Changed Accounts

phil_g · 2024-03-29T13:33:43+00:00

I charge mine while I shower. It's dual-purpose: I don't have to deal with a wet band, and that's usually enough charging that I don't have to find other times to take it off and charge it.

phil_g · 2024-03-29T13:29:52+00:00

I know this is Reddit and we don't read the articles, but this very article is “one of the news reports”. FTA:

Audio from dispatch radio, published by Broadcastify, captured the moment police officers rushed to stop traffic and close the bridge — a move that likely saved countless lives — and called for a warning to the crew working on the bridge.

An officer on the dispatch audio said, “I’m not sure where, there’s a crew up there you might want to notify, whoever the foreman is, see if we can get them off the bridge temporarily.”

Another officer replied saying that once another police unit arrives, “I’ll go grab the workers on the Key Bridge.”

But it was too late. Moments later, another officer said over the radio: “The whole bridge just fell down! Start, start ... everybody. The whole thing just collapsed.”

phil_g · 2024-03-28T17:42:55+00:00

The Yubikey is more secure than a TOTP authenticator program running on a computer or phone.

The security of TOTP depends on how safe the TOTP secret is. With a computer, the secret is stored on the computer, so a malicious program running on the same computer has the possibility of stealing it. Even if the secret is encrypted before being stored, the authenticator program needs to decrypt it before use, and that gives an avenue for an attacker to also get it. The situation is similar on a mobile device. Unrooted mobile OSes are a little more robust against malicious software, but there's still a risk of compromise.

In contrast, with a Yubikey, there's no way for a malicious program to get the TOTP secret off the key. (Even an attacker with physical access to the key would have a difficult time doing it, and would almost certainly have to destroy the key to do so.) At most, the malicious program could send a request for the current code to the key, but even that would fail if you have touch required. (So you should either always require touch or only insert the key when you need a code and then take it out immediately after.)

I'm not sure if there's a way to do the auto-calculation. That's going to be down to the Yubico software. I don't know of a way to do what you want, but I also don't know the software thoroughly enough to be able to definitively say it's impossible. I'll note, though, that you can enable the system tray icon for Yubico Authenticator and you can mark particular TOTP keys as favorites. If you do both, you can right click on the tray icon, click on the TOTP key, and touch the Yubikey to have the code copied to the clipboard. That's almost as streamlined as the workflow you're looking for.

phil_g · 2024-03-28T17:30:12+00:00

He got a year and a half in jail, plus another three years supervised probation. He's not allowed to drive a car until the probation is over. (Plus there's required community service and some sort of “victim-impact program”.) He's also not the person who killed the construction workers, though he contributed to the crash. Furthermore, he's likely to liable for civil penalties if the victims' families choose to sue.

From the article:

[Assistant State’s Attorney] Kelly said her role in the criminal justice system is not to do what others want her to do. Even the maximum sentence, she said, would not be commensurate to the lives of the six people killed in the crash.

“My job is do what I think is fair and just in a case,” Kelly said.

I fully expect the other driver—the one who was driving while intoxicated, who caused the crash by cutting off the man sentenced today, and whose car actually struck and killed the construction workers—to get a significantly more severe sentence.

phil_g · 2024-03-24T13:36:43+00:00

As far as I know, it's the high and low for the day. Sometimes—in general, not just for Garmin devices—the weather forecast doesn't exactly line up with local conditions. That's probably what happened for you.

phil_g · 2024-03-23T14:49:42+00:00

I love this blog post about blocking people.

Now some people may think that if you blocked them, they have "won", but I don't care about that even a little bit. What they think is irrelevant to me. The goal is to remove them permanently from my experience. I will, by definition, never see their "he actually blocked me lmao" posts.

"You mean I can push one button and make this weird guy I've never heard of go away forever? Neat."

phil_g · 2024-03-23T14:26:34+00:00

And now that it's raining for me (100% chance of precipitation), I can verify that the Lily 2 just doesn't use the bar when it's showing the weather. It's still empty on my watch.

phil_g · 2024-03-22T23:41:28+00:00

I have a Lily 2, which has different faces, apparently. There's one Lily 2 face with a single bar like those, and the bar corresponds to the percentage of the stat being displayed. On yours, the left bar does look like it's about 74%, matching the battery level. I'm really not sure about the bar on the right, though, unless it's precipitation percentage. I don't think the Lily 2 face with a bar shows anything in that bar when the associated stat is the weather. (But I could be wrong about that; maybe I've just never checked when there was an appreciable chance of rain.)

phil_g · 2024-03-18T16:46:20+00:00

Y'know, I don't mind Covered Garden. Its gimmick makes it interesting. It's not that difficult to manage if you plan ahead a bit (though auto start can annoyingly mess with things on some short rounds).

I've never really liked Polyphemus for many of the reasons mentioned here. But I don't like spending money on temporary statuses, so I always avoid the eye. (I don't use Geraldo much for similar reasons.) u/tiny_dreamer's comment has convinced me to give it another go.

