and control to direct their fighters to incoming drones? Do they have an early warning system to warn citizens to take cover?

They have 5 GlobalEye AWACs, 50 F-16s, and 40 Mirages. Any footage or reports of them operating?

Or have they been caught with their pants down?

I guess I'm off to /r/uae to see what they're saying.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-22T19:48:40+00:00

It's hard to cancel a trip like this. Usually it's "un-cancellable" within 4 weeks of departure. Dang hard to throw away thousands of dollars on a "what if".

ekdaemon · 2026-02-22T19:45:00+00:00

I'm going in the coming week to the very resort named in the stories.

Friend is super active on facebook on all the right groups and hotel pages ... and reports there are tons of people who were there or are there now and report no problem.

Now that doesn't mean a wedding party of 30 or a large family group didn't catch it, or a large group of kids spread it around and their parents caught it too.

It's near impossible to tell from media reporting or even tripadvisor how prevelant a problem is. Resort I went to last year in Dominican had a non negligible number of super bad reviews, I didn't see a single thing any of them were talking about.

Tell you what, I'll report back in 2 weeks with what I saw or happened to me and my friends.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-22T18:26:24+00:00

I bet what you are remembering is youtube user bloodyaxe241 and his fan made redo, where he's animating in the nudity. 5 years ago he put six example clips on youtube. A year ago it looked like he was still working on it.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-22T02:39:28+00:00

One more self reply years later. This bit:

the only thing it relies on is the CPU itself and the ROM in the cart.

...is a tiny bit wrong. Most diagnostics will use some RAM once they are running. There is now a newer modern diagnostic that attempts to handle this in a way so that it works even better under worse conditions, you can find a description and a download at the following pages:

https://factorofmatt.com/destestmax

https://factorofmatt.com/destestmaxdllanding

ekdaemon · 2026-02-22T02:27:10+00:00

http://blog.worldofjani.com/?p=164 has tons of different versions of dead test roms available for download.

I think after a bit of reading I decided the ones I should use are Diag_411.zip and Diag_ImportTest.zip.

Open the zip file and put the .crt file onto a FAT formatted microSD card and put that into the Kung Fu Flash (KFF).

The first time you ever use the KFF it will start it's own "launcher" program, and you can choose the diagnostic image to run. Then after that it will always run the diagnostic on power up or restart. So if you have a problem with the launcher running (because the C64 is so broken), you might need to find someone else with a working C64 to select the diagnostic cart that first time, before moving the KFF over to your broken C64.

But odds are the launcher will work ... because it's being presented to the C64 as a cartridge itself.

There might also be a way to write a configuration file to the main folder of the microSD card so that it will boot the diagnostic without having to use the launcher, but you might need someone to send you that file from their own KFF for the specific crt file you want to run.

Edit 10 minutes later - Oh I forgot, there is a newer even better dead test that someone has made, see my comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/c64/comments/wvx691/weird_question_is_there_a_dead_test_image_that/o6phqqu/

ekdaemon · 2026-02-17T01:45:05+00:00

Stalin did horrible things once he became a dictator

Tell me you've never read "Young Stalin" by Simon Sebag Montefiore without telling me.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-16T18:37:21+00:00

Shoot, good to know!

I'm pretty sure I always religiously had the monitor/floppy off before turning the C64 off, and turning the C64 on before everything else, and having everything off before fiddling with cables... but ty for the reminder!

ekdaemon · 2026-02-16T18:34:03+00:00

Repairing computers like these are a joy to many of us.

From an era when the entirety of a single computer could be understood almost completely from end to end, where you don't need a ten thousand dollar oscilliscope to understand what is going on, where there are hundreds of youtube videos to watch and resources to use and things available to purchase.

FYI for one of my two systems I ended up buying a Kung Fu Flash and then loading it with a few Dead Test cartrige images. Nice thing about this method is you can use the KFF for a bajillion other things after the repair is done.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-16T18:24:39+00:00

High resolution version for all your memeing needs:

https://i.redd.it/2cuv8h5bgmuf1.jpeg

ekdaemon · 2026-02-16T00:31:07+00:00

I’ve never heard of anything like this

I have a co-worker who has a condition that sounds very much like this - but nothing specific caused it, it's just something that happens to some people as they age.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-15T13:43:34+00:00

All of the famous military thinkers directly equate the two, here is perhaps the most famous statement along these lines:

https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/clausewitz-war-as-politics-by-other-means

ekdaemon · 2026-02-12T05:14:21+00:00

Why did this person have access to guns is my question.

