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The Elzetta Alpha A323 has been part of my EDC for 2 years now. For all but a few weeks of that time I’ve been carrying it on my belt with a Prometheus Lights Titanium Pocket Clip, which works great on the Alpha. I changed over to the Raven Concealment Systems Pocket Clip to get the finger ring, which is just a large rubber O-ring that allows you to use your hands for something else without dropping the light.
Starting with the recent Tesla crash caused by the car’s inability to discern the tractor against the bright sky, Geoff discusses how the spread of robots may force us to rebuild our environment – either to support their perceptual systems or hinder them. It’s an interesting idea to ponder, particularly within the context of the rise of drones. Readers of Daniel Suarez can sleep easier at night knowing that razorbacks can probably be defeated with a few mirrors and rubber.
One possible line of defense—among many, of course—would be to redesign your city, even down to the interior of your own home, such that machine vision is constantly confused there. You thus rebuild the world using light-absorbing fabrics and reflective ornament, installing projections and mirrors, screens and smoke. Or “stealth objects” and radar-baffling architectural geometries. A military robot wheeling its way into your home thus simply gets lost there, stuck in a labyrinth of perceptual convolution and reflection-implied rooms that don’t exist.
The book presents a fictionalized portrait of the life of Miyamoto Musashi. It is an epic novel, exploring the development of many of the concepts and themes which Musashi codified at the end of his life in The Book of Five Rings.
It’s 2016, and stuffing cash in an envelope and mailing it to a small island nation is sometimes still the best way to move money with some degree of privacy.
This is not the cyberpunk dystopia I was promised.
A few weeks ago I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X260, replacing the T430s that has been my daily driver since 2012. I’m a big fan of the simplicity, ruggedness and modularity of Thinkpads. It used to be that one of the only downsides to Thinkpads were the terrible screens, but that has been addressed by the X260’s FHD display. The high resolution let me move from the 14” display of the T430s to the 12.5” display of the X260 without feeling like I’ve lost anything, but with an obvious gain in portability. The X260 is a great machine to put Linux on, which Spark helps me to do with no effort and a minimum expenditure of time.
In his decade at the FBI, Soufan developed an expertise in al-Qadea, investigating the Kenyan embassy bombing, Jordan millennium pole, attack on the USS Cole, and the September 11th attacks. The book is a history of al-Qaeda, beginning with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, as well as a memoir of the author’s experience investigating the organization. It is a well-written, intriguing read that offers a different insight into familiar stories. I was inspired to read it after subscribing to the The Soufan Group‘s daily IntelBriefs and have not been disappointed.
Four encrypted 2TB hard drives, stored in a Pelican 1200, with Abloy Protec2 PL 321 padlocks as tamper-evident seals. Having everything that matters stored in git-annex makes projects like this simple: just clone the repositories, define the preferred content expressions, and watch the magic happen.
