__ disco0

Xfinity XB3 hardware mod: Disable WiFi and save 2 watts

Background

Comcast has a prepaid "Xfinity NOW" service that's cheaper than normal Xfinity, with unlimited data instead of a 1.2TB/month cap. If you currently have Xfinity, the NOW online signup is hidden, but when I called to cancel my Xfinity service on a date a couple weeks in the future, the NOW signup started working immediately. (I initially queried a neighbor's address to confirm that NOW was available in my area.)

The catch is that you can't use your own modem. They provide a free Arris TG1682P (also known as the XB3), but it's huge and uses more power (14.9 watts) than my Arris SB8200 (9.8 watts). I suspect they retired millions of these things and treat NOW as a recycling service.

The XB3 lets you enable bridge mode via the admin page at http://10.0.0.1/, and IPv4/IPv6 works just like a plain modem, but even in bridge mode, the gateway broadcasts several hidden SSIDs with no option to disable the radios. Curiously I did not see an `xf

FAQ on the xz-utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

This is a living document. Everything in this document is made in good faith of being accurate, but like I just said; we don't yet know everything about what's going on.

Update: I've disabled comments as of 2025-01-26 to avoid everyone having notifications for something a year on if someone wants to suggest a correction. Folks are free to email to suggest corrections still, of course.

Background

During the past days, this great article by Sam Pruden has been making the rounds around the gamedev community. While the article provides an in-depth analysis, its a bit easy to miss the point and exert the wrong conclusions from it. As such, and in many cases, users unfamiliar with Godot internals have used it points such as following:

Godot C# support is inefficient
Godot API and binding system is designed around GDScript
Godot is not production ready

In this brief article, I will shed a bit more light about how the Godot binding system works and some detail on the Godot

preface: Posting these online since it sounds like these notes are somewhat interesting based on a few folks I've shared with. These are semi-rough notes that I basically wrote for myself in case I ever needed to revisit this fix, so keep that in mind.

I recently bought an LG ULTRAGEAR monitor secondhand off of a coworker. I really love it and it's been great so far, but I ran into some minor issues with it in Linux. It works great on both Mac and Windows, but on Linux it displays just a black panel until I use the second monitor to go in and reduce the refresh rate down to 60 Hz.

This has worked decent so far but there's some issues:

It doesn't work while linux is booting up. The motherboards boot sequence is visible just fine, but as soon as control is handed over to Linux and I'd normally see a splash screen while I'm waiting for my login window, I see nothing.
It doesn't work on the login screen. This would be fine if login consistently worked on my second screen, but I need to manually switch

macOS Internals

Understand your Mac and iPhone more deeply by tracing the evolution of Mac OS X from prelease to Swift. John Siracusa delivers the details.

Starting Points

How to use this gist

You've got two main options:

python3 lispytest.py
python3 lispy.py factorial.lsp

Source pages are:

https://norvig.com/lispy.html
https://norvig.com/lispy2.html

	#cloud-config

	# Enable automatic package updates and upgrades during cloud-init execution
	package_update: true
	package_upgrade: true

	packages:
	# Security and Hardening
	- ufw
	- fail2ban

	shader_type spatial;

	float saturate(float x)
	{
	return clamp(x,0.0,1.0);
	}
	vec3 saturate3(vec3 x)
	{
	return clamp(x, vec3(0), vec3(1));
	}

	// Ref: https://old.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/1dlc4kw
	#include <stdint.h>
	#include <stdio.h>
	#include <stdlib.h>
	#include <string.h>

	#define new(n, t) (t *)calloc(n, sizeof(t))

	typedef struct node node;
	struct node {

	// $ node
	// Welcome to Node.js v20.5.1.
	// Type ".help" for more information.

	const { barChartHStr, lineChartStr } = await import("@thi.ng/text-canvas");
	const { adsr, osc, modOsc, rect, saw, sin, tri } = await import("@thi.ng/dsp");

	// display line plot of 100 samples from an amplitude-modulate sine oscillator
	console.log(lineChartStr(20, modOsc(sin, 0.01, 0, osc(sin, 0.2)).take(100)));
	// ╭╮ ╭╮ ╭╮ ╭╮