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1326
A man is driving down the road and breaks down near a monastery. He goes to the monastery, knocks on the door, and says, “My car broke down. Do you think I could stay the night?”

The monks graciously accept him, feed him dinner, even fix his car. As the man tries to fall asleep, he hears a strange sound.

The next morning, he asks the monks what the sound was, but they say, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”

The man is disappointed but thanks them anyway and goes about his merry way.

Some years later, the same man breaks down in front of the same monastery.

The monks accept him, feed him, even fix his car. That night, he hears the same strange noise that he had heard years earlier.

The next morning, he asks what it is, but the monks reply, “We can’t tell you. You’re not a monk.”

The man says, “All right, all right. I’m dying to know. If the only way I can find out what that sound was is to become a monk, how do I become a monk?”

The monks reply, “You must travel the earth and tell us how many blades of grass there are and the exact number of sand pebbles. When you find these numbers, you will become a monk.”

The man sets about his task. Forty-five years later, he returns and knocks on the door of the monastery. He says, “I have traveled the earth and have found what you have asked for. There are 145,236,284,232 blades of grass and 231,281,219,999,129,382 sand pebbles on the earth.”

The monks reply, “Congratulations. You are now a monk. We shall now show you the way to the sound.”

The monks lead the man to a wooden door, where the head monk says, “The sound is right behind that door.”

The man reaches for the knob, but the door is locked. He says, “Real funny. May I have the key?”

The monks give him the key, and he opens the door.

Behind the wooden door is another door made of stone.

The man demands the key to the stone door.

The monks give him the key, and he opens it, only to find a door made of ruby.

He demands another key from the monks, who provide it.

Behind that door is another door, this one made of sapphire.

So it went until the man had gone through doors of emerald, silver, topaz, and amethyst.

Finally, the monks say, “This is the last key to the last door.”

The man is relieved to no end.

He unlocks the door, turns the knob, and behind that door he is amazed to find the source of that strange sound.

But I can’t tell you what it is because you’re not a monk.
1327
Living Room / Re: The quest for a completely silent PC
« Last post by Deozaan on June 19, 2018, 05:31 PM »
No moving parts means this PC is also completely silent.

1328
Living Room / Re: Beware of punycode phishing attempts
« Last post by Deozaan on June 19, 2018, 11:13 AM »
Interesting... IE caught it and through a warning when I clicked the link. But when I copied the link to paste it into FireFox it came off the Windows clipboard as apple.com.

The browser that he's using to show the vulnerability appears to be Firefox.

The screenshot I took was from Tor browser, which is indeed based on Firefox.
1329
DC Gamer Club / Re: Find out how much you've spent on Steam
« Last post by Deozaan on June 19, 2018, 11:07 AM »
At least someone else has a shocking number.  In perspective, mine isn't bad at $9.29 a game for 1045 games.  At least, that's what I tell myself...

Mine says I've paid just over $22,000, which comes out to about $30 per game for the 752 games on my account. It can't be right. I can't remember the last time I spent more than $30 for a game on Steam, and I know for sure that many of the games on my account were bundled for a few dollars in Humble Bundles, or were giveaways, or on sale for $5 (or less) to $20.

$15-20 is generally my upper limit. That is, for AAA games that launch at around $60, I generally wait until they go on sale for $20 or less. In fact, I generally wait for the complete edition with all the DLC bundled into the package to go on sale for $20 or less. Occasionally, if I'm really excited for the game I'll buy it for something closer to $30. And the last game I can remember buying for that much (I think it was $28) was a game I purchased about 3 years ago.


Then again! I just remembered that there was a time when I would organize and purchase a lot of 4-packs, and I did a lot of "gifting" where people would send me money to buy games for them, to help them get around crazy regional price differences. So I suppose if you took all those purchases into account, it might be accurate for me after all. :huh:
1330
DC Gamer Club / Re: Find out how much you've spent on Steam
« Last post by Deozaan on June 18, 2018, 11:56 PM »
That can't be accurate! That's probably just the full price of every item in your library, and doesn't take into consideration sales or giveaways or things like humble bundles.

At least, that's what I have to believe in order to sleep at night. :o
1331
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by Deozaan on June 18, 2018, 07:18 PM »
This is a tangentially related bit of irony:

I went to download a paper on privacy called "I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel J. Solove, but since the website detected that I was using an anonymous proxy, they tried to get me to register for an account so they could track me, and made me complete the reCAPTCHA three times when I insisted on clicking the (almost hidden) link to continue downloading anonymously.

Privacy Paper Irony.png
1332
There's a part of me that hopes this obtuse clock is a real thing:

Obtuse Clock.jpg
1333
Living Room / Re: WordPress question
« Last post by Deozaan on June 18, 2018, 05:22 PM »
I only have my WordPress site integrated with Twitter, so I'm not sure how/if this applies to Facebook posts, but I can selectively tweet or modify the default tweet content by clicking "Edit" the publicize section:

WordPress Publicize Settings.png
1334
Living Room / Beware of punycode phishing attempts
« Last post by Deozaan on June 18, 2018, 05:10 PM »
This is probably considered old news, but it's some information I just discovered and haven't found any references to punycode on DC, so I thought I'd post about it here.

Punycodew was created to help protect against phishing attacks where certain unicode characters in different languages look the same as letters from the roman alphabet but are in fact different. Punycode tries to avoid this problem by converting domains with unicode characters to what might appear to the average person to be a somewhat random mishmash of ASCII letters and numbers. However, there is a flaw in its design such that it doesn't always work, leaving you vulnerable to phishing attacks after all.

