Military, Python, SQL, Data Retention, Comms

1. Remote Control Killers (@ bellingcat.com). Isn't this kind of stuff usually reserved for bad TV movies / series? Anyway, excellent work. Because it also highlights how important even metadata leaks are!

2. Passive RADAR with SDR (@ spectrum.iiie.org) - A very nice article.  Reminds me what I said about mobile networks and military being worried.

3. Python 3.11 (@ docs.python.org) - At least the speedup is one of most important killer features. Subscript performance improved by 10 - 25%, and all of my programs are absolutely full of subscripts, so that's really really important. Better error messages, haha. Ahem, who writes programs that doesn't work and gives out error messages, haha. I've so many times split complex lines into several very short lines, to pinpoint the error source. I love the add_note feature on exceptions. Yet I've usually added the note as text string with the exception anyway. Users love it. Getting error is quite annoying, if it doesn't give you any hint what could be done to resolve the issue. TOML (@ Wikipedia) makes me think. Sure it's good for Python nerds. And it's kind of improved .ini file. But I would say it's confusing for normal users, which might interpret the file as .ini file.

4. Spent a day hunting for missing SQL database transactions. So much fun. Well, I did get more results in half a day than the previous team had gotten in a year. They simply looked issues as "individual problems". And fixed those. But I often like the reverse approach from top down, hunting for root cause and automating checks, instead of manually checking 10 random samples from million records or so.

5. Europe and Energy Crisis, cloud hosting prices going up, up and up. It was funny when one friend said, that it doesn't matter that energy is expensive, we're using CLOUD servers. - Yup. Why we need nuclear power? Electricity comes from socket on the wall! Duh!

6. We had some interesting discussions withing a admin group. Some people prefer to delete messages / data, after it's not necessary anymore. Some others prefer to store and archive everything perpetually. Hmm? I personally prefer deleting data which clearly has expired and isn't needed anymore. Which camp do you belong in? kw: data retention, persistence, permanent record

7. WiFi 7 802.11be (@ Wikipedia) - Yes, it's coming to you! What's new? 

8. Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS (@ technologyreview.com) - Satellite signals can be used for navigation? Reinventing the wheel, nothing new, but sure interesting.

9. It's quite annoying that drive sleep (standby  / suspend) doesn't work with many modern drives. I had to write my own service for putting idle drives to sleep.

10. I just made some steganography art  (@ pleroma.envs.net) for fun, of course this image could be embedded in any other image painting or whatever.

11. How Iran Can Track and Control Protesters Phones (@ theintercept.com). Internet & Mobile Phone tracking & monitoring, nothing new really afaik.

12. SimpleX Chat (@ simplex.chat) is developing incredibly fast. If you're asking why I care? Well, SimpleX Chat is closest to the IM app design I've been thinking about for years. That's why I love the project. When disappearing messages have been implemented, I think it's my first choice for private IM platform. For less anonymous / hidden generic use Matrix is still the primary option.

13. But why? "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform.". So? You can't show text / image(s) without JavaScript with modern web browser? - Ok? Why you think so, but I'm sorry, I really can't agree with you. Maybe traditional HTML is just seriously too challenging for the developers today. ref: Mastodon (@ Wikipedia)

14. Had to switch my python programs to use  python-certifi (@ GitHub) library instead of the older certifi library. Because it seems that it wasn't maintained and I encountered annoying SSL errors in different environments all the time. But now it's all sorted out.

15. Wrote a power management script, which shuts down under utilized systems and starts new systems when required. Automatic scaling platform, in quite naive implementation. Yet it works and saves quite a much money monthly.

16. Something different? AbramsX next generation of US MBTs? Lot's of talk in Finland about Small Nuclear Reactor (SMR) (@ Wikipedia) (thermal) power plants.

2023-12-10