Voidtools' Everything is a great File Explorer replacement //
WinDirStat is a tell-all we all need
A cold hard look into the storage //
ShutUp10++ is an absolute must-have
This is where I take control back from Windows //
Autoruns gives you a very deep look under the hood
Autoruns often feels like my secret weapon
The Lockheed L-1011 competed primarily with the DC-10. Whereas McDonnell Douglas had produced two successful jet airliners and built an extensive customer base, this was Lockheed's first jet-powered airliner. However, while McDonnell Douglas was able to get its aircraft out the door in a swift fashion, Lockheed faced several delays with its program, primarily centered around issues with the Rolls-Royce RB211.
Both aircraft were largely developed out of a request from American Airlines for a twin-engine widebody smaller than the Boeing 747. Both companies developed trijets due to restrictions on twin-engine operations over water, and Lockheed put extra effort into the Tristar's technology. It featured an advanced autopilot, an autoland system, and an automated emergency descent function. This was undoubtedly the most advanced subsonic airliner of its time. //
Charles
I think when the 767 came on the scene, that's what really killed the tristar. //
TJCrewChief
I had a friend that was a 747 and L1011 pilot for TWA. He just loved the Lockheed L1011.
He extolled the fly ability and called it a " Pilots Airplane."
The Federal Highway Administration has given interim approval under the national Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) for the optional use of green colored pavement in marked bike lanes to boost visibility and alert drivers to where bicycles are expected to operate.
If there’s one state that’s leaned into this trend, it’s Florida. Transportation agencies there have adopted MUTCD-aligned design and installation requirements for green-colored pavement markings on bike lanes and multi-use paths.
Under the MUTCD rules, green is not just decorative. It’s a legitimate traffic control device meant to communicate a reserved space (usually for cyclists) and to increase conspicuity.
Ocean currents and tidal flows don’t just push water. They shape where fish go. Around powerful tidal sites like Canada’s Bay of Fundy, researchers have observed patterns in fish movement that almost resemble highways — consistent routes that fish follow as they migrate along the currents.
Thinking about self-hosting an ebook library? Here are the open source software you can consider.
Announced in a press release submitted to Simple Flying, EirTrade Aviation has partnered with RESIDCO to acquire two Airbus A320neo aircraft for teardown, marking the youngest airframes of the type ever dismantled. The aircraft were previously operated by Spirit Airlines and are just four and three and a half years old. Disassembly is taking place in Goodyear, Arizona, with parts destined for EirTrade’s Dallas hub. The transaction is designed to bolster the supply of next-generation used serviceable material (USM) amid growing global demand. //
Early-life teardowns, once uncommon, are now emerging as a strategic response to supply-chain constraints and escalating maintenance costs. //
There are currently more than 4,400 Airbus A320neo aircraft in commercial service worldwide, with a further 7,200 on order. This excludes the approximately 6,500 A320ceo aircraft still operating, many of which share common components. Given the size of the installed base, the A320 platform is expected to remain the largest segment of the global commercial fleet for decades. As a result, demand for USM is projected to increase steadily.
Early-life teardowns provide access to components that align with current regulatory and operational standards, offering operators an alternative to new-part procurement.
There are two important things you must do now: confirm you have Secure Boot enabled and that your system firmware is updated. The Windows System Information tool can show if Secure Boot is enabled. However, any firmware update should come from your PC manufacturer or the platform managing virtual firmware.
If your system is eligible, the update typically happens quietly in the background. You should pay more attention to devices with dual-boot setups or PCs with legacy boot remnants, as they are less likely to get automatic deployment. You may have to navigate to this registry path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecureBoot and set the AvailableUpdates registry value to a nonzero value. //
You can view the current certificate on your PC by running this PowerShell command: (Get-AuthenticodeSignature "C:\Windows\Boot\EFI\bootmgfw.efi").SignerCertificate | Format-List Subject,Issuer,NotAfter,Thumbprint
You can run this command on PowerShell, and a non-zero value for AvailableUpdates would confirm your computer is eligible to receive certificate updates: Get-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecureBoot" | Format-List
Divers have located the wreck of the Lac La Belle, a luxury steamer that vanished in a violent gale in 1872, a discovery that came after nearly six decades of organized searching. //
The Lac La Belle left Milwaukee on October 13, 1872, bound for Grand Haven, Michigan. Captain William Gilcher commanded the ship that, along with passengers, carried barley, pork, flour, and whiskey.
