IcedRaktajino

The Black Eyed Peas can sing us a song but chickpeas can only humus one.

Running suspicious software in a virtual machine seems like a basic precaution to figure out whether said software contains naughty code. Unfortunately it’s generally rather easy to detect whether or not one’s software runs inside a VM, with [bRootForce] going through a list of ways that a VirtualBox VM can be detected from inside the guest OS. While there are a range of obvious naming issues, such as the occurrence of the word ‘VirtualBox’ everywhere, there many more subtle ways too.

...

In order to squeeze by those checks, [bRootForce] created the vbox_stealth shell script for Bash-blessed systems in order to use the VirtualBox Manager for the renaming of hardware identifier, along with the VBoxCloak project’s PowerShell script that’s used inside a Windows VirtualBox guest instance to rename registry keys, kill VirtualBox-specific processes, and delete VirtualBox-specific files.

Who will protect the juice?

Copper wire thefts have increased in Los Angeles and other cities, but with thieves looking outside of street lights for cables to cut, drivers expecting to use EV chargers are sometimes caught off-guard.

With a significant number of the cut cables and smashed charging units being harvested for copper wire now, companies, governments and EV advocates are proposing everything from greater enforcement and penalties to cables that cover a vandal with ink—similar to the measures employed against bank robbers. Such a system has also been discussed in the UK, according to a BBC story from April.

The latest must-have accessory is a "stop-scrolling bag" -- a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. "Analog bags," as they're also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.

The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 -- up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios.

"It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile ... that involve creating over scrolling," says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.

One in six laboratory-confirmed bacteria tested in 2023 proved resistant to antibiotic treatment, according to the World Health Organization. All were related to various common diseases.

The proliferation of difficult-to-treat bacterial diseases represents a growing threat, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report. The report reveals that, between 2018 and 2023, antibiotic resistance increased by more than 40 percent in monitored pathogen-drug combinations, with an average annual increase of 5-15 percent.

An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants -- already a daily information gateway for millions of people -- routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. The intensive international study of unprecedented scope and scale was launched at the EBU News Assembly, in Naples. Involving 22 public service media (PSM) organizations in 18 countries working in 14 languages, it identified multiple systemic issues across four leading AI tools. Professional journalists from participating PSM evaluated more than 3,000 responses from ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity against key criteria, including accuracy, sourcing, distinguishing opinion from fact, and providing context.

Key findings:

• 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
• 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems - missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
• 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
• Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
• Comparison between the BBC's results earlier this year and this study show some improvements but still high levels of errors.

Was watching an old episode of Mama's Family the other day and this was mentioned. I had no idea what it was, so I landed here. Probably gonna give this a try sometime this week because it looks amazing. I also don't see casseroles very often anymore.

Solved. Thank you @sandbo00@feddit.org . It's an MHF4 connector. Will leave the post up for future people with the same question.

I've been playing around with an Orange Pi Zero 2W the last week. When I finally got the point of putting a case together, I was going to replace the little whip with a U.FL->SMA cable for an external antenna. However, the U.FL connector is too large for this.

This connector is the same form factor as U.FL but about half the size.

Is micro U.FL a thing? My Google-fu is failing me, the acronym stew is thick here, and I'd really like to wrap up this project with a nice external antenna. OrangePi hasn't been helpful - they just call it "Wifi + BT Antenna connector" like that explains it all lol

You give it a weigh, give it a weigh, give it a weigh now.

The DVD screensaver was perfect: unobtrusive and did what it was supposed to do: prevent your CRT screen from burning-in an image. On top of that, it gave you something to look forward to when it would perfectly hit a corner (which some people thought was a myth; sadly the GIF version does not).

Now, any screen in your home is fair game for intrusive ads. Why make something simple, elegant, functional, and unobtrusive when that otherwise idle (or even in-use!) screen can be crammed with ads.

In case you thought I was joking...

mplayer handles filesystem wildcards beautifully. This is playing anything by STP in any subfolder of my main "Music" directory. I use wildcards between words because it's lazier than escaping the spaces.

Raktajino@laptop:~$ ssh rak@media-pc

rak@media-pc:~$ mplayer -shuffle /media/Music/*/Stone*Temple*Pilots*
MPlayer 1.5+svn38446-1build5 (Debian)
Playing Acoustics/Stone Temple Pilots - Plush (Acoustic).mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Plush
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: Simply Acoustic
 Track: 10
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A: 233.8 (03:53.7) of 234.0 (03:54.0)  4.5% 

Playing Rock/Stone Temple Pilots - Dead and Bloated.mp3.
Clip info:
 Title: Dead & Bloated
 Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
 Album: The Best Of Stone Temple Pilot
 Track: 7
 Genre: Grunge
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mpg123] MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III
AUDIO: 44100 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 128.0 kbit/9.07% (ratio: 16000->176400)
Selected audio codec: [mpg123] afm: mpg123 (MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 layers I, II, III)
==========================================================================
AO: [alsa] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
Starting playback...
A:   9.1 (09.1) of 310.0 (05:10.0)  4.5% 

This year is a boom time for comets. Not only did we have the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS gracing our skies (and Mars’) earlier this year, but now we have another brand new comet to look out for.

Expected to be at its brightest on October 21, this month you might have the chance to spot the comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6) blazing across the night sky—no telescope or binoculars required.