Andy Herbert

The Mandalorian and Grogu gets a solid B rating, better than what I expected. The dialog was cheesy and the plot couldve been a two parter episode of The Mandalorian, but it sstsyed true to being a star wars story in its thrill, world building, and casual atmosphere.

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Follow up films are great, but we're losing the sense of what made the first story great in the first place, and its causing successors to need more content to make up for when they fail. Its become too much; the Mandalorian and Grogu from the context of someone who has not seen the show...

...is a film of a "young" child affluent in the force, and a bounty hunter, doing a job for the good guys. It works with existing star wars material but stands pretty well on its own. Look at it not as a continuation of the TV show, but a test for the next generation of star wars movies.

It is entertaining, something which cant be said about the last star trek movie to have released, section 31, which is so bad I deny its existence. I hope it leads to more small story movies in stsr wars, like the TV showa coming out but for the cinema...

And I hope the writing could improve so the movies can be enjoyed as standalone films without context of other movies or shows. Wanting something that recaptures what A New Hope managed to do- create a compelling space opera story, stand out on its own.

The TV show Mr. Robot (great show BTW) has a Christmas episode, in the form of season 4. December 25th, 2015 spans across 5.5 out of 13 episodes of the season.

Dont update @firefox.com to 157.0. Forced "nova" UI changes imminent. If you did update it, you can revert the setting in about:config, search "nova" and look for the variable about it being enabled, and disable it.

quantum.quantonium.netquantum.quantonium.net

UI designers like those at Google and now Firefox mist believe thst people use circular phones shaped like my watch here (but bigger). I dont see any other explanation for the rise in round corners in UI design. (Seriously its an awful waste of space and ruins readability)

Darn spelling errors

I will be hibernating LinkedIn, urging "connections" to switch to Bluesky. Read more: quantum.quantonium.net/2026/09/will...

15 Sept

If someone manages to hack the Meta Quest 3 such that they can install the Frame's SteamOS, I will pay them at minimum the price of the Steam Frame.

1 Sept

What is there to stop me from committing a pull request to RedHat's Kiwi TCMS Community ed. to disable ethical ads by altering the nginx CORS policy?

22 Aug

Google: you will no longer be able to backup photos on drive for desktop Me: no, dont do that removing it is pointless (post locked) Google: you will no longer be able to backup photos on drive for desktop Me: dont remove it, just done touch the 10 year old feature (post locked)

Me: SHUT UP YOU DONT HAVE TO REMIND ME EVERY TIME I START MY PC Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop Me: YOURE SPENDING MORE EFFORT TELLING ME THE THING IS BEING REMOVED THAN JUST KEEPING IT IN PLACE YOU INCOMPETENT CORPORATION

22 Aug

Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop Me: and you can no longer back up my photos and videos at all, very soon, if you keep up with this.

Google: you will no longer be able to backup photos on drive for desktop Me: okay but you already disabled the setting in drive for desktop, can you undo it? Or just stop telling me? Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop Me: 🖕

22 Aug

Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop Me: great thanks I already know Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop me: no I'm not switching to your chrome dependent half baked solution Google: you can no longer backup photos on drive for desktop

19 Aug

Ive had this book for many years, decided to pull it out today. I forgot where I got it but it was printed in 1982. I looked st the last pages, "the world in 1980" * it had the cold war end in 1978. The soviet invasion of Afghanistan had just begun, regesn had also started his term

* Little focus on Yugoslavia post-ww2. South Africa under apartheid was mentioned as the only remaining African nation under white rule

19 Aug

This book provides a unique perspective to how events csnt necessarily be predicted. At time of publishing, I doubt the authors could have predicted that less than 10 years later, the USSR would collapse, Yugoslavia would split, Germany would unify, and south Africa would cease apartheid.

* third world countries and poverty disparity on a nation level was discussed * the book foreshadows a "period of turbulence and unsettlement" and mentions political divide in the US, post Vietnam war * nothing about CIA involvement in Latin america

19 Aug

* images were computer generated, with very rudimentary terrain shading and some 3D globe renderings. Very interesting seeing the odd perspectives rendered to 3D, all prior to modern graphics techniques which were establishing themselves in the 1980s * this book is probably older than my house

* the last page discussed the middle east with oil production. No gulf wars, in fact I dont even think al-queda was a thing when this book was made. * the internet was at most an idea in university, ARPANET wasnt public yet. Cybernetics was mentioned as an up and coming tech trend.

10 Aug

Today is the day Google (Googlop) Photos backup on drive for desktop is being removed, for no reason, other than malicious intent. Google's motto: do evil to oneself.

