tal @ tal @olio.cafe

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2 wk. ago

I wonder if that's because they're exporting gasoline rather than making it available there.

kagis

No. Apparently a few days back, the Kremlin also banned exports.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/25/world/russia-export-fuel-ban-ukranian-drones-intl

Kremlin bans fuel exports until the end of the year as Russia’s supply is disrupted by Ukrainian drones

So I assume that they can't actually even produce enough for domestic use at this point.

EDIT: Nah, the shortages are specific to Crimea, so it's probably a logistics breakdown there. Looking back over the article:

As The Bell notes, Crimea is also facing additional challenges due to severe weather conditions near the Kerch Strait, further complicating supply lines and exacerbating the fuel deficit. This is the first time such restrictions have been imposed on fuel sales to private individuals in the region.

This was from a month back, saying that at that point, they had a 20% margin and that if there was actually a domstic shortfall, then they'd expect rationing:

https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/08/russia-war-gasoline-problem?lang=en

On top of this, annual gasoline production in Russia exceeds domestic demand by up to 20 percent...

If the worst comes to the worst, a crisis measure would be gasoline rationing.

You'd expect nationwide rationing rather than just rationing in Crimea in that case. Has burned through their supply for export, though, or they wouldn't have cut that off.

Speaking of Bethesda, Fallout 4's scaling turned enemies into stupendous bullet sponges at very high levels. I mean, I get that it's hard to increase difficulty wirhout limit, but it just wasn't very much fun to keep pouring immense amounts of ammunition into very high level enemies.

I still like them, though they aren't as novel as when computers really got the resources to open up the world.

For non-procedurally-generated-world games (e.g. Minecraft-type games), though, they require a large budget to do well, and not many games have the required budget to fill a large map.

I liked Ratslayer, also from Fallout: New Vegas. A varmint rifle with high critical damage, low base damage, night optics. Neat area to find the thing and hunting it down had its own quest. Just felt satisfying.

Yeah, came here to say this. East Asia has a whole collection of sauces based on fermented fish that taste amazing and have no offensive smell when cooked, but dear God, the smell of the stuff before it's cooked is horrifying.

Like, being able to cast a spell once or twice before needing to rest at camp feels weird to me.

It's a Dungeons&Dragons -ism. Spells need to have some sort of limitations, and I think that the rise of mana/spell power/energy, another popular convention for constraining spells, post-dates Dungeons & Dragons. And Dungeons & Dragons never dropped the "rest to re-acquire spells" convention.

Could also play non-spellcasters, if you don't like the spell mechanics. I haven't played through all of BG3, but everything I've read is that it's pretty viable to play well with any party composition that you want.

Yeah, I saw, but it's an interesting topic.

Is your concern compromise of your data or loss of the server?

My guess is that most burglaries don't wind up with people trying to make use of the data on computers.

As to loss, I mean, do an off-site backup of stuff that you can't handle losing and in the unlikely case that it gets stolen, be prepared to replace hardware.

If you just want to keep the hardware out of sight and create a minimal barrier, you can get locking, ventillated racks. I don't know how cost-effective that is; I'd think that that might cost more than the expected value of the loss from theft. If a computer costs $1000 and you have a 1% chance of it being stolen, you should not spend more than $10 on prevention in terms of reducing cost of hardware loss, even if that method is 100% effective.

Wikipedia: Mantrap (snare)

Mantraps that use deadly force are illegal in the United States, and in notable tort law cases the trespasser has successfully sued the property owner for damages caused by the mantrap. There is also the possibility that such traps could endanger emergency service personnel such as firefighters who must forcefully enter such buildings during emergencies. As noted in the important American court case of Katko v. Briney, "the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights of property".[5]

EDIT: I'd add that I don't know about the "life always takes precedence over property" statement; Texas has pretty permissive use of deadly force in defense of property. However, I don't think that anywhere in the US permits traps that make use of deadly force.

I'd bet against Sweden starting a nuclear weapons program, at least at a national level, but if they do, I have to say that this is going on the "why invading Ukraine has been pretry counterproductive in terms of Russia's security" list.

Looking at Double Dragon, it looks like they still have a 2023 entry, Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons. It appears to be out for console, so I assume that it supports local multiplayer, and it sounds like they had a release that added and online cooperative multiplayer.

Bubble Bobble 4 Friends apparently supports local multiplayer.

I wasn't that impressed with the last Contra game I played, but Contra: Operation Galaga says that it supports local multiplayer.

It looks like the most-recent game in the series containing Secret of Mana is the 2024 Visions of Mana, which doesn't have multiplayer. However, there is a 2014 Rise of Mana, which does (albeit not on a single shared screen). I'm also pretty sure that some SNES emulators support remote multiplayer, though I'd guess that on anything other than a pretty low-latency connection, you're going to inevitably feel the latency, as I don't think that it's likely technically viable to do reasonable client-side prediction without support from the game.

kagis

It looks like there are SNES emulators that do apparently provide support via some sort of save-state synchronization. I expect that this is probably not the best-performing system, but it does exist.

