The next thing I wondered was, “How difficult would it be to write that program?” Not a program that actually cracks PIN numbers from debit cards, I don’t think you can actually do that with a serial cable and some aluminum foil wrapped around a debit card, but a program that can simulate the output of the palmtop in that scene.
Let’s gather some product requirements!

Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the covid-19 vaccine would require repeated booster shots to protect against the disease and finally get the pandemic under control.

The study, published January 6 in Science, contrasts with earlier findings that suggested covid-19 immunity could be short-lived, putting millions who’ve already recovered at risk of reinfection. 

This week was the 40th anniversary of the release of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight, the legendary debut single off his first solo album "Face Value"! Phil Collins’ 1981 debut single, “In the Air Tonight,” is one of the most influential pop songs of all time.
...
at 3:41​ one of the most dramatic, legendary and talked-about moments in the history of music arrives: the entrance of Collins’ gated drums, in particular THAT astonishing 10-note tom-fill, leading to a proper backbeat and the introduction of John Giblin’s bass. The gated reverb drum sound was first heard a year earlier on Peter Gabriel’s song “Intruder,” on which Collins also played drums. Engineer Hugh Padgham heard Collins play drums through the heavily compressed reverse talkback mic on a new SSL desk, which also had noise-gates on every channel, and was awe-struck by the unexpected new sound. Gabriel and Collins also loved it, and the SSL was duly rewired so the talkback mic could be recorded easily. For “In The Air Tonight” a year later, Collins and Padgham recreated the sound with heavily compressed and gated ambient mics. The resulting thunderous gated drum sound has since been imitated countless times, and is now so deeply engrained in popular culture that it’s easy to forget how revolutionary it was at the time.

Google can’t read your mind, of course. But it can read your search history. It tracks a lot of your web browsing, too. Google has an enormous amount of data about its users, and it uses that data to make an unimaginable amount of money from advertising: over $120 billion a year. The company runs a vast profiling machine, fitting people into categories that say who they are, what they’re worth, and how they’re expected to act. Google isn’t just organizing the world’s information; it’s sorting the world’s populations.

Though the word 'noise' has acquired a negative connotation, it can be beautiful, such as the sound of the ocean, the rain, or a field in the summer.
The idea behind an online background noise machine like this website, is to make use of the noises you like to mask the noises you dislike. The concept is simple, works extremely well, and does not require expensive equipment, such as active noise cancelling headphones.

Authors including Nnedi Okorafor, Kim Stanley Robinson and Alastair Reynolds reveal what does, and doesn’t, go into creating their worlds

Hugh Padgham is one of the world’s top producers, on par music industry legends like Phil Spector, George Martin, Quincy Jones, Phil Ramone, Brian Eno, and Rick Rubin, to name but a few. The reason why Padgham enjoys, perhaps, not quite the same name recognition is because he prefers to remain behind the scenes, or, in his case, the desk. He likes to call himself “an invisible catalyst,” someone who gets the best out of the artists he works with, without taking any of the limelight.

Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Padgham has been the “invisible catalyst” behind dozens of best-selling, multi-platinum albums, many of them genuinely ground-breaking. Among them are recordings by XTC, Peter Gabriel, The Police, Yes, Phil Collins, Genesis, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Howard Jones, Paul McCartney, Sting, Roger Waters, Suzanne Vega, Sheryl Crow, The Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, McFly, and many more. Altogether it earned him four Grammy Awards.

Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the privacy policy originally outlined when the government launched its TraceTogether app in March 2020 and is being criticized as a backpedal just after participation in contact tracing was made mandatory. 

Singapore ruled out using the Apple-Google system itself because officials there said they wanted more detailed infection information. Participation in contact tracing was once voluntary, but the government rolled that back late last year, and there are now mandatory check-ins at most places where people work, shop, and gather.