5 Aug

Yo Google thanks for the photos spam HOW ABOUT YOU STOP REMOVING DRIVE FOR DESKTOP PHOTOS BACKUP INSTEAD. OR GIVE ME A VALID REASON WHY IT CSNT COEXIST WITH THE ONLINE CHROME DEPENDENT BACKUP FEATURE.

Flock safety is a scam to your local government, forcing jurisdictions to pay for a subscription to access video footage from cameras which said government chose to install, and they've been caught selling the footage without authorization to 3rd parties like ICE.

It should be unthinkable that the footage of a security camera I see can't be accessed without paying for a cloud service which is responsible for enabling anyone to buy that footage or access its data.

Just like how it should be unthinkable that if I ask an assistant to turn on lights, it has to contact a remote server to do something local. We need to stop with this cloud-first approach. My phones and computers and laptops and oculus quest 3 aren't dumb frontends to websites. Self host anything

If something goes wrong, like a data breach or corrupted data, do you know if the cloud service has the means to recover your data and compensate for damages done? Or is the company able to deal with recovery and mitigate damage done?

Flock has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted previously to handle company data, and they're making companies pay to correctly handle the data.

The question that needs to be asked when considering SaaS or self hosting as a company, is: do you, the company, trust the cloud service to handle your data? Do you know what they're doing with the employee data or security footage or banking information you'll feed to it?

Do you trust their black box to prevent the data from being leaked, assuming they aren't doing it intentionally? Alternatively, is your organization able to hire and maintain the needs to establish a reliable self hosted system where strictly you have control of all the data?

Self hosting is not scary or as dangerous as it was 10 years ago, thanks to services like Docker streamlining things. If you have an old computer or laptop (or in some cases a mobile device) you can turn that into a simple server, for backups, watching shows and movies, maybe home management...

And if you want to have more capacity or are an organization, there are tons of free and open source self hosted alternatives to paid software (though there should be more). Initial costs of a VPS or VM may be more than a month subscription, but the cost can be made up for when expanding.

Inform your town or city or state that if they want to spy on their residents, they can do so without an annual subscription to a cloud service they don't control. Security footage should never leave the vicinity of the property it is captured in under normal operation.

SaaS is literally scamming governments, profiting off your taxes. It needs to stop. Stop using cloud services. Look into ways for self hosting. If you're a corporation, spend that money which would've been spent on a subscription, on a self hosted system instead.

Who are these "people" who post enlightened reviews on the spammiest and most bloated apps on android in existence? It seems most mobile users hsve fallen in line to what corporate devs want you to do, rather than seeing what could be done, in software.

Protect your servers, because assume the client is always malicious and cannot/should not be controlled- seems like a lost practice in comp sec. Meta, google, PlayStation, Microsoft, apple, any LLM company, amd, amazon, darn it your bank account and other companies forcing tech on you...

All guilty of blocking your freedom and your choice. I guess its because of a fear that they cant trust you. What harm is there in letting someone chsnge the look of their phone? Or letting someone play a gsme on any media? If hackers cause issues, is it worth impeding everyone else's experience?

... A reminder every time I boot the headset about who actually owns the experience. I own the hardware, but meta will do anything in their software to ensure they own my experience. They choose what I csn see and where the options are and when the device updstes, even against my own intentions.

This is the ultimate modern crime of software engineering, and meta is far from the one being guilty. Theyre not creating new experiences, theyre controlling the experience, and if you dont play along theyll brick your hardware. This should be illegal. Every hardware should be unlockable.

I want the full potential of the headset to be realized, its spatial sensor and color fpv marvels of technology largely untouched by devs, and handicapped by proprietary software as a service. Its awful that I cant see what the headset can do, over what the software cant do.

There is no reason why the hardware needs a Facebook account to work, or why it needs a phone. Its about as capable as my phone. The app doesnt do much more than what the headset can do. Yet I can't ignore my ugly avatar forcibly changed from my profile photo every time I want to use the headset...

I cant wait for the steam frame. It might be more expensive and less performant, but it will most likely be a better experience- if its like other vslve hardware I could mod and flash a custom OS hopefully if I wanted to.

I got a quest 3 gifted to me because of its hardware. I didnt ask for a frontend to meta horizons, or get a 256GB headset to stream spatial video at 10 fps over a capped xfinity internet.

Posted this after seeing an unsolicited notification in the oculus ("meta") app, and visiting it in the (obligatory horrendous) play store, and seeing my one star review. I got that app because I hsve a headset which is 100% dependent on it and my phone.

We are standardizing insecure data collection with age verification, or forcing control by a company on what apps you use, when we should be debating sbout options for notification sorting or letting users choose the ads they are forced to see.