Brutkey

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social
Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

Apparently I accidentally blocked mastodon.social on the 4th December. Sorry about that.

Have just managed to recover the people I unfollowed, but can't recover the people who were following me - I had no idea server blocking actually terminates relationships!

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

Oh you think your Home Assistant install is cursed?

A friend of mine has a broken fridge thermostat. For the last year it has been regulated by Home Assistant using a zigbee temperature sensor, turning the entire fridge off and on with a smart plug. He likes this.

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

Idiots: "The arts have no purpose"

Me:

Saved by Stoppard Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: "If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of "adjuvant systemic chemotherapy", and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients' survival. Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia. Michael Baum Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

Good morning from this row of excited boxes

A row of boxes which all look delighted due to the holes looking like faces
Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

FISH HEIST FISH HEIST

A screenshot of a Wikipedia article: Credit card fraud Black neon tetras committed credit card fraud during a 2023 livestream by "Mutekimaru Channel" on YouTube. The owner was using motion-tracking software to turn the fishes' movements into Nintendo Switch inputs, letting them "play" video games.[8] In 2020, the fish beat Pokemon Sapphire after 3,195 hours, a feat that takes about 30 hours for a typical human.[9][8] On January 14, 2023, Pokémon Violet crashed at 1,144 hours, giving the fish free access to the main menu. They entered inputs that opened Nintendo eShop, added 500 yen ($3.85 USD) to their owner's account, and exposed his credit card details on the livestream.[10][11] Mutekimaru later requested a refund of the 500 yen from Nintendo.[12] "Fish eagerly read the terms and conditions. Many of us humans don't read the terms of service, but fish are smarter than we are" – caption from Mutekimaru in a video about the incident[12] The fish also downloaded an N64 emulator, set up PayPal, used reward points to buy an avatar, and changed Mutekimaru's Nintendo account name to "ROWAWAWAWA¥".[13] After about seven hours, their movements shut down the Switch.
Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

TIL "Gardens of the World" in Berlin has detailed replicas of foreign horticultural parks.

Los Angeles is represented by six palm trees behind a chain-link fence in the car park

A car park, with cars in it. Between the cars is a square patch of grass with a chain-link fence around it, containing six large palm trees
Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

For what it's worth, we made the same error on the @emf@social.emfcamp.org 2014 badge using unprotected lipo pouches. Never again.

That event was only ~1000 people and we had at least three instances of batteries emitting smoke #why2025

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

Apparently the Lime Bike unlock system has been cracked for months - all the people now riding around on beeping bikes unlocked them via a telegram bot that takes crypto.

This is incredible.

Jonty Wareing
@jonty@chaos.social

It has been 0 days since I started a new project I absolutely do not have time for