The legislation, known as the Homes for American Families Act, would amend the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to make it illegal for investment funds with over $150 million in assets to buy single-family homes, condominiums or townhouses. It doesn't apply to homebuilders that are constructing units for sale.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46161145

I've been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.

However I'm currently in the process of moving and as a result I've had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.

Since it's been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46161145

I've been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.

However I'm currently in the process of moving and as a result I've had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.

Since it's been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46161145

I've been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.

However I'm currently in the process of moving and as a result I've had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.

Since it's been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46161145

I've been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.

However I'm currently in the process of moving and as a result I've had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.

Since it's been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?

I've been using Thunderbird to sort out my junk email for a while, ever since I walked away from my Gmail account. Thunderbird does a great job, but it does mean it has to stay running somewhere.

However I'm currently in the process of moving and as a result I've had to shut down the system that that I had been running Thunderbird on. The result of which, obviously, is that my inbox is now being flooded with spam.

Since it's been a while since I last looked at the problem, I figured I ask. How do you deal with spam email?

Sadly, this isn't your mother's (or more likely these days, grandmother's) 50lb vacuum that could suck up household's shag carpeting into the bag, follow it up with the pet cat and golden retriever, burp and ask loudly if it could have the baby next. We're firmly post "Think of the Children!" here, thank you very much. However, as tame and weak as it is, it is a rather powerful vacuum for this gilded day and age.

In my usage, if it could fit up the tube, this vacuum had no problem eating it. Litter, kitty crunchies, dirt, dust bunnies, hair, fur, pet dander, Legos, screws, unidentifiable detritus I'm too lazy to pick up or identify. This thing doesn't really care. It'll happily eat it. While I used it mostly on hardwood floors, it also did a wonderful job cleaning our few carpets, pulling far more dirt and hair out of them than our Roomba could ever hope to. Honestly, it did a better job on the rugs than the mains powered upright it's replacing.

It's also great for cleaning couches and upholstery and comes with a smaller powered head just for that. It did an amazing job of pulling all of the cat and dog hair our pets so lovingly deposited on the furniture for us.

And it does so somewhat quietly, With my Apple watch showing around 75db on medium and around 80db on High.

The floor head on this thing has a pair of rollers that are easy to remove for cleaning or detangling any long things that happen to get tangled in them. A nice touch and something that I've not seen on any vacuum except a Roomba. Ryobi claims it can eat hair up to 9 inches long without getting tangled too badly, and I've not had any problems with tangles yet. It's also got a nice powerful light to let you see clearly exactly how badly you've let your housekeeping go.

Probably the only real downsides to this vacuum are the bin's capacity and the vacuum's endurance.

The vacuum bin has a 1 liter dust bin which is... fine, but, unlike the floor head, I've found that the dust bin gets a bit fussy when you vacuum up a whole bunch of pet hair. When it thinks the bin is full, the unit shuts off and flashes red at you. It's fine, not a problem, just empty the bin and keep going, but if you have pets, you are going to have to empty the bin after every use and if you've let the housekeeping go a while, you may need to empty the bin once or twice during the vacuuming run as well.

Now we get to what might be either it's biggest strength or it biggest downfall, depending on how deep you are into Ryobi's ecosystem. This thing chews through battery like there is no tomarrow.

For shits and giggles, I ran the unit using a 2 Ah battery pack to get a rough power draw for each of the power levels. Why the small pack? Two reasons. First I figure that since Ryobi likes to put the smaller packs in pretty much every single kit they sell, that most folks in the Ryobi ecosystem will have more spare small packs than the larger packs. And second, I'm lazy and the smaller packs will die faster during testing. Upside, This should give us a rough, worst case estimate for endurance. If I've done my math correctly, High draws 12.3 W/min, Medium draws 3.7 W/min and low draws 2.25 W/min. Below is a table where I've extrapolated some rough run times. The times for the 2 Ah pack are the actual times I got.

The math was:

Wh / Runtime = W/min

In practice, the battery in the kit did slightly better than the extrapolated values. I had no problem vacuuming the hardwood floors and carpets in our 1200 sq foot home and was then able to get halfway through vacuuming our furniture before the kit's battery played out. On it's default (medium) setting you can expect to get a bit over 20 minutes of run time with the 4 AH battery that comes in the kit. On high, that gets cut down to roughly 10 minutes. Upside, if you are already deep into the Ryobi ecosystem all you need to do is swap the pack for a fresh charge and keep going. Otherwise you will need to stop and let it recharge. Ryobi has done a solid on the charging front as well as the charger it comes with is a 105 W fast charger and is actually faster than the other chargers that I have.

Being a One+ tool, there is also nothing stopping you from upgrading to a larger battery if you find you need to. Except perhaps your wallet, the bigger batteries get expensive.

All in all, though, I like this vacuum. It's light weight, powerful and does an excelent job. But for what I paid for it, it damned well better last.

