Per your suggestion, I went out and took a new photo. The blog post has already been updated, but here’s the image.

I agree. I really struggled finding good light once the acrylic was on. It was just too shiny. Maybe I’ll try a daylight photo outside or something. In the article there are better pictures of the individual components though. It’s also hard to get the 3D effect in a photo. I thought about trying to embed a short video/gif of it, but didn’t have any handy.

Disasters do happen. Hurricanes are a big problem that often take out everything you mentioned except for starlink. And starlink has several problems, being owned by a Nazi is certainly one of them.

Oh, I’m not defending these dumb-asses doing illegal things to avoid systems setup to safeguard American and its people. They absolutely could have synced things to compromised devices. Just that Signal, themselves, couldn’t do that.

So I and some others here have probably sounded a bit antagonistic to you, but good on you for asking and trying to understand. Public Key Cryptography feels like magic to me too, it’s just magic that I’ve accepted exists without understanding the base math of it all. Without it, however, most of the security of the Internet doesn’t work.

Even most symmetrical encryption (Like AES, which is how you are picturing encryption working) layers on asymmetrical encryption as a negotiation layer to share a key that both parties have but that nobody eves dropping can read. Then once the key is exchanged, they use that because symmetrical encryption is way easier for computers. But for short messages like Signal sends, it wouldn’t surprise me if they stay asymmetrical for the entire communication.

Signal does hold the public keys for every user. But having the public key doesn’t let you decrypt anything. You need the private key to decrypt data encrypted with the public key. So in a chat example, if you and I exchange public keys, I can encrypt the message using your public key, but only you can decrypt it, using your private key.

Signal does run the key exchange, which means they could hand a user the wrong public key, a public key which they have the private key for, instead of the other person’s. That is a threat model for this type of communications, however, signal users can see the key thumbprints of their fellow chat participants and verify them manually. And once a chat has begun, any changes to that key alerts all parties in the chat so they know a change has happened. The new key wont have access to any previous or pending messages, only new ones after the change took place.

In the case of signal, it is provable that it cannot. They do not hold the keys to decrypt. The closest risk is the server injecting a new public key into the conversation, which the Signal app will warn about.

The server can’t decrypt it if it doesn’t have the keys to do so. It can be proven that private keys never leave the local device. It can also be proven that the proper public keys are being provided, and that the local device alerts on public key changes with a partner are announced.

Of course, nobody as part of the linked article did any of that verification, but still, a server doesn’t need to be trusted to be functional.

Nobody in this thread suggested not getting the vaccine. Entire problem is that we are dropping below herd immunity thresholds and that means worse outcomes for the vaccinated and unvaccinatable alike.

My experience is that their ass end ends up hanging over the sidewalk, and the tow hook takes an extra foot or so.

There are plenty if multiplayer Tetris games out there. Tetris 99 was going for something very different.

I replaced pocketcast with Antennapod a year or so ago. It took some time to adjust, but I’m quite satisified with it now. I feel like I’m slowly converting over at an F-Droid stack on my phone. About all I have left from the Play store are streaming apps and banking apps. I should look into replacing the banking apps with PWAs.

Roku started as a streaming media box. You paid them money, they gave you a box that could play Netflix and Youtube. It was a simple transaction. Unfortunately, at some point they decided to start selling/giving their OS to TV manufacturers. This was actually nice at the start. You got a smart TV who’s “Smarts” were designed by competent people. A revolution at the time. But the drive to drop prices lower and lower meant that there was no margin on the TV, which means Roku had to investigate other ways of making their revenue, AKA Ads and selling data.

Of course, the stand alone box probably would have went that way anyways, but at least with selling a dedicated box, there is a clear financial benefit without the need to get invasive.

Same on Android.

I agree with your core point, if the watermark is a maker’s mark, then it would be wrong to remove it.

Depends on the watermark that is being removed. So many memes out there have random watermarks on them of some crappy facebook account or random website that has nothing to do with the content, they just slap their logo on everything they share.

Chrome is (basically) already open source. That’s why there are a million crappy browsers out there, they are Chromium clones. Google could give Chrome to the Chromium project and cut ties with Chromium, I suppose.

Thanks! The background is 5 different colors blended. That’s the magic of hueforge. The total color changes for that print was only 4 start to finish, so even someone without a multicolor printer could do those easily. Alice was 6 colors, but was changing multiple times per layer, so a little harder to do. My printer only supports 5 colors, so I had to manually change one out after the first layer went down (a transparent base layer).

I’m pretty proud of this. It’s for a gift.

I didn’t do the artwork work, Disney did that many years ago, it’s Disney Classic #8 book cover. But what I did do is worth through Hueforge for the background, and my own custom process for Alice. Which involved a quite complicated process of redrawing Alice in vector, separating the colors, and manually selecting the colors per layer to create a good contrast.

The frame was generated off my frame/shadowbox generator you can find on Printables. https://www.printables.com/model/1120635-frameshadowbox-generator

OpenSCAD lends itself to be treated as a function/stand alone program for generating models as well. Some of the 3D modeling websites even have OpenSCAD integration that runs it in your browser to generate the model based on the flagged configurable parameters. That’s powerful for basic functions like the mentioned adapters, because you can have a page that just spits out adapters of any size and shape.

Theoretically, a more standard CAD program like FreeCAD can use OpenSCAD for a standard parts library like threads, screws, bolts, sprints and allow for custom creation of those outside the standard. FreeCAD has some OpenSCAD support, but I’m not sure if it uses it in that way.