I'd be curious about this as well, I have one of these Logitech dongles and if I plug a USB3 device in the port next to it (say a SD card reader or external drive) the logitech device, my mouse in this case, becomes basically unusable due to the interference.
How are they even going to know if there is an airtag in someone's luggage? Are they particularly obvious on an x-ray or is there some kind of specialised detector?
It's an interesting question. Maybe it's just scare tactics. The battery that goes in an AirTag is the same as in a lot of wristwatches and I expect it would look like a wristwatch via x-ray. And it is exactly as dangerous as such a thing, which it to say: not.
>The battery that goes in an AirTag is the same as in a lot of wristwatches and I expect it would look like a wristwatch via x-ray.
If it's just scare tactics then the similarity to watches is irrelevant. However, if for whatever reason they want to crack down on it, it being similar to wristwatches isn't going to stop them. I suspect most wristwatches are kept with the person rather than in checked luggage, and that if were actually determined they could demand a search of your luggage if they spot anything that remotely looks like an airtag on x-ray.
Well, if they are transmitting, at least in theory it would be possible to detect that transmission. Though I would be kind of surprised if they actually put much effort into actually enforcing it.
If they want to defeat tracking, they can enforce their baggage employees not to bring iPhones to work. Of course eventually on the plane, the luggage will be like ten feet below hundreds of people who might have an iPhone!
Transport for London works similarly for contactless payment card acceptance on the tube, buses, etc. Cards are authorised in offline mode, with transactions processed overnight at the end of each day.
But they also maintain an internal blacklist of declined cards, so the most you'll get away with is one day's travel around London. Per card.
As someone from the UK I'm a bit confused why he can't seem to get the college to pay him? If a court has ruled that the college has to pay how can they avoid this? In the UK if a company failed to pay a debt then ultimately you can apply to the court for a winding up petition which if they didn't resolve the situation the company would be liquidated by the court.
Ya it's only been two days since the state supreme court ruling. Oberlin could keep appealing to the feds, which they may do. Imo the "when will we see our money" is a bit silly; an emotional appeals when this process always entails a ton of legal appeals before the …final_final_forReal.PDF decision is handed down.
For more than 30 million dollars I wouldn’t be surprised if they give it shot on first amendment grounds. The gamble would be the additional legal fees v.s. the chance of success.
From a UK perspective, it is not obvious that they can keep appealing. Here there needs to be a legal basis for an appeal. I am not sure about civil cases, but the criminal case grounds for appeal appear to be:
* new evidence - but only under a set of conditions including that there was a reasonable explanation for the failure to adduce it;
* appeal against sentence.
Notably there doesn't seem to be an option for "we don't like the verdict". A judge must grant a certificate of appeal before the case can go ahead - someone can't decide unilaterally that they will appeal. Appeals are nowhere near as common here as in the USA
It looks like the Ohio supreme court just declined to hear the case yesterday, and before that they were appealing the ruling. IANAL but I would assume that it's only now that Gibson's will be able to really go after them for the money.
Personally with DP cables, especially if you're looking for a longer length cable or wanting to push a higher bit rate through it, then you're better off just spending a bit extra and getting a proper VESA certified cable.
Along with that, I've found that fiber based cables tend to be more reliable than the copper ones. I suspect this is because the media conversion causes there to be a cleaner signal at the output since it has to completely recreate it rather than just amplifying it. Leading to better clocking and less rounding of the edges from capacitance of the cable.
Yeah, on the list on the article the only "modern major payment service" I actually recognised was PayPal and Alipay. I noticed that Rubles are mentioned multiple times in the article, perhaps the author is Russian. Is Stripe even available in Russia?
However saying that I thought PayPal had suspended operations in Russia.
I mean you can get pretty comparable counter top dishwashers for a similar price or even less that just use regular dishwasher detergent with no DRM features.
If you're looking for a KVM over IP for a hobby project with a Intel CPU you might want to first check to see if your CPU supports Intel AMT/vPro. If you enable this then you get a built in KVM over IP without any additional hardware/software. Once setup you can connect via a VNC client.
I tried this with a few HP desktops I was going to use as a homelab, but I found it flaky. I used MeshCommander but I never got a stable workflow. I wanted to be able to reinstall with PXE. Somehow the vPro failed to connect when booting into BIOS.
I see, so I assume the upside is that it's a time saver. Thanks! I personally wen't with samba on Linux and with btrfs. I was wondering if there's something non-obvious in TrueNAS that I'm missing out on.
And to my account, I think my upsides are that:
- ability to choose the kernel
- no need for SSD for base OS since running off of RAM is
rather easy on Linux
- samba can run in a container thus a bit more control security-wise
- server may run something else as well
Of course, this comes with a lot more technical hurdles. More like a side-project than utility really. That's why I was wondering does TrueNAS provide non-obvious upsides that would be lacking in self-rolled one.
There are two flavors of TrueNAS - Core and Scale. Core is basically a FreeBSD distro and Scale is basically a Linux distro. They're both a base OS with the typical packages anyone would need for a NAS, with sane defaults + a user-friendly web-based management system.
The upsides are that it's plug-and-play for anyone who doesn't want to research all the options available and figure out the various pitfalls on their own.
