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Why I Don’t Trust Politicians on IT/Tech Issues

It’s because they are not competent in even the simplest of technical issues, here’s a prime example.

U.S. Senator Mark R. Warner and staff introduce an IoT bill and where do they post the text,  a walled garden pay service that requires registration to get a copy. Thankfully the bill will eventually put on the official US government sites including congess.gov where citizens can get a copy without paying¹ a commercial service. When senators and their staff can’t even do the simplests of tasks, posting a document for citizens for free, how can anyone trust they are competent in any tech area. I suppose I should at least give them credit for not being even worse, they could have posted it to Facebook or some other extreme privacy violating money grubbing corporate site.

Source: Bipartisan Legislation to Improve Cybersecurity of Internet-of-Things Devices Introduced in Senate & House – Press Releases – Mark R. Warner

¹ Forced sign up, even without direct cash payment, is still paying with your private personal data.

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Orange Required Starting Next Week

For all visitors to RI forests where hunting is allowed (most of them) the wearing of hunter safety orange is required by law starting September 8th 2018 and running until February 28, 2019. The second second season runs from April 20, 2019 through May 31, 2019.

During the entire season 200 square inches are required and during shotgun deer hunting season 500 square inches are required. The official brochure of the regulations states:

Fluorescent hunter orange must be worn above the waist and be visible in all directions. Examples are: a hat that covers 200 square inches or a combination of hat and vest covering 500 square inches. Fluorescent camouflage does not meet this requirement.

img_20180903_183133I’m not sure the math actually works out but I’ll take their word for it (a hemisphere 11.4 inches in diameter is 200 in2, and that’s a huge noggin). I’ve created a Google Calendar showing the dates and amounts to make it easy to know how much and when.

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I Wonder What Drives Sears’s Ad Engine

WeirdSearsAd

I did just buy some tires from Sears last month so as with most advertising engines they keep suggesting the item I already bought (Is that really a wise use of an ad budget?). But WTF prompted them to try to sell me the top left item.

(Winado Female Dress Form Plastic Mannequin Full Body Display stand with Metal Base).

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Windows 10 Bug Fix

On my personally owned home office workstation I saw this message in red on the Windows Update screen, “Some Settings Are Managed By Your Organization”. For quite a while I didn’t think much about it since I log in to the corporate Office 365 site on this PC. Today it suddenly dawned on me that since this PC’s Win 10 login is to my personal outlook.com ID it seemed unlikely my workstation was being managed by my employer.

A quick Google search and I found that the message is likely caused by what appears to be a rare bug in Windows 10. TekRevue has the details and a simple fix that worked for me.

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OneDrive for Business Sync Problems

I had sync problems between my home office PC and the PC in the main office. It turned out that the problem was from making huge changes in the files synced with OneDrive and SharePoint via the OneDrive for Business program. To avoid this problem I found you should have both PC’s logged in while making large changes.

Sadly the only way to get things back in sync was to perform a reset of OneDrive and then let it download all 20G again. Glad I discovered this problem before my usage got into the multi-hundred Gigabyte range.

To perform the reset and restart run this command.

%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe /reset

If OneDrive does not restart on its own in a copule minutes then run this command.

%localappdata%\Microsoft\OneDrive\onedrive.exe

From this Microsoft OneDrive community forum post.

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TWiT Network Ridiculous Whining

Ian and Leo on TWiT, and others on other shows this week, were whining because US newspaper companies don’t want to spend a bunch of money so that they can continue to give free stuff to Europeans without fear of legal financial penalties.

Leo has even admitted it cost his tiny company 40 hours of labor some if it lawyer time. Obviously Leo feels his company will at least break even on the expense so of course he should make the effort. I am confident the newspapers calculated that it will result in only a net loss so it would violate their fiduciary responsibility to waste money complying with GDPR.

Update: just watched Mac Break Weekly and Alex brought up how GDPR is a no profit, only losses, situation for businesses who don’t have EU customers. I should have expected this bit of sanity since Alex is a very smart business person (as well as one of the most amazing media production experts around).