Category: Uncategorized

I’m a bit stressed out with everything going on, so I went for a long walk to clear my head…

I live across the street from a big state park, so I walked over there to get away from things – at least the scenery was pretty…

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Ran over to my local gas station to top off the tank in the 300 and pick up a couple of 20oz sodas for the day… Something I’ve been doing at this particular gas station for over a decade now because they sell high-test that isn’t mostly water and I tend to drive super picky hotrods.

Yes, buying stuff at the gas station is more expensive than going to the grocers, but going to the grocers these days is an exercise in frustration with the crowds, lines at the self-checkout, and having to pay for the bags that you are bagging… I figure it would have taken a solid half an hour to get two sodas at the nearby Walmart – so I reserve that particular suffering for when I need to actually buy groceries.

Anyway, said gas station sodas in 2019 were two for $2 and I would grumble because I could get two 12oz cans at work for $0.50.

In 2021 those two sodas were two for $3 because end-of-the-world global-pandemic supply chain issues or something.

Last year I was irked because they were two for $4 and I figured that was essentially robbery.

Today they were 2 for $5 and I guess I’m done with gas station sodas.

Listening to "Rockstar" by Blue Stahli

Got word from my CFO yesterday that things are coming to a head with the company; Bidenomics are kicking our ass as far as operating costs and we don’t have enough business to offset them because Bidenomics is kicking everyone else’s ass too.

So it appears that after 20 years I will once again be job hunting.

Nothing is immediate so there’s no emergency… I probably have through the rest of the year to line up something and gracefully end things at the office. I have some potentials already, but I need to work on my CV first – which hasn’t been touched in over a decade.

And then there’s the fact I’ve not really interviewed for a job since before the turn of the century… My “interview” in 2004 for where I work now consisted of me walking in, talking to the project manager for about 45 seconds, and then sitting down in front of a PC to test a matrix of conditions for a game… Prior to this I had an actual two-part departmental interview for the IT position at Amerind in 1997. So, it’s been a while.

Listening to "Save a Prayer" by Duran Duran

At work I do a little of everything, and one of the things on the list of “everything” is graphic design for things like advertising, flyers, t-shirts, trade-show booths, whitepaper headers, holiday cards, and anything else that needs some art.

A couple of weeks ago it was decided that we would go to a couple of trade-shows this year, which requires new marketing materials and an update to the booth design to cover the new stuff we do.

The problem with booth graphics is they are huge… 300 dpi across several feet of canvas results in pretty large files, and the web-based Photoshop replacement I’ve been using runs out of steam at anything slightly larger than A1.

Soooo, I had to re-up my Adobe subscription, and Adobe only really runs on Windows and MacOS. Add to this that my hot rod PC really only runs Linux and Windows and – welp.

Friday I backed up everything in ~/ and started the Windows install right after work; and finished getting the OS into a usable shape and everything restored / installed by about 2am.

Most of the effort was just shutting down Windows 11’s incredible desire to report everything to Microsoft. Sure, there are config switches you can turn off that tamps down the behavior – but to really gain some privacy in modern Windows you need to do registry tricks, remove applications, rename things, and lock directories to prevent the weekly update from just turning it all back on…

In the end though I got Windows to behave, and I spent the weekend working on art projects for work and some new textures for my Secondlife avatar.

I also installed a couple of video games that didn’t run well in Linux and goofed off a bit. Granted, things like Proton and WINE have come a really long ways towards making gaming on Linux a reality, they’re still only about 90% of the way there… Give it another year, maybe two, and there won’t be any appreciable difference between Linux and Windows as far as games go.

Really, if it wasn’t for work wanting me to do art and Adobe’s steadfast refusal to support Linux, I’d be perfectly happy with modern Linux… But that day isn’t today unfortunately, and for a while at least I’ll be wrestling with Windows.

Listening to "Legends Never Die" by Against The Current

Been doing a little work on the car; new CAI and over the weekend I put a new oil catch-can on it.

What the catch does is strip the oil out of the PCV return into the intake, and this prevents cooked oil on the intake valves. And given the thermal characteristics of a big ‘ol Hemi V8, this is a good thing.