> no need for SSD for base OS since running off of RAM is rather easy on Linux
I don't understand this sentence. You're running off a RAM disk with no boot drive? What if you have a power outage?
> samba can run in a container thus a bit more control security-wise
Core supports FreeBSD jails and Scale supports Docker so you could run samba in a container on either if you're willing to do set it up yourself.
> server may run something else as well
As before, both have jail/container functionality. I haven't used Scale myself but Core comes with a bunch of "click to install" jail options for stuff like Plex, ZoneMinder, etc. Our machine also runs a Windows VM (ew) and a Wordpress install in a Jail
Thanks, this is a great explanation! I wish the blog post would have described the TrueNAS like this.
> You're running off a RAM disk with no boot drive? What if you have a power outage?
Yes, the server only has the HDDs which contain the NAS data. The server bootloops until it gets an image from the router (ipxe boot). The disk images have systemd scripts which install everything from 0 on each boot. Coincidentally, this means system restart is how I upgrade my software.
> Core supports FreeBSD jails and Scale supports Docker
This clarifies the situation -- TrueNAS seems like an option that I would recommend for anyone who wants a quick OSS NAS setup.
The technical quality of Netflix originals is really high. One thing that annoys me though is for some reason despite having rigorous standards for the camera it seems a common trend through numerous Netflix Originals to use the Vantage Hawk V-Lite Vintage '74 line of anamorphic lenses. I guess it's a stylistic choice but it results is some (for me at least) annoying image distortion that can really distract from the show. They are literally described at claiming the flaws are a feature: "The Vintage’74 version has certain gentle aberrations and other characteristics that might be considered flaws by others but are welcomed storytelling tools for cinematographers"
Might be related but I'm finding recent TV shows and film to have a really narrow field of focus while the rest of the screen is either blurry like your example or a depth of field effect.
My eyes generally wander to look at the surrounding scene or detail but I get the feeling I'm not supposed to be looking there.
It's probably too blur out any imperfections in the background green screen, or to hide any uncanny valley lack of detail in the CG set. It's become basically standard practice to use a CG set of some kind in almost everything, because it's cheaper than shooting on site or on a fully detailed sound stage.
Is this at least partly due to higher resolution / larger displays? Better quality displays with higher resolution sources will make a difference between out-of-focus and in-focus more apparent.
Barry Lyndon was shot with an f/0.7 lens because Kubrick wanted period-correct lighting: candlelight, which required a super fast lens with the film used. To my knowledge he wasn’t going for shallow DoF.
Not sure about TV shows but for films (especially Netflix originals), that's partly due to the recent trend of films getting shot for TV viewing experience. These films tend to have fewer "wide" shots and more "character" shots compared to the earlier theatre release only films.
i'n not sure what you're watching, but it's probably at least partly because you're not supposed to be looking there - VFX cost money, and if they can blur or darken a bunch of the frame that makes it cheaper.
That kind of distortion is naturally common to most anamorphic lenses, but especially apparent in older glass. See: Soderbergh’s vintage anamorphic choices in No Sudden Move.
In the old days, they would mostly restrict anamorphics to locked off shots/specific compositions to minimize how visible these type of distortions can be.
Cinematographers almost always want part of the image blurred - an entire image in sharp focus would make it difficult to perceive depth and would take away the ability to direct the gaze of the audience.
In this case the OOF points of light are actually vertically oriented ovals. The idea being its reminiscent of "1974" style anamorphic lenses. Its an affectation not unlike digital retro photo filters, except that its the physical lens.
Its not unlike musicians who use vintage equipment because they want to reproduce something as it was done in the past. Its gets a bit dissonant if the movie is set in the present though.
I just imagined sitting for a photography course test and the first question is "why do anamorphic lenses not produce round out-of-focus points of light, since the in-focus parts are not stretched". Naturally the course material didn't cover any of this.
The out of focus spots are an 'image' of the aperture mask. So they'll take on whatever shape the aperture has... not its physical shape, but its optical shape.
In an anamorphic lens the image is squeezed, so the effective aperture is squeezed... well, in most of them. There are anamorphic lenses with the anamorphic part behind the iris, and for those you don't get the oval shaped oof highlights.
A lot of cinematographers don’t really like the extreme resolving power inherent to 4K+ sensors, and optics that diffuse that sharpness (for instance, a lot of anamorphics) are VERY much in vogue as a result.
I don't know a whole lot about camera lenses, but it's this the reason shows like Sabrina have that extremely annoying distortion/aberration near the edges of the frame but covering almost everything not in focus at close range? I find it extremely jarring.
I’ll take terrible wig work over ‘oh shit, am I about to get a migraine?’ camera work any day. Nevertheless, I think my wife and I quit watching around the beginning of season 3 when it was clear the show had utterly jumped the shark.
Oh wow, I've noticed that a lot of Netflix Originals blur out regions of the frame that aren't front and center and it bugs the hell out of me. I assumed it was some weird post-production attempt to mimic depth of field, I didn't realize it was a lens choice.
Oh thanks. I thought I was crazy because I could notice the blur on the bottom and top of the screen but not anywhere else. I thought "Maybe they did this so the subtitles have a better contrast" but I found it stupid. At least it was done for artistic motives...