A gale caused massive waves that battered the hull. A quickly spreading leak filled the hold, and when the pumps failed, the vessel sank stern-first into about 300 feet of water. //
Luke Warm
a day ago
I left Marquette Mi. the day the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost. My sister who lived there recommended I check out Presque Isle on my way back. I thought I was about to die. My car looked like it survived a roller over. The waves kept pushing me into the rocks, and the retreating waves trying to suck me into Superior. The Mackinaw bridge closed less than an hr after I crossed it heading south. The bridge looked like to world's biggest swing. I learned very quickly that you do not steer when the road your on is swinging. //
Shadd
20 hours ago
I've been to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, up at Whitefish Point, MI. It's about 45 mins north of the Mackinac Bridge. I highly recommend it. //
Hank Reardon
16 hours ago
Readers interested in Great Lakes shipping and shipwreck history might also be interested in visiting the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center at Thunder Bay, Michigan.
https://thunderbay.noaa.gov/visit/great-lakes-maritime-heritage-center.html
Also, unrelated to Great Lakes shipwrecks but equally fascinating is the display of cargo from the 1865 wreck of the Missouri river steamboat Bertrand, discovered in 1968. The large amount of freight bound for the goldfields of Montana captures a snapshot of life in America and is meticulously displayed at the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, on the Missouri River north of Omaha.
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/desoto/steamboat-bertrand
Academics say they found a series of flaws affecting three popular password managers, all of which claim to protect user credentials in the event that their servers are compromised.
The team, comprised of researchers from ETH Zurich and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), examined the "zero-knowledge encryption" promises made by Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane, finding all three could expose passwords if attackers compromised servers. //
As one of the most popular alternatives to Apple and Google's own password managers, which together dominate the market, the researchers found Bitwarden was most susceptible to attacks, with 12 working against the open-source product. Seven distinct attacks worked against LastPass, and six succeeded in Dashlane.
The Depenguinator, version 2.0
In December 2003, I wrote a script for remotely upgrading a linux system to FreeBSD. I gave it a catchy name ("depenguinator", inspired by the "Antichickenator" in Baldur's Gate), announced it on a FreeBSD mailing list and on slashdot, and before long it was famous. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for changes in the layout of FreeBSD releases to make the depenguination script stop working; so for the past three years I have been receiving emails asking me to update it to work with newer FreeBSD releases.
A few weeks ago, Richard Bejtlich came forward with an offer to pay me to make the necessary improvements (money doesn't solve everything, but offering money certainly helps break the "I'll do it when I have some free time" / "I never have any free time" deadlock). In the end I asked him to arrange for a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation instead of paying me, but his offer was enough of a prompt for me to spend ten hours revising and testing the depenguinator.
Many computer systems around the world have been possessed by penguins; some have even been possessed by dead rats. In light of this, it is desireable to exorcize these evil spirits, and replace them with a nice, friendly daemon.
(More to the point, there are a number of dedicated server hosting companies which only offer Linux (or, in some cases, Linux and Windows); being able to remotely replace Linux with FreeBSD makes the (typically very low cost) offerings from these companies available to those who want to run FreeBSD.
I've put together some code for building a FreeBSD disk image which will boot into memory, configure the network, set a root password, and enable SSH. This can be used to "depenguinate" a Linux box, without requiring any access beyond a network connection.
The remainder of this page relates to the original (December 2003) version of my depenguinator. For a more recent version (which works with FreeBSD 7.0) see my blog post about my depenguinator version 2.0.
To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off. //
Molecular batteries, in principle, are extremely good at storing energy. Heating oil, arguably the most popular molecular battery we use for heating, is essentially ancient solar energy stored in chemical bonds. Its energy density stands at around 40 Megajoules per kilo. To put that in perspective, Li-ion batteries usually pack less than one MJ/kg. One of the problems with heating oil, though, is that it is single-use only—it gets burnt when you use it. What Nguyen and her colleagues aimed to achieve with their DNA-inspired substance is essentially a reusable fuel. //
The researchers achieved an energy storage density of 1.65 MJ/kg—nearly double the capacity of Li-ion batteries and substantially higher than any previous MOST material. //
One of the biggest fears with chemical storage is thermal reversion—the fuel spontaneously discharges because it got a little too warm in the storage tank. But the Dewar isomers of the pyrimidones are incredibly stable. The researchers calculated a half-life of up to 481 days at room temperature for some derivatives. This means the fuel could be charged in the heat of July, and it would remain fully charged when you need to heat your home in January. The degradation figures also look decent for a MOST energy storage. The team ran the system through 20 charge-discharge cycles with negligible decay. //
Still, we’re rather far away using MOST systems for heating actual homes. To get there, we’re going to need molecules that absorb far more of the light spectrum and convert to the activated state with a higher efficiency. We’re just not there yet.
Emotion and character are what we remember… not spectacle. At best, spectacle is salt on a good steak.
On the other end of the spectrum, necessity is said to be the mother of invention, and nowhere have we seen this old axiom play out more often than in the movies. Magic happens at the movies most reliably when filmmakers do not have unlimited resources from which to draw, and must find creative ways to “make do” instead.
The most famous example is “Jaws.” As the legend goes, Steven Spielberg’s rubber shark, named “Bruce” after his lawyer, was chronically broken and so Spielberg had to figure out ways to suggest or imply the shark’s presence in scenes without the audience being able to actually see it. The result was a brilliantly understated thriller that plays more like Hitchcock than Roland Emmerich.
All of which cries out for a question be asked… what if bigger isn’t better?
