delibby

This is pretty cool.

Someone bought the remains of the Commodore company for "low 7 figures", hired back original engineers, and reinvented the machine via FPGA chipsets. There are three different models, all in the same basic form factor with the addition of USB and HDMI ports. The original ports are still there, so you can plug in that original CRT display and floppy disk drive that's sitting in an old box somewhere. All of the original games work, and they come with a spiral-bound manual and a USB drive with 50 LICENSED games on it!

The base model is currently $250 and is a plain beige case, more expensive models include a clear case with LED lighting and a founder's case that is spiffier yet, but still quite affordable. You will be charged for tariffs, and that charge may go up or be refunded if lowered before shipping.

The boxes are planned to ship in October but may slip. If you order one now, your card will be charged immediately but you can cancel and get refunded prior to shipment.

To connect to a CRT TV, you need to buy a cable adapter to connect to an edge card, it's designed for HDMI interface. It has 3x USB-A ports, 1x USB-C, WiFi and Ethernet and a MicroSD slot, and a headphone jack. And as expected, two DB-9 joystick ports, the datasette port, and the floppy disk drive port. That's fairly nicely equipped, all in all.

AND, in a shout-out to the originals, it has the original signatures inscribed in the cases and PC boards!

For $250-300, I think I may buy one. I never owned one, and I've considered getting a used one but I've balked at such old hardware. With this being new and warranted hardware, that reluctance is lifted. It would be interesting to do some 'low-level poking into the hardware' programming again, and theoretically I should be able to slave this into a KVM switch to share the monitor around.

https://www.commodore.net/

https://slashdot.org/story/25/07/19/0528234/after-30-years-you-can-buy-a-new-commodore-64-ultimate-for-299

McD's hired a company called Paradox.AI to run an "AI" chatbot to conduct hiring interviews for its restaurants. Pretty basic stuff. I'm a little unclear as to how much of the application/interview/hiring process Paradox was responsible for, but it at least conducted an online interview with the applicants.

There was a recent data spill from Paradox that exposed "64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses and phone numbers." That's a lot of records. Then again, McDonald's has a lot of locations and high turnover.

Security researchers were able to get in to McDonald's access portal by guessing their password. Said password?

1
2
3
4
5
6.

I guess I'd better change the combination on my luggage.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/07/poor-passwords-tattle-on-ai-hiring-bot-maker-paradox-ai/


The most common passwords for 2025, thus far, are:

123456
123456789
qwerty
password
12345
12345678
111111
1234567
123123
1234567890

https://www.passwordmanager.com/most-common-passwords-latest-statistics/


Now, here's the ridiculous part: it would be pretty trivial for the programmers at Paradox to BLOCK THE USE OF PASSWORDS LIKE THIS! These are common patterns, and it would be easy to test the password and say "NO! You have to use a good password!" There are APIs that enforce good password measures, and clearly they are not using them.

Paradox should be black-listed as a company not to do business with if they allow passwords like this.

Oh, and other Paradox clients? Several Fortune 500 corps including Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.

This is the recipe that I used:
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/141169/easy-indian-butter-chicken/

The major prep is doing a fine dice on the onion and cutting up a pound and a half of chicken into bite-sized pieces. Not a terribly expensive recipe - if you have the spices - I'd guess the chicken, tomato sauce cost, and cream to be under $20 or so. I did not have the spices, so that cost me another $13ish, but those will be usable for a few more iterations. It also makes for a busy stove: I had three burners plus the oven going: rice, sauce, onion reduction, and the oven was cooking the chicken.

VERY high-fat recipe! A cup of butter and three cups of heavy cream! I made it with rice and there was way more sauce than needed, if I use this recipe again I'm going to cut the amount of sauce by at least a third. Milk Street has a recipe that uses some sort of cashew puree, I'll be investigating that.

VERY yummy recipe! But as I said, also quite high-fat.

Is it tacky to use a friend's husband for fanfic? Let me explain!

So I am somewhat embarrassed, having heard all my life about the Appalachian Trail, that I didn't know the west coast has a similar trek, the Pacific Crest Trail, from the border with Mexico, up through California, Oregon, and Washington, until reaching the Canadian border. A friend's husband started walking it mid-April, so I'd heard a bit about his planning and have been following his hike on Tumblr.
(https://www.tumblr.com/robpct2025) He's gone over 1000 miles already.

It makes me realize that this is something I would never have been capable of doing and will never try now, but go him!

At some point on the trail, he was given the sobriquet of Lighthouse. He's a tall man with a light on his hat, it was getting dark and other hikers used his light to see their way. Trail nickname! (This is apparently a special naming that happens for some people but not everyone.)

Of course, I had to think of Liam's 6'4" height. QUINN. Hiking the trail by himself. He's always wanted to do it and has taken a sabbatical for it. He's in his mid-40s, he figures he should get it done soon. He comes up on three hikers, young people in their 20s, moving a bit slower than him. Normally he politely passes slower hikers, but it's getting late and dark and he's looking for the next good spot to pitch his tent for the night. He chats with them a bit, sensing a bit of discord between them, but flattered when they begin calling him Lighthouse. Trail nickname has come to him!

They reach a good flat area and decide to camp side by side. He's taking a detour soon to meet up with his friend Mace, get more supplies, maybe sleep overnight in a motel and have a long, proper shower. He shares the rest of his candy. The young men seem fairly well organized but also certainly not perfectly, they didn't have his two extra decades of contemplation and reading about other people's successful treks.