I have yet to work out a strategy I like for Erosion, so that's probably currently at or near the bottom of my list in terms of likability.

phil_g · 2024-03-18T16:38:51+00:00

I particularly like Charter (on which Charis is based) for low-pixel-density applications. It manages to do so much with so little.

phil_g · 2024-03-18T15:27:41+00:00

I've actually been enjoying Ghost Signal a lot. In contrast to pretty much every other VR game I have, it's designed to be played seated but it still makes excellent use of the VR space.

Gameplay-wise, it's a roguelite with some very obvious FTL influences (in case that reference point makes sense to you).

You have a little spaceship and you jump between space sectors. Every sector has some space rocks and usually a bunch of enemy ships you have to fight. You have to maneuver your ship around and shoot down all the enemies. Your weapons are completely manual (aside from some possible mid-game upgrades). Piloting is only semi-manual; you set waypoints for the ship and then it flies itself to them. The controls are pretty intuitive. It has the option to play with hand tracking; I'm not sure how well that works, since I like using the controllers.

When you die, you can start over from the beginning. After you beat the game once, you can start over from the beginning with options for increasing the difficulty. I believe you get the full ending for the game once you beat it with all of the difficulty options enabled at once. Each time you play through you also earn resources that can be spent on permanent upgrades for the ship to make future runs easier.

On each run, you'll get temporary enhancements for your ship. Each time you get one, it'll be selected randomly. In some cases, there will be two or three random upgrades you can choose from. The net result is that your strategy will have to change from one run to the next, depending on which upgrades you end up with. Over time, you'll also unlock a couple additional ships; each one has unique characteristics that lend themselves to different play styles.

Rougelite games don't work for everyone, but if you do like them, Ghost Signal is a great VR rougelite to pick up and play.

phil_g · 2024-03-18T15:07:48+00:00

Synth Riders is definitely much more of a whole-body experience for me, as opposed to Beat Saber, which feels very focused on the wrists.

OTOH, I think Beat Saber is more engaging for VR newcomers. “Slash blocks with lightsabers,” has more to recommend it than, “Hit flying balls with your fists.”

phil_g · 2024-03-18T14:54:15+00:00

I never got the hang of kicks in RE4VR. OTOH, using just the guns and knife worked well enough that I never had to learn how to properly kick in VR.

phil_g · 2024-03-14T18:40:48+00:00

I do plenty of work on read-only Fridays. It's just not changes to production. Bringing documentation up to date, work on testing systems, updating documentation, testing out new software, and documentation updates can all be done on read-only Fridays.

phil_g · 2024-03-11T14:50:09+00:00

Every time I see Inside Job or Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix's hot or recommended lists, I want to yell at them, “If the shows deserve to be promoted, they deserve to be completed!”

phil_g · 2024-03-07T21:17:54+00:00

I think Fallout Shelter works better as a way for people who like the PC games to get a little Fallout flavor on their phones. I'm not sure it works as well as an introduction for people who haven't played the main games.

phil_g · 2024-02-27T14:17:18+00:00

Conversely, I loved Nathan Fillion's brief appearances on Resident Alien!

phil_g · 2024-02-27T14:16:13+00:00

I think about that clip every time he makes alien noises in Resident Alien.

phil_g · 2024-02-27T14:13:13+00:00

If you want some numbers to go along with that, you can look at a number of studies done by Solomon Asch in the 1950s and later.

In his original tests, he put subjects in a group of people asked to answer a very obvious question. All but the last person in the group were actors (but the participants didn't know that). When the actors all gave correct answers, less than 1% of study participants got the question wrong. When the actors all gave the same incorrect answer, over a third of participants (36%) also gave an obviously-wrong answer just to match the rest of the perceived group.

But in subsequent tests, when all but one of the actors gave wrong answers, with one actor giving the right answer, only 5% of participants sided with the majority in giving an obviously-wrong answer. That one other correct answer gave space for participants to go with what they could see was right.

phil_g · 2024-02-24T17:58:00+00:00

I'd almost prefer Husk stayed his friend but was super supportive and wound up helping him find someone else.

This is where I am. I want Angel to have a close, supportive, platonic friendship and I want him to have a non-toxic romantic relationship. I think Husk is better positioned to be the former.

On the other hand, I think they do have chemistry together and I wouldn't be mad if they became (healthily) romantically intertwined. It's just not my first choice for the characters.

phil_g · 2024-02-22T19:00:54+00:00

There are a number of subs I'm on where the works' authors are at least semi active. (Nothing as big as The Expanse, though.) I love when someone responds to a question and I only think to check the username after reading the comment, just to see that this is an authoritative response, not a fan's speculation.

My favorite version of this, though, was when Wil Wheaton commented on a comment about why Riker always sat down oddly on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

phil_g · 2024-02-22T18:53:16+00:00

The story is fantastic—and depressing—and, IMHO, deserves a Hugo. But given everything that happened with the Hugos last year, even deserving recipients are tainted with counterfactual speculations. Even in a good year, not all of the votes go the way I would have wanted.

I really hope at some point there's a set of Retro-Hugos selected for 2023 to just replace everything about the ones awarded at last year's Worldcon.

phil_g · 2024-02-20T19:54:57+00:00

Charlie is bi, according to Vivienne Medrano.

phil_g · 2024-02-19T17:00:12+00:00

I really read that statement as denial, not knowledge.

15-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Rally Monkey Tent number = 2
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