Hypertension alerts on the new Apple Watch are a great step as hypertension is often underdiagnosed. If you get an alert, see a doctor. To double-check, use a validated blood pressure cuff from a pharmacy. If readings stay high, go see your Doc.

In the US, YouTube rolled out an age estimation tool that estimates the viewer’s age from their viewing history. If it judges you to be a teen, you get put in the teen bucket, and some content is restricted. To remove the teen flag, YouTube wants a credit card, a government ID, or a selfie.

Microsoft joins the World Nuclear Association, Google and Amazon invest in Small Modular Reactor (SMR) technology. The first deployments of SMRs could be used to power AI anime waifu chatbots.

Satellite TV was revolutionary in Europe, but in Ireland & the UK, its days are numbered. The Astra satellites at 28.2°E, are nearing the end of their service lives, and KA-Sat 9A (Saorsat in Ireland) ends its service life around 2026. You may have to talk to your Granny about IPTV soon.

The European Processor Initiative has developed its first ARM based European designed microprocessor (Rhea) and RISC-V vector/stencil/tensor accelerator chip (EPAC). No path to consumer commercialisation that I can see. That’s going to make TMSC charge an arm and a leg for fabbing low volume parts.

It’s remarkable that PowerPC is dead in the consumer market. At one point, it was in the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii all at the same time. ~300M units in homes. Now we’ve got x86-64 or ARM. Maybe you’ll get a RISC-V CPU on the controller of your next SSD. Maybe you won’t.

The internal battery of my Sega Saturn has gone kaput. So tonight I party like it’s 1994.

IPV6 is now the infrastructure protocol of the Internet, and most end users never noticed. HTTP3 is built into all Chrome-derived web browsers. It’s been in web servers since 2019. Handsets will make it the default. And most users will never notice. Except for their page loads getting faster.

20 a month for access to AI has created history’s largest beta test group. I think mass exposure is a good thing, as the more people use it, the better they’ll get at detecting when AI starts making things up. There’s a point where you can almost feel it collapse under its context window.

Having looked at several different public DNS resolvers I can say that those who have DNS Over TLS running correctly are the large operations (money to hire nerds with OCD) and the one person outfits (has nerd OCD). There’s a lot of poorly configured junk out there from those providers in between.

The male urge to stay up all night putting 10Gbps Ethernet into the house and building a DNS resolver & cache “because if I dumped that hardware it would just be e-waste anyway.”

Then I watched this week’s episode of Foundation, where none of my networking changes mattered.

Larry Ellison’s dream of revolutionizing agriculture on his private island of Lanai has led to one of Hawaii’s most expensive produce offerings: lettuce, which is priced at $24 per pound.

The Oracle database was a hell of a trick. But Larry has a disease where he thinks he can repeat it on anything.

I’m impressed by the HD remaster of The X-Files on streaming. I was never a “monster of the week” series fan so I skipped it when it first aired, but this show now looks pristine. It’s a great looking procedural TV time capsule show.

It’s amazing that the Atari ST had such an effect on 80s and 90s music. Some engineer pitched building in MIDI because it was a cheap differentiator versus the Amiga. That gave bedroom musicians a digital music studio in a box. Wintel killed the ST. Internet piracy nearly killed the music biz.

I remember mocking No Man’s Sky when it first came out. It was janky and felt small. I’m not laughing now. It’s possibly had the best comeback in gaming history.

Weird streaming issue where some services claimed to be having technical issues. Quad9 was routing my IPv6 DNS lookups to a resolver of theirs in the US. DNS0.eu routes it just up the road from here and the streams are flowing. I’ll use that for now.

Today is failed hard drive destruction day. Which involves a Torx 6 & 8 set of screwdrivers to get into the case and then a hammer to finish off the platters. Five down, three to go.

Thomas Harris: Red Dragon

Media has made killers cute. We've given them sardonic voice overs in TV shows. Some have become "I can fix them" characters in books. They'll kill only the bad people, or so the authors would have us believe. That's not how these people work. The reality is that everyone around a serial killer will be in some way damaged or destroyed by them. Other people's pain is their point.