One of them in particular (of course!) catches his attention. Ben, with his easy smile and changeable grey-blue-green eyes. He's the most diplomatic of the three and it seems like he's been playing referee a lot.

All goes well, it's nice to have real conversation over a meal after several weeks already of being mostly alone.

In the morning, they share breakfast and pack up. Does tragedy strike so that the other two bail, leaving Ben alone? Does Ben then end up hiking the rest of the trip with Quinn? Of course he does! Hours pass by where they silently walk, simply enjoying each other's company, but they also share long, thoughtful conversations and really get to know each other in a way that's deeper and more meaningful than casually getting to know each other in a city.

And of course, sex under the stars, in a tent, in a waterfall...

I probably won't try to write that, but it's been amusing to contemplate whenever I look at the pics on Tumblr. Such gorgeous scenery, it's so easy to see the boys enjoying it.

Fanfic everything!

Bill is, in my ever so humble opinion, one of the most brilliant musical comedians. I'd rate him up there with Tom Lehrer and Eric Idle and above them in many ways (Peter Schickele is still #1 for me). If you ever want to have a lot of fun, just cruise YouTube for Bill Bailey videos and you should have a good time.

In this one, he pays tribute to one of his favorite bands, one of the first techno bands, Kraftwerk.

Not long ago, Google released an update that slammed the batteries in the Pixel 4 phone. That phone had batteries from two different makers, and it was found that one of those batteries did not age gracefully, the update greatly reduced its ability to charge to reduce its likelihood of bursting into flames. They also offered various compensation schemes to get the battery replaced or retire and replace the phones, but the hoops they put in place for said compensation were rather onerous.

Well, the circle has come around again and now it's the 6a's turn. But this time, the phone isn't particularly old. This one still has two years of updates available, and the compensation is higher than what was offered to owners of the 4. But it appears that the terms are just as bad, you'll need to make sure the screen is absolutely perfect and that there's nothing else at all wrong with the phone and that you read all the fine print before you try to comply with any of the terms.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/a-mess-of-its-own-making-google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/07/11/1921242/google-nerfs-second-pixel-phone-battery-this-year

Thy name is not Elayna. No, it's really not!

I hadn't thought much about writing until suddenly I had a story in my brain and was writing it. And kept doing that, and at some point I thought, I should probably read some advice on writing. I've read a lot but not studied that much about the actual mechanics of writing. So much advice is "Write What You Know." Really! So much! And I found this sorta stressful! I was a middle-aged female bureaucrat with a job in an 8x8 cubicle, I wanted to write about Jedi in a galaxy far, far away, not what I knew, thank you very much.

But I go through life and I swear, so often I'm thinking, how can I use this in fanfic?

I got a free turkey recently, which had been in a freezer since last November. Normally I cook a turkey once a year, on Thanksgiving, but I didn't want to keep this one for another 4 months. I cooked it yesterday. My brother always carves it on Thanksgiving, so I had to do that myself. I looked up instructions online, and it went fine.

Today I'm boiling the bones with vegetables for turkey stock. It smells absolutely delicious.

And I just keep thinking... who should be roasting a turkey> Thanksgiving or some other time? What do they think about how good it smells? What did they think about carving it and getting grease on their hands? I feel Bucky would snap a glove on his prosthetic hand so the turkey grease wouldn't invade the finger joints. Would Tony find cooking stock an extremely odd thing to do, or would it bring back fond childhood memories of Ana Jarvis?

I seem to be MCU these days.

I don't want to write what I know... except I totally do. EVERYTHING.

/weird writerly ramble

Mine and society's, I guess.

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of movies from the 1940s and 50s. Many of the characters smoked, which looked glamorous to me. I often pretended to smoke with those white candy cigarettes.

Then my parents stopped when I was around 13, and I got to watch first hand the difficulty of breaking an addiction. Also, a health unit at school on smoking showed a picture of a smoker’s lung and ew. Smoking still looked glamorous in movies but the impact in real life very much did not.

I saw The Materialists this week, primarily for my love of Chris Evans. In several early scenes, Dakota Johnson’s character smokes, looking very elegant with how she holds the cigarette. Chris’s character does too, though with less stylistic drama.

And it was so weirdly distracting! I don’t remember the last time I saw a character smoke in a movie set in modern times. All I could think was how nasty those characters must have smelled.

As the movie progresses, both characters stop smoking, like it was just something to give ‘a bit of business’ to their hands until the plot got more intense, but not really supposed to be part of their personality.

I’m very happy attitudes have changed so much toward smoking. I don’t know anyone who smokes. I only smell it when I go to a casino, which always makes me so grateful that California outlaws smoking most places.

I have no clue why the director had those characters smoke, but it seemed like a bad decision to have it and then inconsistent to drop it. I found the movie interesting though a weird mix of jaded cynicism and hopefulness. I don’t know that I’d recommend it, though if you want to watch for Chris, he definitely looked very good. There’s a scene where he has a few lines about love, and the camera stays focused on him the whole time, and I thought: someone must use that in a video. It would be perfect.

Pedro Pascal looks very good too.

So qualified rec. But really, why have main characters smoke? Why? It's a unpleasant habit that kills people.