Next up will (hopefully) be a new rear differential and, while I have the car in the air and the suspension taken apart, better springs and a brake upgrade.

Listening to "Awaken" by Valerie Broussard and Ray Chen

Just for posterity, ye olden blog here is now over 1000 posts… Not bad for 20 years.

Listening to "Alive And Kicking" by Simple Minds

A couple of days ago I ordered a new CAI for the car, and it came in today – so I wasted a half an hour in the garage installing it…

That air filter is the size of a small motorcycle helmet…

The difference in the car is pretty noticeable with the CAI – better throttle response, a butt-dyno is registering a few more ponies, and the soundtrack at WOT is a wonder to behold.

All in all I think it was a good waste of $400.

Next up, an unlocked ECU and programmer.

Listening to "Cars" by Gary Numan

A friend of mine worked for the phone company back in the early 90’s and was sent over to Panama to support the military during the ousting of Noriega, and he has a lot of stories pertaining to his time there.

One such story is about going to a McDonald’s where he used an intercom to order his food which was delivered via a slot under bulletproof glass, and there were armed guards in the lobby. It always struck him as the penultimate example of what a place looks like when the government fails.

Today I walked the mile and a half over to the McDonald’s near my office building, where I ordered via touch screen and my food was delivered via a slot under bulletproof glass, and there was an armed guard in the lobby…

My company has owned this building for about 15 years now, so I remember when the area was really nice. The decay really began with the addition of the light-rail station just up the street in 2017, and has dramatically accelerated in the last few years… Now I have to walk around the building every morning to evict homeless folks camping in the doorways and clean up cardboard beds and stolen Amazon grocery delivery bags from the apartment complexes nearby.

Last year the building was broken into and ransacked, and that was also the beginning of cars getting broken into in the parking lot every now and then.

So, long story short; Aurora Colorado in 2024 has achieved Panama City in 1990.

Listening to "All She Wants To Do Is Dance" by Don Henley

Found a good deal on a new filter and intake tube for the car the other night, so against my better judgement I purchased it… $400 later and I have an aFe Power “Magnum Force” intake and the dry filter arriving between the 18th and 22nd.

Being as an internal combustion engine is really just a pump, this is just a small part of the whole. The exhaust I put on the car a year and a half ago improved the engine’s ability to move the air out, and this will improve its ability to move air in.

When all is said and done, the exhaust and intake will only add perhaps ten horsepower to the car, but they set the groundwork for other things like the unlocked ECU and programmer that I’ll get someday.

Listening to "Resilience" by Dream Shore

In the early 80’s the phone system was kind of a passing interest of mine – specifically the rapidly developing digital switching systems that were replacing the very mechanical and very analog systems that had been commonplace for so long.

To be fair, a lot of my interest stemmed from Ma Bell telling everyone they couldn’t know about how it worked – which turned it into a challenge. And then the breakup of AT&T in 1984 really stirred the pot and generated a lot more interest.

In what was probably a lucky move for me, I joined the Navy in ’86 and that more or less removed me from contact with the phreaking community before I got into serious trouble. But that only lasted until 1993 when I started to get back into it again.

In the early 90’s most of my free moments were invested in BBS culture, which extensively utilized the phone system and in-turn became a haven for people with a shared interest in such things. Eventually things turned from theoretical telecom exploration to some physical efforts, but I insisted that if we were going to lay hands on the system that we maintained some morals; we would never cause harm to the system and we would never exploit the system. Our goal was simply to learn more about the system – not break shit and cause chaos.

Over a three year period, before I took off to Virginia and Ice headed to college, we did a lot of telecom spelunking and learned a ton about how Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph / US West operated in the “303”. Everything we did held to our strict code of conduct, so we never interrupted service or caused problems for anyone.

Probably the coolest part of what we did though was the scenery we got to see while we were tracing out the system. In Colorado the phone system has to reach places that you only see on postcards, so scenic photography was just as important on our outings as documenting what we found.

Early this morning I headed out to visit a few places we ‘discovered’ back in the 90’s. These days I have to go pretty far afield to find things that still exist – but there are still a few out there.

Listening to "Steppin' Out" by Joe Jackson

Ages ago – 1985 / 1986 – I had an Atari 800XL computer that was my gateway to an online world through bulletin boards and things like Compuserve.