Check this article for more information: https://fraudwatchin...ode-phishing-part-1/

If you click the following link and your browser shows something that looks like "apple.com" in the address bar, then your browser is vulnerable to this attack vector.

xn--80ak6aa92e.com


Here's an example of what it looks like from a vulnerable browser:

IDN Homograph Example.png
1335
Living Room / Re: Abusing Emoji on your computer filesystem
« Last post by Deozaan on June 16, 2018, 07:57 PM »
I guess I'll claim "skull poop L" for my extensions. :P

MyFile.💀💩L
1336
Living Room / Re: Photography and Camera Related
« Last post by Deozaan on June 12, 2018, 03:44 PM »
Wikipedia explains it as 2 squared -- another example: 6 bit colour would be 2 to the power of six (as opposed to 2*6, which was how I was thinking).

Exactly. Each bit is either true or false. So each additional bit is another power of two.


This is tangentially related to the Game Boy Camera, but I saw a video some time ago of some hardware hackers who reverse engineered the Game Boy [Camera] Printer which may be interesting:

1337
Living Room / Re: Photography and Camera Related
« Last post by Deozaan on June 11, 2018, 10:22 PM »
apparently the above images have been increased in size by 200%. Originals were 256 x 224 pixels and just 2 bits (although that's just black & white isn't it? images below include grey).

1 bit is black and white (true or false). 2 bits is 4 colors, which was the case for all GameBoy games as well. :Thmbsup:
1338
DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway
« Last post by Deozaan on June 11, 2018, 01:59 PM »
Ziggurat is free for the next 2 days. :Thmbsup:



But it seems you have to claim it from the banner on the GOG homepage.
1339
I'm with Edvard and Deozaan. I REALLY like Brave.

Whoa there! I wouldn't say I REALLY like Brave. I like the idea(s) behind it, but I don't feel it is well enough developed yet to fully make the switch. I primarily use Vivaldi on my PC these days. But I do use Brave as my primary browser on Android.

And I get the feeling that Edvard isn't too impressed with Brave, either:

I've been using Brave for a while now, as it is VERY fast and does adblocking very well.  I agree it has some glitches that I'd rather not deal with.

[...]

Well, after putting it all on one page, I think I'm done.  Vivaldi is looking better lately...
1341
DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest Steam Giveaway
« Last post by Deozaan on June 06, 2018, 01:31 PM »
And another one. Claim this within ~48 hours to keep it forever:

https://store.steamp...pp/334210/Fortified/

1342
Just read an article about why GitHub is worth that kind of money to Microsoft here:

https://www.bloomber...-billion-undo-button

Eh... If you count this throw-away line as explaining why it is worth that much money:

Enter GitHub in 2008. GitHub makes it easier for large, loosely coordinated groups of programmers—in corporations, for instance—to use git. It has a well-designed web interface. If you don’t think that’s worth $7.5 billion, you’ve never read the git manual.

Personally, I'm not satisfied with that answer. But then again, I've never read the git manual.
1343
DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest Steam Giveaway
« Last post by Deozaan on June 06, 2018, 11:03 AM »
There's a PUBG parody game that is free (to keep) if you claim it within the first 100 hours since launch:

Totally Accurate Battlegrounds

1344
It moved, or is moving, to Google Cloud:

Why and how GitLab abandoned Microsoft Azure for Google Cloud

Edit: But yeah, I agree with an opinion I read elsewhere (maybe that Twitter thread) saying it seems like a tempest in a teacup, which will be forgotten in two weeks.
1345
It seems there is an ongoing "mass exodus" from GitHub to GitLab:

https://twitter.com/.../1004143715844124673

Even so, it's something like less than 1% of all GitHub repos.
1346
While I agree more with wraith808's definition, I do have to opine about the fact that for almost all intents and purposes, it's almost as if Github were the only hosted DVCS that exists in the world. So many other services and platforms that support a DVCS seem to only support git, and only support Github. :(
1347
DC Gamer Club / Re: Latest GOG Giveaway
« Last post by Deozaan on June 04, 2018, 03:38 PM »
Xenonauts is currently being given away as part of GOG's summer sale.
1348
DC Gamer Club / Re: GOG Connect - DRM-free access to your Steam library
« Last post by Deozaan on June 04, 2018, 03:36 PM »
13 games are available on GOG Connect for the next 2 weeks.

https://www.gog.com/connect
1349
General Software Discussion / Re: Request: Deepdream frontend.
« Last post by Deozaan on June 03, 2018, 11:45 PM »
Necro-thread revival!

Here's one I just came across that allows you to preview a small image for free, and then order UHD (9 Megapixels) images for about $1.05 each (if I understood their weird credits system properly).

https://art.app/
1350
Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?
« Last post by Deozaan on June 02, 2018, 10:27 AM »
IainB, I would respectfully suggest that (in my opinion) your pointing out of potential logical fallacies in mouser's statement is misplaced.

(1) Dr. Gottman has spent decades academically studying (i.e. scientifically researching) relationships, so it does follow that what he has to say about them is worth hearing. Therefore it's not a non-sequitur.
(2) Dr. Gottman has spent decades studying relationships, so he actually is the country's foremost expert on relationships and what makes them successful or not. Appealing to authority is not necessarily a logical fallacy, especially when you're talking about their area of expertise.
(3) mouser's "proof" of the validity of the content of the book he recommended is not based merely on his opinion. It's based on the fact that Dr. Gottman has spent decades studying relationships and is the foremost expert on them. Therefore it's not forwarding an opinion in ignorance.





I also recommend Dr. Gottman's book (The 7 Principles). :Thmbsup:

Another book that may be helpful in learning how to communicate and understand each other is The 5 Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman.
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