Sure, Dirty Pair is your classic sci-fi action adventure comedy, but it can also get seriously trippy.

Tech News

• Dear Windows notifications: FUCK THE HELL OFF!
  
  A YouTube livestream starts, and I want to comment on it.  It's on the computer to the left...  Yes, I do have five computers on my desk, do you not?  Anyway, on the right half of the computer to the left, and I go to leave a comment in chat.
  
  POP!  Notification that the livestream has started, blocking the chat window.
  
  Yes, thanks, go away so I can -
  
  POP!  Notification that a different livestream started eleven hours ago.
  
  I don't nee -
  
  POP!  Notification that a different livestream starts tomorrow at 4PM.
  
  FUUUUUUUU -
  
  POP!  POP!  POP!
  
  Calling it useless would be an offense to uselessness.
  
  
  
• Mac is Mac and Pad is Pad and never the twain shall meet, except in the landfill.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In fact the two systems are rapidly converging into a single hermetically sealed hardware and software platform that only permits you do do what Apple currently deems socially beneficial.
  
  Still, there is the point that Apple refuses to support MacOS on the iPad, despite the hardware being identical, or to support touchscreens on the Mac.
  
  
  
• Intel's Q1 earnings are essentially even with Q4 despite ongoing industry-wide component shortages.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And well above analyst expectations.  So the stock is down by 5% because none of this is even supposed to make sense.
  
  
  
• Speaking of component shortages, you can't by a Land Rover.  (BBC)
  
  I mean, if you were planning to.  You can't.  Their two factories, employing 6000 people to make Land Rovers, Range Rovers, and Jaguars, are closed temporarily because they can't get the chips.
  
  
  
• Courts have overturned the fraud and embezzlement conventions of dozens of British postmasters after it was proven that the accounting software was full of shit.  (BBC)
  
  And bugs.
  
  Hundreds of people were prosecuted in this farce and some have spent years in jail, and now - after more than a decade of legal battles - the entire thing has been thrown out.
  
  
  
• If you have a QNAP NAS connected to the internet, patch it right now.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Or better yet, unplug that sucker.
  
  
  
• Cascading containment failure.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Codecov - a continuous integration tool - got hacked, and didn't notice for weeks.
  
  That's okay, I don't use Codecov.
  
  But other people do, and the fact that Codecov got hacked means that they got hacked.
  
  Case in point: HashiCorp, creators of Terraform, a tool for managing multi-cloud operations.  At my day job we use AWS, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud, as well as our own servers.
  
  We don't use Terraform, because I don't trust anyone.  If I can't look inside the files and see what it's doing, it doesn't get deployed.
  
  But sooner or later I'm going to find that there was someone we did use to provide a key service and somewhere down the chain they did get hacked.  And then I'll have to consider our own servers hacked.

1 I was pleased recently to discover a way to disable notifications in Windows settings.  Apparently has to be done on a per user basis, but I'm no longer worried about some of the stuff I was fearing.

2 Yep, you can disable it.  Problem is, I want notifications, I just don't want them to constantly splat all over whatever it is I am trying to do.

If I dismiss a notification the absolute last thing it should do is give me ten more.

3 Macross now makes me sad because Harmony Gold has been given free reign to ravage and pillage the franchise while flogging it to every place outside Japan, and that will be awful.

The only thing worse would be if Harmony Gold linked up with FUNimation for releases....Oh, wait, they already did that before.

As an aside, the trick about getting from the beginning to the end of a Favorites scroll is useful if you did not have a hundred or more Favorites in the scroll...And you were last on #39 and wanted to get to #61 without scrolling through the rest of the list.

4 Ah, yeah.  I drop news items into a folder for later reference, so 99% of the time I'm only looking at the last 5-10 items.  The up-arrow trick works great when I'm writing my daily news posts.

5 Speaking of grisly things from Japan....Yen Press has licensed the Nidome no Yuusha light novels.

That series is truly unpleasant to read.  I read some of the fan translated chapters and suffice to say, it is not for the faint of heart.