The FBI finally walked into the front door of what’s being called a “Chinese police station in Manhattan”, nearly four months after the NGO Safeguard Defenders first reported the global operation to police Chinese citizens no matter where they live in the world.

I don’t find myself particularly astonished that our borders and national security apparatus is so flimsily operated that foreign governments are operating their own police stations and rendering their own citizens back home with nary a care for extradition treaties, rule of law, or what have you, not after the very obvious influence peddling and mind-control wielded by pretty much anyone with a bank account and the ability to operate AdWords over the past three years.

If anything, it should be a nice reminder to my fellow subjectscitizens of just how little our governmental operators care about the mechanisms of government that a citizen might care about when instead they can spend their time monitoring and influencing our politicians instead.

So although Safeguard Defenders parades around as an independent organization, you gotta conceive of it as just another arm of the unified security state. One whose job is to make sure that the FBI every now and again is seen to Do The Right Thing. Instead of whatever else it is they do all day, smear journalists and file content takedown requests with Twitter and Facebook.

It’s cheap, easy and fast to host your videos on YouTube! Why would you bother to do anything other than hosting your videos with a hosting provider? You can just paste the video URL into WordPress and it’ll Just Work, embedding your video! You don’t even have to think!

Here are a few reasons: major hosting platforms aren’t in the business of agnostically hosting my content nearly as much as they are in the business of soliciting uploads and driving engagement with their userbase so they can maximize ad revenue. They constantly push “views” and other metrics on you if you start uploading, which drives one to care more about the popularity of uploaded content rather than living ones life and taking the odd video or photo for friends and family. The press is always to be a good serf for the digital sharecroppers, although the term of choice these days is “content creator”. Me, I’m a bit old-school, don’t fancy producing content to line the pockets of Google’s shareholders. Moreover, I don’t trust them to not pull the rug at the slightest provocation; start charging for uploads, for hosting, to completely de-list my videos en masse for malicious copyright infringement claims (or who knows! merely including my childrens faces or voices!), the list of possible downsides is pretty much endless. I’m also extremely paranoid, and expect that every frame is scraped for faces and pumped directly into the NSA and probably mainlined over into Zuckerberg’s machine in some nightmarish data-sharing arrangement.

Continue reading Preemptively deplatforming my own website: a ludicrously overbuilt WordPress hosting setup →

There I was, full of Covid brain-fog, attempting to put together the simplest of electrical experiments, building an electromagnetic coil for my kids, when I got distracted and nearly burnt the house down!

Yes, yes, it’s missing a ferrous core to make the coil produce a truly B-eefy field, and yes dumping 5A through the coil for 15s should have made the Jerry-rigged water compass do more than the nothing that you can see in this video.

Continue reading Today i almost lit my house on fire with electrical experiments! →

Extremely late to this party, just like everything else for my generation. I’m looking for “blockchain games” that actually encode their logic into the blockchain. I’ve drawn a blank on pretty much everything that I’ve looked at so far (in that there’s typically some UI that runs animations and performs game logic and then writes the results of individual rounds back to the underlying store).

For all the hype, I’ve yet to see an NFT/blockchain game where all of the logic is encoded in the smart contracts. Likely because the space is full of scammers who don’t actually understand technology and have never encountered Andrew Parker’s user-driven minting mechanism.

Anyways, if you know of a game that’s fully encoded on the blockchain, let me know in the comments.