Prior to that my family had an Atari 2600 that lived on top of the television in the late 70’s, and that was my introduction to video games. I still remember the day I got home from school and caught my mother playing Breakout… It was so incongruous for my mom to be playing a video game that the memory has stuck with me forever.

Anyway, today my CFO rolled into the office with an Amazon box and stating he had something for me… This isn’t unusual as the company buys all sorts of stuff from Amazon on an almost daily basis, but what he pulled out of the box was unusual.

It was an Atari 400 “mini”.

Apparently he was cruising Amazon late at night, saw this thing, and knowing of my retro-computing habit / addiction figured I’d like to play with it – so he bought me one.

After some jaw-jacking about both of our experiences with old Ataris, he left me to get it hooked up to something so we could mess with it… Inside the box was an old-school Atari joystick and the 400.

The machine itself is a pretty good homage to the original Atari 400, right down to the raised edges around the membrane keys – it’s just “fun size” compared to the original machine.

The keyboard and cartridge slot don’t function, of course, but otherwise the thing is really exacting in its replication of the original. It has four type-A USB ports on the front for the new USB joysticks (where the original had four 9-pin ports), and on the back are a USB-C for power, an HDMI, and another type-A USB for extra storage.

Anyway, it took all of 5 minutes to get an HDMI monitor up on my desk and get this thing plugged in and running.

It comes with something like 25 games, one of which is “M.U.L.E.“, which I played a lot of back in the day. But my CFO wanted to play some old Broderbund games – so I quickly pulled down “Lode Runner” and “Choplifter” for us to play.

My CFO ripped through the first five levels of Lode Runner before my CEO called and he had to run off. I then flew around in Choplifter for a bit before getting back to work.

All in all the 400 “mini” is a pretty neat system. It’s an emulator, of course, and it’ll emulate a 400, 800, 130XE, 800XL, and 5200 pretty faithfully – which is roughly a bajillion games from the 80’s, some of which I still have in my collection. So I guess I have a “new” 800XL now and I need to update the list of retro systems I have before I run off to play far too much “Archon“. 😀

Listening to "Rio" by Duran Duran

On Friday the car hit 6000 miles – so as I usually do here’s the record:

I purchased the 300 on August 10th, 2022, which was approximately 600 days ago – so I’m managing to stick to the roughly 10 miles a day that I’ve been averaging since I bought it. Which is interesting considering the 300-ish mile trip to Walsenburg and back last month and the fact the car ticked over 6000 miles on the way back from North Denver.

I’ve been eyeballing some modifications for the car such as a 3.09 geared differential, long tube headers, and a racier intake which may happen this summer depending on how cocked up the economy remains as we head into election season… Typically right before an election the current regime does everything they can to make everyone’s economic situation as nice as possible to garner votes – so who knows, maybe I’ll find myself with a spare hundred dollars or so this summer.

Listening to "Who's Behind The Door" by Zebra

I’ve been building a computer to load my old BBS on for giggles – a Dell E521 running Windows XP.

The E521 is interesting because it’s one of the last machines Dell made with a Windows XP option – so it’s about as powerful a machine as you can run WinXP on – and the restore CD has things like the drivers for the Nvidia chipset included in the OS install, so it can actually see the HDs without resorting to voodoo.

This E521 started life in 2007 as an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ with 2 gigs of 600Mhz DDR2, a 5400 RPM 160G HD, and an Nvidia GeForce 7300 LE video card all running from an anemic proprietary 300 watt PSU. These days it’s an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ with 4 gigs of 800Mhz DDR2, raid-0 7200RPM 1TB WD “Black” HDs, and an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS with a 550 watt modular ATX PSU… That’s more than enough for a DOS-based BBS I think.

I have a 6400+ CPU and an 8800 GTS I could put in the machine to max it out – but the 6400+ is a 125 watt part and I’m not sure the stock E521 cooler can handle it, and the 8800 is a 2-slot card which won’t fit in the case without dremel work…

Anyway, getting back to the point of this post: Windows XP is objectively better than Windows 11.