Now for the BIFL folks, while Ryobi has taken steps to prevent the motor on this thing from burning out, and replacement filters and rollers can be easily had, basically every single part is unobtainium. At least through official channels. Additionally, the floor head uses a flexable tube that is likely to crack over time leaking air pressure. While the tube is easily accessible for repair (duck tape, perhaps?), the lack of repair parts, lack of data sheets, and lack of repair documentation causes me to not recommend this vacuum for the BIFL crowd.

Not sure why I tried to do that. I knew when I did it that it wouldn't work and I was kicking my self for being stupid when the prompt showed up asking me to confirm that I wanted to download to that location. My jaw hit the metaphorical floor!

Now I'm wondering what other neat tricks I've missed over the years!

To be clear this is in Firefox on NixOS with the KDE6 desktop environment. No clue if it works on other browsers, DEs, or OSs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36954801

So I just woke up from what might be one of the weirder nightmares I've ever had. It didn't happen, but it did introduce a scenario for which I am not sure what the right thing to do in that moment is. I thought I'd toss it to y'all for ideas on how to best deescalate the scenario in my dream as I have often found myself in dejavu situations.

I was walking into an indoor mall of some sort when a woman stops me and tells me that I owe money for something. I disagree, turn around and begin to leave when I see the woman exiting the mall ahead of me and a male security officer (not police) begins to follow me. As I step off the curb and onto the parking area blacktop, the security guy reaches over and pinches my arm. In shock and surprise, I about face and shout "What the fuck was that for?" He replies something about a cop that was lost as I woke up with a spiked heart rate.

As far as dream interpretation, I'm pretty sure that it's just the result of stress from everything that is happening in the US and the world at the moment plus caffeine before bed, plus my cat probably deciding to pad with claws on my arm at the moment that I woke up.

Again, it hasn't happened. It was a dream. But a long time ago, when I was in JROTC, our SAI said that the best way to deal with a situation was not to deal with it in the moment, but rather to come up with how you are going to deal with it before hand. Basically, play what-if with the situation until you have covered every likely possible scenario.

So I just woke up from what might be one of the weirder nightmares I've ever had. It didn't happen, but it did introduce a scenario for which I am not sure what the right thing to do in that moment is. I thought I'd toss it to y'all for ideas on how to best deescalate the scenario in my dream as I have often found myself in dejavu situations.

I was walking into an indoor mall of some sort when a woman stops me and tells me that I owe money for something. I disagree, turn around and begin to leave when I see the woman exiting the mall ahead of me and a male security officer (not police) begins to follow me. As I step off the curb and onto the parking area blacktop, the security guy reaches over and pinches my arm. In shock and surprise, I about face and shout "What the fuck was that for?" He replies something about a cop that was lost as I woke up with a spiked heart rate.

As far as dream interpretation, I'm pretty sure that it's just the result of stress from everything that is happening in the US and the world at the moment plus caffeine before bed, plus my cat probably deciding to pad with claws on my arm at the moment that I woke up.

Again, it hasn't happened. It was a dream. But a long time ago, when I was in JROTC, our SAI said that the best way to deal with a situation was not to deal with it in the moment, but rather to come up with how you are going to deal with it before hand. Basically, play what-if with the situation until you have covered every likely possible scenario.

Edit: Changed link to a non amp version of same story from same news organization.

In the comments section of a recent post I found out that Windows PowerShell had been ported to Linux. Had no clue it was a thing.

Went looking and found this old article attempting to explain why they did it. Not remotely interested in giving up Bash for PowerShell, but I thought it was interesting enough to share. The article seems to be from 2016.

I have never been more tempted to check the NSFW box, but I'll leave it open for now unless a mod complains. :-D

I found an interesting barrel plug cable. Thought I'd share in case anyone else is looking for a 5.5mm barrel power plug. No clue if it's any good.

Looks like it's available in 5v 5A to 28v 5A and the cable will only supply the rated voltage or 5v if the power supply can't supply the required voltage.

It does have a datasheet, which unfortunately is written in a language I can't read. Doesn't look like it comes with a power supply.

I see two issues with it. First, I don't have a boat load of spare USB-C PD power supplies so this solution winds up costing me more. Second, while the voltage is printed on the cable, it's printed grey on black so it probably going to be hard to read and once that wears off your back to playing "what's this cable".

This cable includes an EMARK chip

This cable is 1.2 meters long

Tip is 5.5mm outer diameter, 2.5mm inner diameter with center positive voltage, but it's springy so it works just fine for 2.1mm as well.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20187958

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also co-authored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

"None of this is in any way normal"

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a Lead Systems Analyst and Programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

According to the Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma and located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: "The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time."

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g. US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

"None of this is in any way normal," Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: "Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???"

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt Professor of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University said: "It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it."

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone.

A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos.

A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic.

The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of ten or so investigators left a few minutes later.

The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”

Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about.

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with first-hand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: [email protected].