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Boosting me is illegal in the US under 18 U.S. Code § 2385

I wanna know how exactly dragons would sound speaking english, like, a lot of it comes from how human mouths are shaped and our lips being able to do what it does

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

Please appreciate my dino boy (they/them)~

(Art by TuxedoDragon, who keeps surprising me with incredible art!)

trying to install XP on this machine, and it's going *great*

first drive i put in has lost calibration enough to no longer be able to read 700 MB CD-R

second drive i put in can attempt to read it, but generates IO errors

conpuper

I should add a page to my site to submit samples of keygens - I enjoy researching them because they can have unique malware strains that are completely ignored by the commercial AV vendors, since they tend to just flag it as a Keygen and skip actually analyzing them. For example, see chcl.se/2023/08/30/girlsmist.h

the greatest accomplishment of my 7 year long employment at my current employer is when I had to design a login screen for an app, which I promptly modeled after Windows XP

my latest experience in "why did you do it this way Microsoft" 

I know the answer is probably "the printing subsystem in windows is one of the oldest ones and a horror to peer into"

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my latest experience in "why did you do it this way Microsoft" 

For some reason, the Microsoft inbox IPP driver maps the paper loaded to the closest "standard paper" available, and if none are close, it just gives up.

My label printer apparently prints business cards, and the tape on that printer is apparently A4 size.

I forgot to mention - when we finally got rid of those 24-port hubs, I used one for archery practice. Felt nice.

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I never got to use it because it shut down before it was done, but I wrote some software that listened for Torrent peer exchange broadcasts, requested the metadata, and then proceeded to read it out over the speaker, like "Seat 4A is currently downloading Godfather-2005-XviD, shame on them!" to let people know who to complain to if the network got bogged down, lol

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For next year, we bought a couple small unmanaged switches. Had to keep the hubs, but they were connected to switches, so we didn't have any more packet storms.

I eventually added pfSense with a captive portal, where you'd get a voucher with your ticket, so we could connect MAC addresses to people. Used it twice, both times to tell people to stop torrenting shit.

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Another thing was clear from Wireshark - the issue was that someone was torrenting something, and I had their MAC address.

At this point, I flagged down one of the staff, and explained the issue quickly. A quick discussion between them later, and I was given permission to knock them offline (I did some ARP poisoning) and an offer to join up as the "networking guy", which I accepted.

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Well, as a teenager with no boundaries, and a dangerous interest in network security, I wasn't going to let this stand.

The issue was obvious once I opened Wireshark, and saw the amount of traffic coming to my machine - see, they mostly relied on donated equipment, which happened to be 24-port *hubs*. If you don't know what that means, it means that everyone's traffic was going to everyone, and network cards were just giving up under the load.

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I don't think I've told the story here on how I ended up managing the network side on a local LAN party. It was a doozy.

So, I was 16 (I think), and me and some friends had booked some spots at a local LAN party, now on its third year. Rented out venue, you could buy snacks, so on.

By midnight, the network started performing really bad, but in a weird way - I got packet loss to my friend sitting right next to me, and I wasn't alone. You could see that people were getting annoyed.

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

This is a *fascinating* concept for games studies - "quotes" of a game that don't just show you a clip of gameplay, but actually let you take control and try it out. It trims the ROM down to only what's needed to run the quote, so this might even pass a fair dealing/fair use test in court if it came down to it - just like quoting a passage of text, or a clip of a movie.

tenmile.quote.games

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

neurodivergent people have been compiled with the --verbose flag enabled

I have another interest shift coming up I feel

Time to hyper focus on bookbinding for a couple of months

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

The lockdown project for one of my parents neighbours was to build a scale model of the lake district from Lego. It’s now in the local museum.

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

If anybody wants another hilarious online dispute issue, back in 2016 two teens had a dispute over Minecraft, so one DDoS’d the Minecraft server’s DNS server - that broke Dyn, which took down internet access across the US East Coast as they were such a key supplier.

I had to do a radio show on NPR about that one and the presenter kept asking me if it was Putin — and I was like, no, it’s teenagers. Advanced Persistent Teenagers. The show went on for an hour of me just saying ‘yo the net sucks’.

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

An update on the Fediverse spam issue:

- It’s not just Mastodon.

- Most of the targets receiving the spam use Misskey, and are in Japan.

- Most Mastodon users aren’t being targeted, so aren’t seeing it.

- It is a dispute between two people over a social issue, after asking them about it.

- It is fully automated.

- The spam continues to be sent and probably won’t stop any time soon, these guys need to star in a BL drama and make up.

Dusty :blahaj: boosted

AI AI AI 

I'm a little butterfly

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