Kind of a big statement, and I think I need to back that up…

First there’s the UI: WinXP has personality in all of its buttons and bars, and is a bit more “nuts and bolts” than Windows 11’s soulless expanses of flat rectangles and Fisher Price user experience. XP expects you to work with the OS, Win 11 expects you to just paw at the brightly colored boxes to get a treat…

XP is way, WAY lighter than Win11. The machine I have sitting here is a fully patched Dell OEM XP SP3 image – it has 22 processes running and is using about 500megs of ram and zero percent CPU at idle. I’m waiting for the Win11 laptop I’m using to contrast with to finish the weekly .NET security update so I can pull the numbers…

Okay, it’s done (only took ten minutes and a restart…) The laptop I’m using is a fully patched Dell OEM Win11 22H2 image, it has 83 processes running, is using 3.8GB of ram, and 5% CPU at idle.

XP has been finalized and doesn’t suffer from Win11’s “Change for change’s sake”. I have literal muscle memory for doing things in XP’s UI going back like two decades, conversely every time I sit down to use Win11 the last update rearranged things and I have to hunt for what I need before I can perform the function I sat down to do.

XP is a static OS and new apps and features are added as you see fit, and you can remove things you don’t need. Win11 is subject to whatever Microsoft feels like shoehorning into your PC today despite what you might want, and a lot of it – like the Xbox integration – can’t be removed by the end user.

And – just to keep this from being a novel – a ton of effort was put into XP to keep your stuff from being accessed by anyone but you. Win11 is mostly telemetry that tells Microsoft everything you do, see, click on, etc. and stuff like OneDrive will actively try to fool you into storing your data “in the cloud” where good ol Microsoft can digest every byte of it for user modeling.

And that’s why I figure XP is objectively better than Windows 10/11.

Listening to "Heartbeat City" by The Cars

Back in the 80’s I was what they called a “Latch Key Kid”, meaning I usually locked up when I left for school, and let myself back in when I got home – usually an hour after my parents left for work and 2-3 hours before my parents got home. This worked pretty well save for those days when school was out for some reason and my parents still had to go to work… On those days my lunch was usually something in an aluminum tray made by Swanson’s or Banquet. Like these:

I think this is where my like of Salisbury steak and beans and franks comes from, and to this day I still love them both.

Anyway, with the advent of the microwave in the mid 80’s, the handy Swanson’s aluminum tray meal kinda fell to the wayside and was replaced by things like “The Budget Gourmet”:

Fast forward about 40 years and modern TV dinners kinda suck. They tend to be flavorless and texture-less – basically ‘gut wadding’ used to keep you from being quite as hungry as you were before you ate – and I therefore don’t bother with them.

Unless they are one of these:

This is from a local restaurant called “Lazy Dog” which somewhat specializes in old-school aluminum tray TV dinners. These run about $9 a piece in a six-pack and are basically a restaurant meal you have to cook at home, in the oven, for 45 minutes… Lazy Dog rotates the offerings seasonally, so I never get bored, and I really enjoy plopping down in front of the TV with a legitimate TV Dinner and putting on some old 80’s show for ambiance. 🙂

Listening to "TV Dinners" by ZZ Top

I was discussing various old computers with some folks online, and the topic turned to ‘what did screens look like in the 80’s?’

I dug around online for some examples and came up short, so I figured I’d make some based on the machines I have here in my home-office.

Fair warning, the image compression I use here is pretty brutal to get 20+ years of images to fit into a relatively cheap hosting platform, but these should be close enough to give you a feel for how things progressed. And clicking the images will open them separately for a true 1:1 experience.

First up would be the 1986 Macintosh Plus with its 9-inch monochrome monitor:

I remember when the Mac Plus was basically alien technology and the screen on it was awe inspiring. 🙂

Next up we have the 1993 PowerBook 165c – one of the first color laptops ever made:

Having 256 colors on the screen, at the same time, on a laptop, was mind blowing back in the day…

Now we move on to a high-end graphics machine from a year later – 1994 – the PowerMac 8100/80AV. Out of the box the 8100/80AV had enough video memory (2MB) to do 24-bit “TrueColor” at 800×600, but where it really rocked was being able to push 1024×768 at 16bit color:

I maxed out the video memory in mine (4MB, which was hundreds of dollars in the mid-90’s), so my 8100 could do 1024×768 in 24-bit in 1995.