Red Dragon, written in 1981, doesn't do cute. In this book anyone who brushes by evil or confronts it ends up in a worse position afterwards. How could it be otherwise when facing sociopaths and sadists? Someone has to take the blows from these people and in FBI Profiler, Will Graham's case it's him. Graham is intelligent, empathetic and a sacrificial lamb.

Will Graham can put himself in the predator's shoes. He figures out their motivations and the actions those motivations will drive. This puts a distance between him and regular people as he fears he's one degree of separation from the savages he hunts. The problem for Graham is that the predators take as much of an interest in him as he does in them. 

An imprisoned former psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter being Graham's most dangerous fan. Lecter here is a supporting character who acts as an evil force. Early on in the book he's offended by Graham's aftershave, I'm convinced the chaos he causes for Graham later is to drive a change of cologne.

A set of brutal family murders by a killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy, later revealed to be the Red Dragon, has Graham looking for a way into the killer's mind. Lecter gives it to him, and by extension us. It's the strength of the writing that you can empathise with the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, as a result of the abuse he suffered since birth. Then despise him for his insane and murderous actions in the same paragraph.

This is a good book. It's well written, its use of words is tight, and it pushes the realism of the situation by delivering no catharsis. Good people do everything right here and they still lose. I was going to plunge into The Silence Of The Lambs straight after this but right now I don't want to. Next I'll read something where good triumphs and evil is defeated. You know, something not realistic at all.   

Dante: The Divine Comedy

When Dante wrote this narrative poem he did so in Italian instead of Latin to make it as accessible as possible. Alas, I can't read 14th century Italian so I have to depend on translators and their copious amount of footnotes. Over the past 700 years the footnotes have piled up at the bottom of the page like centuries of snow. Dante would be horrified.

Ignoring the opinions of academics and slogging my way through the translated poem, this is a groundbreaking piece of creativity. Dante the author was convicted and sentenced to death by burning on invented charges. He fled his native Florence and never gets to return. In the poem Dante the character, one of literature's most famous self-inserts, considers suicide because of his miserable circumstances. The spirit of the Roman poet Virgil appears to Dante at the request of Dante's great unconsummated love, the deceased Lady Beatrice.

Virgil and Dante travel together as they descend into the circles of hell (Inferno) where Dante meets murdered adulterers forever tossed around by the hurricane winds of lust. Gluttons drowning in excrement. Betrayers feeding on each other and even Satan himself. Climbing down the frozen body of Satan, they pass through the centre of the world and "climb up" one of his legs where they exit onto the shores of purgatory.

In the second book, Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil summit Mount Purgatory. A climb of spiritual rebirth where those capable of change work on overcoming whichever of the seven deadly sins they were guilty of in life. The climb up the cornices of Mount Purgatory is difficult and this is where some readers fall away. After the grotesque punishments of the first book this book presents hopeful struggles that can make a reader melancholy. Purgatory is for the flawed, you may see yourself working your way through a penance for decades in the hope of reaching paradise. I found the second book to be the most..human.

The final book, Paradiso, is a leap into the divine. A literal leap as Dante flies from the summit of Mount Purgatory and journeys through the nine spheres of heaven. A mortal visitor allowed to question the nature of God, faith, hope and love. This book is heavy on the theology and gets more abstract the closer Dante gets to becoming part of the eternal. Dante the author does a great job conveying what a mortal mind might think it sees the closer it gets to God.

Like Dante's own journey, making it from Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso was a journey for me. It was a good one. Should you read it? If you feel you need to. You need an internal motivation to sustain you through works like this. I closed a page somewhere on Mount Purgatory decades ago and it took all this time to come back, start again and get to the end. I don't regret the wait; I was finally ready to start and finish.

Lorde’s transparent CD for her latest album is giving older players fits. Because it’s not a CD. It doesn’t have the Compact Disc logo. It’s a low reflectivity disc being used in a laser reader that requires reflectivity. It probably leans heavily on modern CD player error correction just to work.