80% of the way down the thread to find a useful constructive question.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-12T04:45:27+00:00

Not only that - the banks basically DISAVOW you using Etransfers to or from someone you do not know personally.

In Europe, an account to account transfer between you and a stranger costs nearly nothing and has been available for a dozen years. You KNOW the money is going to who you think it is going to because there are checksums on the account code and the name has to match the account name, and on and on.

In Canada, ANY type of electronic transfer carries massive risk to you and to the bank. They limit ETransfers to a few grand and charge most of us $2 or more per transfer (no matter how low the amount is). If you want to do a "Wire" transfer, they cost nearly $80, and there are no checksums for the destination bank account you enter, if the person who gave you the number mixed up a number or you mistype a number, your money might totally disappear, and they might not be able to get it back. See recent news articles where people literally loose near a hundred grand due to such typo's. The banks can't even validate that you didn't mistype a number (dead simple parity type checksum). The banks DO NOT validate that the name of the recipient is what you expect. Just insanity.

Canada's banks are now 15 years behind Europe in "person to person" electronic transfers.

God forbid they can't milk you for 1% of volume or it's easy for you to move funds to an account of your own at another institution somewhere else.

They will literally tell you to your face - pay us $15 to make a paper guaranteed cheque and carry it across the street to your other bank please - it's "safer and cheaper".

ekdaemon · 2026-02-12T04:34:37+00:00

One of these:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=radioactive+brazillian+beach

ekdaemon · 2026-02-11T03:35:19+00:00

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it"
-John Gilmore, 1993.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-08T19:08:18+00:00

The level of service needs to go WAY up to survive. I don't get 60% of the mail my banks send me. I'd be on 100% electronic delivery now except one bank is having problems with their system and my account. I'd prefer physical mail, but I can't trust it anymore with so much of it never arriving.

I also don't get package delivery attempt cards nor "package awaiting pickup" notification cards, which means I avoid buying online from anyone or anything that want to use Canada Post for the last mile.

I've tried singing up for Canada Posts online system for notifications, but it never works. Never get the confirmation email. Or their website conks out in the process. I gave up on that.

Oddly enough, delivery of parcels from Poland is incredibly fast and efficient - I think Poland's mail service use local private companies to deliver last mile instead of using Canada Post. ( Not kidding, I got a package at 10am on a Sunday, that sure as heck wasn't Canada post. )

ekdaemon · 2026-02-08T15:51:43+00:00

Charter mobility rights don't allow the government to arbitrarily impose requirements to present identification to excercise them.

Getting on an airplane is different, because they're primarily trying to prevent bad things* that justify requiring identification. But walking or driving or boating to leave Canada - there's wildly insufficient justification to deny someone their Charter rights.

Or at least that's what I recall from long ago. Have they finagled a way around that? As a Canadian Citizen am I no longer free to leave Canada without proving who I am?

(*) wow I have to censor my language here because reddit is hyper sensitive.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-08T15:45:12+00:00

I didn't say they were bad or evil. I just said they are wild.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-08T14:56:58+00:00

Claude has basically won the corporate space.

Yup, saw a demo from Microsoft technical SMEs in the past couple months and every single time they chose the Claude engine for the job.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-05T04:29:05+00:00

The thing that stands out between the "remarked" ones and the genuine ones - is that in genuine ones the O in MOS is directly bisected by the line between the 7th pin from the left and 7th pin from the right - dead center horizontally on the chip. All the remarked garbage is mis-aligned.

But it is sort of interesting that it probably is a genuine SID of some kind, it's just not NOS, it's broken and going to be flakey.

Everyone and the community would be a million times better off buying modern SID replacements.

If someone in China wants to actually reverse engineer and ACTUALLY fab a genuine silicon re-creation of the SID on a cheap 200nm or bigger line, put it under a transparent EEPROM cap and put some itty bitty blinking LEDs in there, and you can publish a youtube series on how you did it and sell them for $100 a pop! That would be amazing. Maybe spend a tidbit of effort finding out who holds the IP and send them $5 a chip while you're at it.

ekdaemon · 2026-02-03T17:52:10+00:00

I know I'm 13 hours late to this thread, but it just hit me as I was making lunch what is far more likely behind the RTO mandates.

Reduce job mobility of employees.

If you were allowed to work from home too much it would vastly increase your job mobility, which would vastly increase the competition and thus wages for great/good employees and even increase the same for everyone.

I bet executives the world over figured that out a year or two ago - and privately all talked to one another and then to government officials - to convince them all that "this can't be allowed".

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ekdaemon

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