And lastly we have the circa 2000 PowerBook “Pismo” which was an incredible machine in its day; 500Mhz PPC G3 CPU and an ATI Rage Mobility 128 video card with 8MB… Things haven’t really gotten much better than this over the years – just more and more pixels using more and more ram.

My current video card, an AMD RX 9700 XTX, has 24GB of ram (a mere 3000 percent more than in Y2K) and can push the same 24bit at up to 8192×4320 – which is 5.5 times taller and 8 times wider than circa 2000’s screens – or roughly 16 times the data per frame…

Living in the future is pretty cool.

Listening to "Sing Me Away" by Night Ranger

Back in the before-times, comics were a big deal. And accordingly I spent an inordinate amount of time perusing my local comic shops when I was younger.

The first comic I really got into was “Cerebus the Ardvark” back in the late 70’s as it was was both edgy and witty enough to catch my ten-year-old interest. Cerebus was so edgy and witty in fact that it had no choice but to be an independent (indie) comic, and that kinda started my appreciation of the non-Marvel / non-DC comics as well. So stuff like 2000 AD’s “Nemesis the Warlock” in the early 80’s was also a favorite.

Unfortunately my mom was slightly overprotective of me and tended to put the kibosh on anything she felt was too edgy and / or witty – and the comics I tended to like were on her burn-list. So, I had to purchase and read my comics on the sly.

Eventually I escaped and joined the Navy in 1986, and my duty station in Groton Connecticut was a fairly easy drive from Newbury Comics in Worcester Massachusetts. This, plus having a bit of discretionary income, meant I acquired all kinds of comics – but mostly the aforementioned edgy witty stuff. 🙂

It was 1988 when the comic shop got in some stuff from an indie publisher called “Thoughts and Images” and I stumbled over Vicky Wyman’s “Xanadu”.

This chance encounter kinda cemented my appreciation of anthropomorphic characters as a story device, and elements of “Xanadu” have been present in most of the roleplaying games I’ve run both private and public ever since.

In 1994 the second story set in the Xanadu Universe came out, and I – of course – had to have that too…

There is a third installment set in the same Universe, but unfortunately “Into Golden Skies” was never published outside of a fanzine before Vickie’s passing in 2018.

I was fortunate enough to run into Vickie at a couple of conventions, get a couple of commissions, and talk to her a bit about her art and her comics. She was an extremely nice person and an amazing artist and storyteller, and she is missed.

The last collectable comic I’ll show off today is much more recent, and you only get to see the first two, because they are duplicates and the signed six issue set is in storage.

These sell for hundreds of dollars now, but very few have a set dedicated to them by Peter Beagle himself. 😉

One could say I’m something of a fan of The Last Unicorn – have been since I first read the book back when I was seven (that would be 1976 by the way). And over the years I’ve managed to chat with Peter on several occasions at conventions and a couple of times back during the 2015 movie tour. He is another amazing storyteller and all-around great human being.

I have tons more collectable stuff squirreled away that I should post here someday. Unfortunately it’s only about half, as a lot of my personal collectable crap was lost in the great storage unit debacle of 2002… But such is life.

Listening to "Deepest Blue" by KRISTINE

I try to avoid the “when I was a kid” posts because they don’t really serve much purpose outside of illustrating that time does indeed pass.

But on my walk over to the local mall this morning and looking at the dismal state of things in my four-years-ago-this-was-an-upscale-neighborhood; graffiti, piles of trash everywhere, freshly broken windows in one of the stores – and then watching a roving herd of kids toss leftover McDonalds all over the parking lot while I was waiting for my breakfast burrito, it got me thinking…

Back in my school days, which for those keeping score at home was the mid 70’s to mid 80’s, a lot of the time we spent at school was instilling a sense of there being a world full of people outside of ourselves – and that we were, in part, responsible for their lot as much as our own. And there were things like civics classes, which were a requirement, and those introduced us kids to the social aspects and obligations of living in a country full of other people.

I get the impression this doesn’t happen anymore, or if it does the scope has turned inward.

