Knuckledragger

Russian warship Moskva has sunk - defence ministry.

Everyone's favorite high pitched, hyperactive Canadian tech dropper does a deep dive on the guts of the Mac Studio. It turns out that with considerable work, it is possible to user service the SSD. Much more interesting to me: there are at least two different PSU designs for the Studio, and they are interchangeable.

A couple shots of Paul Lawler's studio.

Russia has defaulted on its foreign debt, says S&P.

Oh hells bells. Those of you who have been around here ...since I created this thread in 2008 may remember I used to do a lot of mucking about in HDR with a small army of apps. The one that I used the most was Photomatix. At first I pirated it, but liked it so much I paid for it not long after. I don't remember the price anymore, but I think it was around $25 in early 2006. For that sum I got the app as well as a Photoshop plugin (which I found to be of limited use, but sometimes handy.) My license got me through many upgrades of Photomatix, to the point in time that I stopped using it. To be fair, this was several laptops ago. Tonight, while editing some photos I took in 2006 (more on that later) remembered Photomatix and decided I wanted to give it bash again. Well, there is a current version, which is nice. It's native to M1/Monterey, which is essential. Also my serial is ancient and no longer valid for the new version. Understandible. I have paid for an upgrade for Little Snitch at least 3 times in the last dozen+ years. LS's devs give me a discount because I have an older license and (this is the key part) I can still run the old version on my other, older Macs (I maintain a number of Minis, which I find to be insanely useful.) By the by, any HCers out there using Macs, I cannot recommend Little Snitch enough. It's my favorite firewall app. As I was saying... I get no discount for owning an old version of Photomatix and CRIKEY have their prices gone up. $99 for the base app and more on top for the PS plugin. Naturally my serial still works on old versions, but they won't run on Monterey (or any other recent version of MacOS.) That's ...more than I'm willing to pay to re-up a program I previous purchased just to futz with it for a bit. So... Yarr har fiddle dee dee! 🏴‍☠️

Kyiv region: police confirm deaths of 1,222 people killed by the occupying forces.

Related:

OWC makes a nice Thunderbolt 4 dock. It's unobtanium. "Ships in 98 Days." The CalDigit TS3 dock, which is built like a brick scheisshaus, is now OOP and going up in price on the used market. It's only Thunderbolt 3 (meaning it works fine with Macs, but will have weird incompatibility issues with Winders laptops) but it has an optical digitial audio output (which is appealing to an incredibly narrow demographic that includes me.)

Doing a soft launch of my show tonight, as much of a technical test as an actual radio show: http://mixlr.com/illuminator/chat

Okay so I had a NAP today which, means I'm wide TF awake RN and therefore attempting to work on my show. This new version of Traktor has some strong "is that a feature or a bug" energy to it. Tonight I discovered 100s (of the 6600+) tracks I have in my record bag are not displaying key text. That's bad because I love to mix in key, but I am a dumb DJ and not a muscian so I need to know if that song is in Cm or not. Currently running a background process scanning the songs in questions. 1h10m remaining. I tried this once before and Traktor cheerfully ran the process but didn't write any tags. I futzed with config settings and I'm unsure if I actually fixed anything. I have a third party key detection software (the open source KeyFinder), which can write tags. Unfortunately, Traktor doesn't recognize those tags.

Ground what?

Was listening to Queen's 1977 album News of the World and reflecting on its cover art. The cover art was done by Kelly Freas, based on his cover for the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. There's an alternative cover for NotW, which was also inside the gatefold on some versions: Freas' artwork is kind of creepy, unsettling, quite vintage looking but also weirdly futuristic. I remember seeing it as a kid and not being sure what to make of it. The music is pretty spectacular as well.

Dark AF Polandball:

In spite of my considerable reservations as to his character, it turns out that the current on hiatus status of The Grand Tour has left me wanting more freakishly tall British jackassery in my life so when the Prive Video splash page (bless its heart) suggested this to me last night: I started watching. True to form, Jeremy is bad at everything. Also this show was filed right before Covid started, which certainly gives it a vintage feel. It's like watching pre-9/11 films in 2002.

Russia Threatens Wikipedia With $50K Fine for Ignoring Ukraine Warning. 🤡

Oh man, I've been putting off writing this one. I have 3 uncles, all on my mother's side. The youngest is a really good dude who has been tasked with dealing with the aftermath of the bad actions of other family members for his entire life. The oldest is an unimaginable piece of shit even by the standards of trash tier relatives. I would not micturate on him were he on fire. Sadly, he lives on at the age of 82, showing no signs of slowing down. My third uncle, the middle one, was born retarded. He spent some troubled times in the 1960s and 1970s in "state schools" which were horrible institutions in MA where all sorts of people with mental disabilities were dumped. In those places my uncle experienced horrors we shall never know. He was never verbal beforehand and was even less so after. From family stories I know he was attacked by aggressive "patients" (not really an appropriate term, but it's what they used) and was more or less defenseless. He'd show his trauma and pain by biting his own hands and the staff would notice the wounds. How long this went on I cannot say, but it was a time period measured in years. In the 1980s, he got out of the ellscape that the MA institutional system and into much more caring group homes. In the 1990s, he moved in with a family who were paid by the state to take care of him. Mercifully, they were a very caring group and took care of him quite well. Late last year the matriarch of that family contacted my youngest uncle (the good one) and said they could no longer really take care of my retarded uncle. That lead to a series bureaucratic headaches where my uncle eventually ended up back in MA institution. Fortunately they aren't as bad as they once were. Not too long after, my uncle contracted Covid. He recovered, but he was 63 years old and not in great shape. He was in and out of the hospital, most recently being treated for intestinal blockage. He returned to the institution and died hours later. His passing has been very hard on his surviving siblings (minus the asshole one, whose opinion to me on par with that one Mr. Putin.) I think for my uncle it was a mercy. What I observed of my uncle was that in spite of the horrors he experienced and witnessed, and his inability to communicate his suffering to anyone around him, he was an an amazingly sweet guy. His limited expressions showed shyness, curiosity, good nature, humor and a kindness I seldom see in us "normal" people. I tried to draw some inspiration from his kind spirit and find strength in his ability to rebound from trauma.

^ That's my entire virtual record bag, archived. Normally only the changed files need to be copied, but part of the process of rebuilding my virtual DJ infrastructure changed the mtime on every single track in it. This M1 MBP doesn't have ethernet of course, so that transfer had to happen over WiFi. Related, I'm eyeing one of those CalDigit TB docks. Probability of me finally returning to the airwaves this coming Friday increasing.

In lighter news, Sanctioned Russian oligarchs break down in tears over their inability to book private jets, reports say.

https://news.obozrevatel.com/ukr/show/people/vse-zaminovano-na-vulitsyah-bagato-til-komarov-pokazav-pershi-kadri-zi-zvilnenoi-buchi.htm