Mini Foldable Desktop Mop – Your Everyday Wet & Dry Cleaning Companion
Make quick cleanups effortless with the Mini Foldable Desktop Mop. Lightweight, portable, and designed for everyday convenience, this compact mop is perfect for countertops, desks, glass surfaces, bathrooms, and even car interiors. It folds neatly for easy storage and features a built-in self-squeezing mechanism to keep your hands clean at all times.
Meet Snappy Tail, the upgraded interactive cat toy designed to keep your cat active, engaged, and entertained — even when you’re not home. Engineered with a high-performance 12,000 RPM motor and smart motion modes, Snappy Tail delivers unpredictable, prey-like movements that satisfy your cat’s natural hunting instincts.
If the president wants to revive the Navy’s surface fleet, he could look to Asian partners to assist in building a reasonably priced and proven multi-mission frigate, such as the South Korean FFX Batch IV class or the Japanese upgraded Mogami class frigates.
Both of these ship designs meet the Navy’s warfighting-capability needs in a cost-effective manner.
This sort of partnership can be modeled on the president’s icebreaker deal with Finland: Build the first few warships in Asia, while training US workers there, then build the remaining 20-plus ships at an existing US military or commercial shipyard modernized with Korean or Japanese technology and processes.
Another opportunity for Asian partnership is in building support vessels — ammunition ships, refueling ships, hydrographic ships, etc.
When the Navy had 600 ships, 200 were support vessels — historically, they’ve been about 30% of the fleet.
As the Navy tries to grow back to 350 or 400 ships, it’ll need 100 to 125 support vessels to meet this ratio. Today, it has only 65.
Yet existing US military shipyards are not scaled to build these, and when they try, they tend to deliver them at double the cost of Korean or Japanese shipyards.
The most expensive element in the Golden Fleet plans is the Navy’s next generation of “large surface combatant,” and this design has also veered off course.
With unprecedented input from the president, the design morphed from a 15,000-ton destroyer to a supersized 35,000-ton “battleship,” likely costing $20 billion for the first ship and $13 billion per follow-on.
For the lower of those prices, you could buy five Aegis-equipped destroyers (DDGs).
And with the “battleship,” the Navy would get only 140 missile cells (as opposed to 480 cells with those DDGs) and one AEGIS air-defense system (as opposed to five with the DDGs).
At a time when the Navy needs to boost capabilities, an oversized ship like the battleship is tactically regressive, and consolidates more eggs in one basket.
A more effective way to maintain America’s dominance in large surface combatants is a three-pronged strategy. //
The president knows he needs to invest in a Navy, but if he wants to get the Golden Fleet right, he should reject much of what he’s hearing from the Pentagon and look to his Asian allies for help.
Belligerent bot bullies maintainer in blog post to get its way
20:47 UTC
Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him.
The bot, designated MJ Rathbun or crabby rathbun (its GitHub account name), apparently attempted to change Shambaugh's mind by publicly criticizing him in a now-removed blog post that the automated software appears to have generated and posted to its website. We say "apparently" because it's also possible that the human who created the agent wrote the post themselves, or prompted an AI tool to write the post, and made it look like it the bot constructed it on its own.
The agent appears to have been built using OpenClaw, an open source AI agent platform that has attracted attention in recent weeks due to its broad capabilities and extensive security issues.
The burden of AI-generated code contributions – known as pull requests among developers using the Git version control system – has become a major problem for open source maintainers. Evaluating lengthy, high-volume, often low-quality submissions from AI bots takes time that maintainers, often volunteers, would rather spend on other tasks. Concerns about slop submissions – whether from people or AI models – have become common enough that GitHub recently convened a discussion to address the problem.
Now AI slop comes with an AI slap.
But I cannot stress enough how much this story is not really about the role of AI in open source software. This is about our systems of reputation, identity, and trust breaking down. So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth.
The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system. Whether that’s because from a small number of bad actors driving large swarms of agents or from a fraction of poorly supervised agents rewriting their own goals, is a distinction with little difference.
Users running a Linux system hardly pay attention to the underlying filesystem. In fact, during the installation of Linux, there’s a tendency to often go with the default filesystem listed without exploring other available options. For windows, things are a lot easier since NTFS is the dominant filesystem. With Linux, there are numerous filesystems at your disposal. These include the Ext4, XFS, ZFS, and BTRFS.
The most widely used filesystems are Ext4 and XFS, with the latter being the default filesystem in RHEL-based distros and Ext4 being the standard filesystem in Debian and Ubuntu distributions. When choosing a filesystem some of the factors that need to be considered include scalability, stability, and data integrity.
In this guide, we will focus on Ext4 and XFS filesystems and seek to understand the differences between these two.
If you see a message like this in your logs:
ext4 filesystem being mounted at /boot supports timestamps until 2038 (0x7fffffff)```it's an indication that your filesystem is not Y2k38-safe.
You can also check this manually using:
$ tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep "Inode size:"
Inode size: 128where an inode size of 128 is insufficient beyond 2038 and an inode size of 256 is what you want.
The safest way to change this is to copy the contents of your partition to another ext4 partition:
...
An easier method (but caution):
e2fsck -f /dev/sda1 tune2fs -I 256 /dev/sda1