Yo-Yo Tutorial: Orbital Decay (rejection whip)

https://spectra.video/w/itcB7DBvRGthJEQW5tbifm

New blog post! This TRS-80 Model 1 was found in the bottom of a trash bin, smashed to bits by heavy printers and cash registers above it. Will it ever run again?

#retrocomputing #tandy #trs80 #trs80model1

https://www.leadedsolder.com/2026/03/03/trs80-model-1-power-supply-case-fix.html

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

• Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
• A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
• Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
• Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

• proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
• uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
• Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
• Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

• play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
• Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

Meet Kai, the women’s freestyle skateboarding champion - by Waltz Skateboards (YouTube)

#skateboarding #freestyleskateboarding

Campaign done! Big thanks to everyone who backed. :)

Final Stats:
97 Backers
97 GameTank Developer Kits
71 Cartridge 2-Packs

Every devkit includes Accursed Fiend and a blank cart, so that represents 336 individual cartridges!

But wait, there's more!

Crowd Supply matched orders 1:1 which makes up their post-campaign stock. So the campaign orders actually represent:
- 194 Consoles
- 194 Controllers
- 194 Cart Flashers
- 672 Cartridges

I guess it's time to get cracking, eh?