In my “old man yells at cloud” point of view, pretty much anyone under the age of 20-something is a narcissistic prick who’s entire universe ends about three inches past their fingertips… Everything is about ‘me’, ‘do what makes me happy’, and ‘what the world owes me because I exist’.

An entire generation of self-centered assholes.

Where we used to get constant admonishments of “think of how that appears to other people”, now seems to be “do whatever you want, everyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter”. Where we used to have a sense of community, we now have kids tearing stuff up because “they have insurance right?”

There’s also the lack of accountability thing… Back in my day we were taught that we were responsible for our actions and how they impact other people. Now it’s all about how nothing is your fault, it’s always the fault of some nebulous group of others so you’re automatically absolved of any responsibility.

It all makes me glad I grew up when I did, and somewhat explains why the 80’s and 90’s were so awesome I guess.

Listening to "Sunset Paradise" by Killstarr

Been busy trying to keep the ship afloat and haven’t really done much more than work-stuff in a while now… It happens.

There have been a few noteworthy events though, for example my experiment with “Factor” only lasted two weeks before I cancelled it. It’s good food, but $600+ a month for lunch and dinner during the work week would still leave another $400 a month for the occasional breakfast and weekends – and a thousand dollars a month for food is simply too much right now.

Monday I had to drive down to Walsenburg and back – 300-ish miles – which was the furthest I’ve driven the car since I bought it. The car did great though; nice ride, really quiet inside even at 80+ so the stereo was a real treat, and having 500 horsepower on tap made the whole event effortless. And I was pleasantly surprised that the car got about 28mpg even with dodging closed sections of highway in Pueblo, rush hour traffic through Colorado Springs, and boosting around the perpetual octogenarian going 55 on a 75mph highway.

I figure the car would get close to 30mpg if I made the drive at night / early morning while the dregs are asleep. Which may become important information given the way things are going.

Anyway, the reason for the Walsenburg trip was to sell my property down in Gardner back to the friend I bought it from…

Back in 2016 things were looking pretty good for me so I started a “ten year plan” to acquire a place in southern Colorado to fix up / build and then retire to when the time comes. I chose Huerfano county as the place to do this because the Spanish Peaks area is beautiful country and it’s cheap to live there – and when I retire I expect to have almost nothing to my name.

I acquired the property back in 2018 as payment for helping out a friend with some emergency funding, and then fixing up a few things around the property such as burring an old trailer and installing new fencing. All told I spent a little over $10000 on the project, and almost a year later the bureaucracy was finally over and I actually owned the land…

But that was all back in the good old days before pandemics and regime change, and since 2020 my income has simply not kept pace with how much things cost… For example, the last estimate I got to run utilities 30 yards and pour a slab of concrete was a quarter million dollars.

Back to the point though, the friend I bought the property from had right of first refusal if I wanted to sell the property as he’s not really interested in neighbors if it’s not me. So last week he agreed to buy it back from me for what I spent, and Monday afternoon we arrived at the title office in Walsenburg to do the deed.

Unfortunately everything takes longer and is more expensive these days, so our spit and a handshake will actually take a week and about a thousand dollars to complete – for legal reasons.

Listening to "Los Angeles" by FM-84

I get asked fairly often by various friends when the subject inevitably turns to computers, “Why Linux?”

So, to put my thoughts on the subject into a concise format, I’ll post them here.

First up is Data Harvesting. These days everything you see, click on, open, or interact with is harvested to create a digital duplicate of you; what you like, who you talk to, where you go, what you do when you get there, how much you spent, and on what, etcetera. And the better this digital duplicate is, the more the various tech companies can successfully outmaneuver you when it comes to everything from selling you stuff to influencing your opinions.

Windows and MacOS are essentially engines for this data harvesting these days, because there is so much money in it. Linux on the other hand is still very much “what happens on your computer stays on your computer”.

Then there’s the “AI” stuff being baked into everything. And while the AI bit itself has it’s issues that I’ll get into in some other post, the fact that it’s just another avenue for the above Data Harvesting is what really bugs me… Things like “CoPilot” send absolutely everything you do on the computer to some server somewhere for processing – that’s how it works.