On March 7, 1983, New Order released the single “Blue Monday.” In addition to its massive commercial success, charting in the top 10 in several different countries, the single established New Order’s reimagined voice, distinct from the raw emotions and haunting melodies of Joy Division, and launching the world of dance music into a whole new era. As John Bush declared: “‘Blue Monday’ cemented New Order’s transition from post-punk to alternative dance with vivid sequencers and a set of distant, chilling lyrics by Bernard Sumner” At first, in the time between Curtis’ death, and “Blue Monday”, New Order struggled to find their identity as a band. Their first single” (“Ceremony” with “In a Lonely Place”) were tracks they had written with Curtis before his passing, and their first album (Movement, 1981) followed in the same vein of dark, haunting ytacks, as their work in Joy Division. What “Blue Monday” offered, instead, was a startling break away from that emotionality and into the mechanized sound of drum machines and synthesizers. As Sumner reflected in 2015: “I think ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ connects with people because of the emotional content within the song, and I think ‘Blue Monday’ connects with people because of the startling lack of emotional content within the song. It’s kind of contradictory, really.” While the sonic shift seemed to be a drastic change, there are several lines of influence that can be drawn between the track and the band’s earlier work. The impact of a band like Kraftwerk on New Order should come as no surprise; however, it was actually Ian Curtis who introduced the electronic music pioneers to his bandmates. As Hook explained: “My earliest memory of Kraftwerk was being given an LP by Ian Curtis. He gave me ‘Autobahn’ and then later ‘Trans Europe Express’. I was absolutely mesmerised by both. Ian suggested that every time Joy Division go on stage, we should do so to ‘Trans Europe Express’. We did that from our first show, until nearly our last […] Joy Division were very tied to Kraftwerk, but it wasn’t until we got to New Order and were able to afford the toys that our primary source of inspiration became, ‘Let’s rip off Kraftwerk’. Their music was beguilingly simple, but impossible to replicate.”

This release adds support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators to
OpenSSH. U2F/FIDO are open standards for inexpensive two-factor
authentication hardware that are widely used for website
authentication. In OpenSSH FIDO devices are supported by new public
key types "ecdsa-sk" and "ed25519-sk", along with corresponding
certificate types.

ssh-keygen(1) may be used to generate a FIDO token-backed key, after
which they may be used much like any other key type supported by
OpenSSH, so long as the hardware token is attached when the keys are
used. FIDO tokens also generally require the user explicitly authorise
operations by touching or tapping them.

For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print, sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote this script.

After RTFM’ing, I realized, under the hood, systemd just runs mount command to mount the specified partition with the specified mount options listed in the mount unit file. Basically, you need to specify the following options in your unit file:

What= a partition name, path or UUID to mount
Where= an absolute path of a directory i.e. path to a mount point. If the mount point is non-existent, it will be created
Type= file system type. In most cases mount command auto-detects the file system
Options= Mount options to use when mounting

In the end, you can convert your typical fstab entry such as this:

UUID=86fef3b2-bdc9-47fa-bbb1-4e528a89d222 /mnt/backups ext4 defaults 0 0

to:

[Mount]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/86fef3b2-bdc9-47fa-bbb1-4e528a89d222
Where=/mnt/backups
Type=ext4
Options=defaults

textadventures.co.uk is a community of interactive fiction game makers and players.

All games here are either playable in your web browser, or as an app for your smartphone or tablet. Almost all are free, and you can even make your own, using our free software - Quest or Squiffy.

A gentle admonishment to use shell scripts where appropriate accept that shell scripts will appear in your codebases and to lean heavily on automated tools, modern features, safety rails, and best practices whenever possible.

A s font that fing censors bad language automatically

It’s able to detect the words f, s, p, t, w, c and dozens more, but with a special exemption for “Scunthorpe”; that town has suffered enough.

The SSH agent is a central part of OpenSSH. In this post, I’ll explain what the agent is, how to use it, and how it works to keep your keys safe. I’ll also describe agent forwarding and how it works. I’ll help you reduce your risk when using agent forwarding, and I’ll share an alternative to agent forwarding that you can use when accessing your internal hosts through bastions.

This repo contains the original source-code for Microsoft's GW-BASIC interpreter, as of 1983.

Is being released for historical reference/interest purposes, and reflects the state of the GW-BASIC interpreter source code as it was in 1983

Will not be modified - please do not submit PR's or request changes

Contains no build scripts, makefiles, or tools required to generate executable binaries, nor does it contain any pre-built binaries / executables

In this paper, I explore the rise and fall of Gopher as the dominant protocol for file search and retrieval over the Internet. After its creation in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, use of Gopher exploded. The popular press lauded it as an important step beyond File Transfer Protocol (FTP), in terms of both usability and ease of implementation. The growth of Gopher was soon overshadowed, however, by the World Wide Web. A major milestone is this direction was the release of the Mosaic graphical browser by the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications [NCSA] in 1993.