I don't know about number one, but a few that I miss.

• freshmeat.net. Announcements of open source software releases and updates.
• newegg.com --- computer components retailer --- is still around, but it doesn't hold the spot it once did.
• bash.org. Searchable list of funny, ranked quotes from IRC and similar. There are some archives, like this one.
• A few "hosting" sites that went down with a lot of user-created content. No one thing was amazing, maybe, but it produced a lot of dangling links. Geocities: "At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated.[7] The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.[8]". AngelFire. Tripod. Apparently the latter two are still around in some limited form.
• Kaleidoscope.net, a site featuring themes for the eponymous classic MacOS themeing software package. They did a good job of generating theme previews. Fun to browse through.

There are a few people running telnet-connected BBSes on the Internet.

kagis

Ah, someone has a list.

https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

The Telnet BBS Guide focuses Bulletin Board Systems – the original Social Network, serving the BBS community for over 27 years! We list both Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin Board Systems all over the world. We currently list 976 BBS and related systems with brief and detailed descriptions and a downloadable text-version listing suitable for listing on your BBS or for as a download for others to view and use.

Medicine to alleviate cold and flu symptoms, at least in the US. Dunno what global availability is like or if it's branded the same way elsewhere.

If you aren't specifically thinking of something that you remember and just want some sort of story that has all these elements, I think that you might want to look into LLM generation of stories.

It might be that it's taking into account how recently you used the thing or something.

As long as any infrastructure used to hint to the indexing engine that its index is dirty to avoid fully-rescanning the filesystem occasionally is available to non-Apple software, I assume that you could just use a different software package for this.

kagis

I haven't used any of these, and can't recommend them, but it looks like Mac developers have built alternatives:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spotlight-alternatives-mac-search/

I mostly use plocate on my Linux machine if I want to do a search across filenames on the filesystem as a whole.

Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.

I'm not saying that there's no magical thinking with cars --- "my magical fuel additive" or whatever --- but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.

It's also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.

I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you'd think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.

You might want to list the platform you want to use it on. I'm assuming that you're wanting to access this on a smartphone of some sort?

Why are you tasting DayQuil at all? My experience is that it comes in gel capsules that you swallow whole. Is there a liquid form?

kagis

Ah. Apparently yes.

https://vicks.com/en-us/shop-products/dayquil/dayquil-cold-flu-relief-liquid

You might want to try the liquid caps. No taste:

https://vicks.com/en-us/shop-products/dayquil/dayquil-severe-cough-cold-flu-daytime-relief-liquicaps-16ct

This will increase your privacy by protecting you from ISP web traffic analysis. It does this by generating fake DNS and HTTP request.

If you're the kind of attacker in a position to be doing traffic analysis in the first place, I suspect that there are a number of ways to filter this sort of thing out. And it's fundamentally only generating a small amount of noise. I suspect that most people who would be worried about traffic analysis are less worried about someone monitoring their traffic knowing that it's really 20% of their traffic going to particular-domain.com instead of just 2% of their traffic, and more that they don't know it to be known that they're talking to particular-domain.com at all.

For DNS, I think that most users are likely better-off either using a VPN to a VPN provider that they're comfortable with, DNS-over-HTTP, or DNSSEC.

HTTPS itself will protect a lot of information, though not the IP address being connected to (which is a significant amount of information, especially with the move to IPv6), analysis of the encrypted data being requested (which I'm sure could be fingerprinted to some degree for specific sites to get some limited idea of what a user is doing even inside an encrypted tunnel). A VPN is probably the best bet to deal with an ISP that might be monitoring traffic.

There are also apparently some attempts at addressing the fact that TLS's SNI exposes domain names in clear text to someone monitoring a connection --- so someone may not know exactly what you're sending, but knowing the domain you're connecting to may itself be an issue.

In a quick test, whatever attempts to mitigate this have actually been deployed, SNI still seems to expose the domain in plaintext for the random sites that I tried.

        $ sudo tcpdump -w packets.pcap port https  


  

<browses to a few test websites in Chromium, since I'm typing this in Firefox, then kills off tcpdump process>

        $ tshark -r packets.pcap -2 -R ssl.handshake.extensions_server_name  


  

I see microsoft.com, google.com, olio.cafe (my current home instance), and cloudflare.net have plaintext SNI entries show up. My guess is that if they aren't deploying something to avoid exposure of their domain name, most sites probably aren't either.

In general, if you're worried about your ISP snooping on your traffic, my suggestion is that the easiest fix is probably to choose a VPN provider that you do trust and pass your traffic through that VPN. The VPN provider will know who you're talking to, but you aren't constrained by geography in VPN provider choice, unlike ISP choice. If you aren't willing to spend anything on this, maybe something like Tor, I2P, or, if you can avoid the regular Web entirely for whatever your use case is, even Hyphanet.