firecall

Powerline Networking is what you are referring too.

Still available today, and has worked well for me when I've needed it.

Maybe I missed it, but the introduction doesn't explain the point that "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" is just a play on "Six Degrees of Separation".

Also, people don't casually swing by my house and start using my electricity.

So my powerbills are predictable.

Whereas traffic spikes to websites are not.

This age of abusive AI crawlers and the non-revenue generating traffic has been a very real problem for me!

That is not true of Australia consumers.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/04/ev-sales...

Another up-vote from me for Plexamp.

I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.

Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!

I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...

>It is already on par with senior programmer if the instruction/prompt is right.

It's magical to me as well, but I don't feel like it's AGI.

Because in my experience a Senior Programmer does not need the right prompts to deliver the right outcome! :-)

I'm more of an optimist!

We've been here before with Windows and IE dominance!

IE peaked at ~95% market share, and windows peaked at ~97%.

Broadly it seems to me that Google is behaving much like MS did.

But who knows, everything is the same and different this time around.

My guess is that it wouldn’t be TB sized files.

It’s probably files that, over the course of a month, add up to multiple TBs.

Which would suggest that a 1Gbit fibre connection would be adequate. For serious commercial usage, multi Gbit fibre is available in many places around the world.

Although being video files, they could easily be in the TB range. In which case, it would be interesting to know!

And there I was wondering about used missiles!

Apparently, I googled, “expended ordnance” is the term.

Cot.

Chain of Thought?

For a school laptop it’s a unfortunate omission IMHO.

Cheap wired headphones are the default choice in the classroom, in my experience.

Bluetooth headphones that need charging aren’t really what you want.

It’s easy enough to get cheap USB headphone adapter, but still, I t would nice if it was built in.

Apple knows what they are doing sometimes it seems! :-)

This is my current use case.

My reading of what Google are saying is that yes, that feature is going away.

Gah!

But one of the key benefits of this is obscuring what my actual Gmail address is!

I don’t want to use my Gmail address as my main email address. Even if it’s just for personal usage.

I don’t want people knowing what my Gmail account is.

And what happens if I do use my Gmail for everything and Google decides to lock me out of my account….

So are Google wrecking peoples Gmail account setups just to push people into paying for their Google Workspace product?

This industry wide obsession with squeezing revenue out of every little corner of services is exhausting and exasperating.

Wow, that National Museum of American History website is time capsule!

Preserved in pristine condition since the year 2000!

Rember when Adobe tried to stop people saying images had been “Photoshopped”?

Well, be careful what you wish for Adobe!

Now everyone just says an image is AI, and something being Photoshopped is a distant memory.

RIP Photoshopped Images.

On a similar note, I still do not understand why I have to plug a USB Flash Drive into my Mac twice for it to mount.

I take modern USB-C Flash Drive, plug it into my Mac. Nothing. Take it out, plug it in again, and it mounts just fine.

Same with SD Cards.

I have no idea why this is, and I'm not sure if it's always been this way, but I can't remember a time when I didn't have to do this.

Must be staged?

That’s the first one I saw too.

I’m not even convinced these are all real, or at least are staged:

https://ipcrawl.com/?page=6&cam=63f7feaf5042d223

That’s the invisible man hanging out at a tennis match…

The kids today will never know the horrors!

I used to have SCSI Terminators in my tech support bag. I still have some somewhere…

And the size and thickness of some of those SCSI cables!

SCSI my old friend!

Much of the black magic art of Mac support back in the 80s and 90s was getting SCSI chains sorted out!

Sorting out the device order, swapping out cables, that sort of thing.

I once spoke to a client who said they’d been happily running a single external SCSI drive hooked up to two Macs at the same time….

> The entire point is to gain control over internet traffic.

I see many arguments claiming it's about mass surveillance and an invasion of privacy and so on.

We already have mass surveillance, so I don't really buy into those arguments.

I think it's worth considering that it is actually about control. Or more precisely, that it's about dissuading citizens from using social media in the first place.

The damage done to our western democracies from misinformation spread via social media has not gone unnoticed...

Where is that quote from?

I can’t see it in the article when reading on my phone?

Didn't we call this Retail Therapy in the '90s?

Indeed.

Here in Australia, the local and state governments push the use of their Apps as well.

These Apps provide access to identity documents, offical notifications, and messages for health, benefits and taxation purposes.

Then there is Banking and the issues around becoming a cashless digital society…

It’s become less about access to hardware devices, as useable devices can often be free when donated by a friend or relative, and more about continuity of access to your digital life.

The risk of losing access to your online identity or having it stolen are very real with often traumatic results for individuals.

Is the "$ Spent on AI since page load" broadly indicative of spend at all, or just a fun animation?

It seems you can use the Claude Code CLI harness without a Claude Pro subscription now, which I don't think you could a before?

I've been using Deepseek v4 with Cline in VS Code as a replacement for Github Copilot, and it's not been too bad.

Back in the old days we needed to make an Ethernet Crossover Cable to get this to work.

Modern ethernet supports Auto MDI-X, which manages that automagically for you.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_crossover_cable