Hot on the heels of data harvesting is the push for Total Cloud Integration Of Everything… What this does is literally tie the use of physical stuff you own to an account controlled by someone else somewhere else. Let’s take Windows for example; you can’t set up Windows 11 without creating a “Microsoft Account” – well, you can, but it requires command line trickery – and once done your ability to log into your computer is entirely at the whim of Microsoft…

So, if you run afoul of Microsoft’s ToS, which can happen by simply saying something Microsoft determines is “misinformation” – and Microsoft sees everything you say – you lose access to your computer and all of the stuff Microsoft has stored on your behalf. This would include things like logins and passwords in Edge, saved documents in OneDrive, and possibly even your email address if you opted for the default free Outlook account.

Apple is the same, though iCloud goes one step further and can prevent boot-time decryption of the machine’s drive(s) as well as locking the firmware and preventing any OS reload and rendering it into an instant brick.

Now, just imagine for a moment that you suddenly can’t use your computer and all of your login info is now locked, and you need access to your bank… Tough luck. You might not even have the ability to change your password at the bank because you no longer have access to your email – all because you were convicted of wrongthink by the tech giant judge, jury, and executioner.

So, yeah – I run Linux.

Listening to "Wonderland" by Killstar

My CFO and the sales guys from our spinoff company have all been eating this stuff called “Factor” at work for a couple years now, and it looks and smells pretty good – so I checked on it a year or so ago…

Basically Factor is “HelloFresh” (literally), but it’s already prepared and you just chuck it in the microwave for two minutes. So, it’s pretty healthy stuff made with actual food instead of fillers and chemistry, and each meal is relatively balanced – meat, veggies, diary, etc.

The down side is that without fillers, extenders, and chemicals food is pretty expensive – and each Factor meal works out to about $12 to $15 – or $150-ish a week for two meals a day during the work week – and that was too rich for my blood… I mean, I actually compare weight to cost on my boxed mac to get the best deal…

But, here we are in 2024 and a singular sack of groceries (a week’s worth of frozen burritos, tv-dinners, hotdogs, canned soup, etc) is right at a hundred bucks – so I decided to give Factor a try.

Today my first box arrived; 10 meals, and for dinner I had this:

Which was made with this:

Ground Beef, Zucchini, Onions, Sour Cream (Cultured Cream), Mushrooms, Sliced Sharp Cheddar Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes, Annatto (Color)), Water, Olive Pomace Oil, Garlic, Cream Cheese (Pasteurized Milk And Cream, Salt, Cheese Culture, Stabilizers (Xanthan Gum, Carob Bean Gum, Guar Gum)), Nitrite/Nitrate-Free Uncured Bacon (Pork, Water, Salt, Celery Powder, Cherry Baste Aid), Granulated Onion, Granulated Garlic, Green Onions, Buttermilk Powder, Sea Salt, Reduced Brown Stock ((Veal Bones, Water), Beef Stock, Mirepoix Stock (Made Of Carrot, Celery And Onion Stocks), Red Wine, Tomato Paste, Gelatin, Salt, Carrot Stock, Celery Stock)), Mirepoix Concentrate (Water, Sea Salt, Vegetable Stock (Carrot, Celery And Onion Stocks), Carrot Stock, Tapioca Starch, Cabbage Juice Concentrate, Celery Stock, Onion Stock, Natural Flavors, Mushroom Stock, Tomato Paste), Smoked Black Pepper (Pepper, Smoke Flavor), Bacon Fat (Nitrite/Nitrate-Free Uncured Bacon (Pork, Water, Salt, Celery Powder, Cherry Baste Aid)), Black Pepper, Monkfruit Sweetener (Erythritol, Monk Fruit Extract), Dried Dill, Dried Chives, Thyme, Dried Parsley

Overall it was really good. Meals made with actual food turn out to be pretty tasty – who would have guessed.

The elephant in the room is the cost, and I need to try and justify the extra $50-ish dollars a week… So far I’m going with “I’m 55 years old and should probably stop living off of frozen burritos”. But we’ll see if that pans out when I’m rummaging in the console of the car for loose change to buy gas.

Listening to "Left Behind" by Absinth3, Zak Love