jwz

So my power went out today (thanks, AT&T!) and just like last time, as soon as the "running on backup power" dialog popped up, my Mac Studio was basically frozen. Moving the mouse took 20+ seconds to update its position. Once the screen locked, it could not register typed characters fast enough for the unlock dialog to not time out!

I unplugged USB from the UPS and rebooted, and it behaved the same at the login screen with no apps running.

Now, last time this happened, the next day I tested it, by unplugging my UPS from the wall -- and the Mac behaved perfectly fine! ◀◀ Read that part again.

It's not even under high load; the UPS said I had like 40 minutes of runtime left.

Once the power finally came back on, suddenly the Mac was behaving perfectly normally again.

Any ideas? For I would like my computer to function on backup power in the future. That would be nice.

Previously.

Venice, Italy:

In a welcome bag filled with favors such as local chocolates, artisanal soaps, and scented candles, guests arriving for the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez this week were reportedly given monogrammed plastic bottles in which to urinate during the ceremony.

"Because guests will be strictly prohibited from leaving the room at any time during the festivities, the couple have provided these custom-made bottles as a token of their appreciation." wedding planner Lucia Contarini said as she showed off a makeshift urine receptacle emblazoned with the initials "J" and "L," noting that it would be the only option available to attendees who did not wish to wet themselves when they inevitably needed to empty their long-held bladders.

"We ask that guests also save some room in the bottle for the reception, because the groom has requested the dance floor be full at all times and no one will be permitted a bathroom break." At press time, the dancing had been in progress for hours, and witnesses confirmed an exhausted Leonardo DiCaprio was completely drenched in urine and struggling to continue moving to the beat of "Uptown Funk."

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My server is getting absolutely obliterated by AI scrapers today. Load is 140+ and I just manually banned 58,000 IP addresses.

Top ten user agents:

8984 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0 5459 Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 4092 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 2437 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:123.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/123.0 490 Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 284 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0 Unique/97.7.7286.70 281 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) AvastSecureBrowser/5.3.1 Mobile/15E148 Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15 280 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Agency/98.8.8175.80 265 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) EdgiOS/120.0.2210.86 Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 263 Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 OPX/2.1.0

Previously, previously.

Six hundred series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy.

Protesters in Venice are claiming an "enormous victory" after US tech billionaire Jeff Bezos and his wedding guests were forced to "run away" from the city centre, moving their main celebration to another location.

"We are very proud of this! We are nobodies, we have no money, nothing!" Tommaso Cacciari, from a group calling itself No Space for Bezos, told the BBC. "We're just citizens who started organising and we managed to move one of the most powerful people in the world - all the billionaires - out of the city." [...]

With the first wedding guests expected to arrive on Thursday, some activists had been planning to launch themselves into canals near the key venues, along with inflatable alligators. They wanted to try to block the path of the rich and famous, stop their fun -- and make their point.

That wet protest has been called-off, but No Space for Bezos still plans to project its feelings onto a city building later this week and on Saturday evening they're calling on people to join a march in a final show of protest.

The wedding will now take place at the Arsenale - a vast, fortress-like complex of shipyards and warehouses.

Flights carrying Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Salma Hayek Pinault, Sir Elton John, and Lady Gaga are expected, among others. They include Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner, Karlie Kloss, and Sánchez's Blue Origin spaceflight crewmates Katy Perry and Gayle King. [...]

Before the formal events, Bezos and Sánchez hosted a foam party aboard Koru, their £371 million three-masted superyacht. Anchored off the Croatian coast, the yacht was accompanied by the Abeona, a support vessel complete with helicopter pad.

I strongly suspect that "foam party" is a euphemism for "blood rave". These are billionaires, after all.

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To dip my toes into the oncoming clusterpocalypse that is Wayland, I thought I'd try something "simple"... Let's see if there's some way to make XScreenSaver hacks able to grab and manipulate screenshots under XWayland.

Here is what I have learned so far:

• Words mean nothing: a "window manager" is now called a "compositor", and a "graphical desktop environment" is now called a "shell".

• Wayland is not a window system, it is a collection of hundreds or thousands of "extensions" that any given "compositor" (window manager) may or may not implement, à la carte, meaning there are actually dozens or hundreds of "Waylands", and it's amazing that anything works at all.

• There's an "unsupported" protocol called wlr screencopy that takes screenshots, but surprise, Gnome and KDE don't implement it.

• Gnome seem to do it with some dbus thing called "org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot" on which I cannot find any documentation.

• KDE does something else entirely. So does OBS, which maybe uses something called Pipewire, whatever that is.

Anyway, if you wanted to help make XScreenSaver work slightly better, you could do that by writing the smallest possible ANSI C program that can grab a screenshot under Wayland, and document under what circumstances it will fail. Using small words.

Future generations thank you in advance.

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My friend Isabella Valeri just published her first novel, Letters from the Dead, and it's fantastic! A girl grows up on the estate of her dynastic family, never setting foot on land her father doesn't own, until power struggles result in her being shipped off to a boarding school under an assumed name. In between there is tradecraft, statecraft, assassins, financial shenanigans, and a rogue's gallery of billionaire sociopaths.

Go buy.

I was fortunate enough to be a beta reader of this novel and its coming sequels, beginning almost a decade ago, so I got to see it evolve... Sometimes the road to publishing is a long one.

You may remember Isabella from her 2003/2004 blog, "She's a Flight Risk", where she documented her time as an international fugitive, having embezzled a small fortune from her family and then gone on the run with smugglers and other small-plane enthusiasts. I understand that those years will be covered in book three.

Now, I expect that right away some of you will get hung up on, "But is it true?"

My friend, this is 2025. Nothing is true.

It does say "a novel" right there on the cover, if that helps you out. She is fond of saying that her attorneys have made it clear to her that she is "no longer permitted to tell true stories."

Are we still doing "truthy"? It's definitely truthy.

And it's a great story.

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Mads from Tromsø reacts strongly to the treatment he received at American border control on his way into the United States:

They threatened me with a minimum fine of $5,000 or five years in prison if I refused to give up the password to my phone, he explains.

When examining the phone, the officers found two photos on Mikkelsen's phone. They were photos that were not to their liking. One was a caricature of US Vice President JD Vance, while the other image was a picture of a wooden pipe [...]

The 21-year-old says that during his stay in the interrogation room he was refused to buy food or fill his water bottle. It was not until he was on the plane that would take him back to Norway that he was allowed to eat and drink.

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Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops:

"We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up," McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. "fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly -- the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year."

"Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead," the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer's face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. "Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match," the site says.

"fucklapd.com uses data provided by the City of Los Angeles directly to the public," McDonald told me in an email. "This data has been provided in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. fucklapd.com is not scraping any data."

In addition to potentially identifying officers by name and serial number, FuckLAPD.com also pulls up a police officer's salary.

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Space Nazi has the biggliest OPSEC:

Since sharing the lab results on Wednesday, Musk hasn't said much about the possible leak of his Social Security information or taken down the post.

Let Them Fight:

Elon Musk's lawyers are claiming he "does not use a computer," contradicting Musk's social media posts, video game streams, employees at his companies, publicly available data, and common sense.

Musk's attorneys made the claim as part of a 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 but left three years later after a failed takeover attempt.

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