June 08, 2026
Top Story
- The Sound Blaster Katana V2X is a walking disaster. (Ars Technica)
It's a USB speaker. How bad can it be?
Well, it is a USB speaker, yes. It also supports Bluetooth connectivity for your mobile devices. At the same time.
And it makes it easy to upgrade the firmware should you need to do so.
Over Bluetooth. Without authentication. While it is plugged into your PC.
Meaning that anyone within Bluetooth range can reprogram it with arbitrary functionality. Make it open Powershell and wipe your hard drive? Sure. The only problem there is the lack of imagination.
Oh, and Bluetooth is always on, even when the device is powered down to "sleep" mode, so just turning it off won't save you.
Creative - the company that sells Sound Blaster devices - states that it does not regard this as a vulnerability, which leaves me to wonder what kind of creeping cosmic horrors they would regard as vulnerabilities.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | Comments (153) | Trackbacks (Suck)
June 07, 2026

From sun
Howdy Hordelings! Welcome to the Sunday night ONT. First one of June 2026. Open thread, as always. Fashion and music, as always. What's on YOUR mind tonight?
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[Hat Tip: TC]
Graham Platner, the likely Democrat Senate candidate for Maine, who got an SS Nazi tattoo and lied about most of his past, and cheated repeatedly on his wife while she was undergoing IVF was featured in a New York Times article describing how he had abused an ex and discussed raping people. And raised $200,000 making it his biggest fundraising haul since Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race. A whole lot of Dems and lefties are voting with their bucks and supporting what they like .
Violence against women? Rape as a tool of power? That is perfectly acceptable for the Democrat party because the acquisition and exercise of power over the people is the only thing that matters, and any tool that allows them to achieve those goals is perfectly reasonable. How else to explain Platner's fundraising haul? All of those middle-aged blue-haired lunatic women who find him exciting are curiously quiet when it comes to his casual misogyny. And if they find rape to be acceptable, they certainly won't blink an eye at his Jew-hate. 'What else do we have?' Maine Democrats signal they'll stick with Graham Platner, some with regret That is a clear signal that power is more important to any ethical standards in the Democrat Party. They would rather have a violent rape-fantasizing Nazi than cede the election to a milquetoast ersatz Republican.
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Top Story
- I mentioned before how PCIe switches - at least ones operating faster than PCIe 3.0 - are prohibitively expensive and reserved for enterprise customers except for the ones built into every mainstream PC motherboard. All but the cheapest models have a chipset, and that chipset's primary function is to act as a PCIe switch.
And hobbyists have started tinkering with using AMD's B650 chip, which is a serviceable and reasonably priced example - plus one that already works because every operating system has drivers to support it.
Now it's moving beyond a hobby. (Tom's Hardware)
Raspberry Pi shop WisdPi announced its PROM21 All In Expansion Card - the codename for the chip in the B650 chipset is Promontory 21. For $199 - not cheap, but it's a small production run - you get four extra M.2 slots, five 10Gb USB 3 ports, a selection of USB 2 headers, and an OCuLink header that can provide four PCIe 4.0 lanes or through an adaptor cable four SATA ports (the magic happens in the chipset, so the cable is easy). And it's a single slot half-height half-length card so it will fit easily into any PC.
Minisforum is preparing a similar card.
This would have been much more interesting before storage prices went into orbit, but at least it exists.
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June 06, 2026

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Why these movies? I deliberately left out blockbusters from the 1980s, such as E.T., Star Wars, and any of the Indiana Jones pictures. Spectacles and blockbusters have been a given since at least the 1920s, so I didn’t feel a high budget movie qualified as representative of any particular decade. Different appetites (sword and sandal, war, sci-fi), yes, but no distinctive aspect that would tie any big-budget series of films to a decade. I also put Academy Award-style films to the side—for the same reason. Movies seeking Oscar glory are always going to exist and don’t necessarily possess anything unique to a decade. Finally, I did not count the burgeoning independent film scene of the 1980s or foreign films. What then, in my estimation, made the films on my list “80s” movies, other than the years in which they were produced? These mainstream domestic pictures, in my opinion, were particular to the 1980s because they were mid-budget fare, well-structured, quite clear in their dramatic purpose, and reflective of the more ordered zeitgeist of the Reagan era.
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Welcome hobbyists! Pull up a chair and sit a spell with the Horde in this little corner of the interweb. This is the mighty, mighty officially sanctioned Ace of Spades Hobby Thread. For this week, the Wheel of Hobbies (TM) is on target. It spun and spun and ended up deciding on an archery theme for this Hobby Thread.
A what? Yes, an archery thread. This is like the gun thread except with different launching apparatus and projectiles, less bang and boom, and no movies about the wonders of ball bearings. But fundamentals still matter...Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:30 PM | Comments (168) | Trackbacks (Suck)

Courtesy Terry Glenn
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My terrace garden is pretty small so each blossoming is a little thrilling.This tiger lily was one tiny plant two years ago. I had trouble getting a good photo because they are in the planter and it is taller than I am. Of course, if you've met me, that is not difficult.Thrilling photos! You did well in compensating for the height of the planter!
Sharon(willow's apprentice)
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Top Story
- SpaceX just launched 50 more Starlink satellites into orbit in a single day, using a pair of its trusty Falcon 9 boosters from facilities at Cape Canaveral and Vandenburg. (Space)
And recovered both boosters, with them landing autonomously on the company's two purpose-built drone ships.
I was curious as to how long it took mankind to launch its first 50 satellites into orbit, and the answer surprised me: Withing four years of Sputnik there were over a hundred satellite launches. "Space race" is no misnomer.
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June 05, 2026

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the Lisbon waterfront by the Tagus River
Jorge Chagas
Beat the heat. Man removes a big screw that got stuck in the giant foot of an elephant. How much trust do you need to have in the intelligence of an elephant to put your body directly under his foot as you painfully unscrew the screw out as the elephant cries? I think I've been oversold on geishas. This capybara wanted to be stylish so they put a Tommy Bahama shirt on him. Nice. Baby bears, out of control. Thank goodness they're in slow motion. Rescue dog is a little clingy. Setting up a scrubbing station for your turtle. This makes turtle-ownership worth it. I usually don't like it when one person takes up two seats, but this guy looks tuckered out. He's training to be a competitive biscuit-maker. Aw: Orphaned baby goat rejected by its own herd snuggles with the guardian dogs. Helping a baby moose who can't cross the highway median. Steve Inman: It's okay to sucker-punch a lunatic on a rampage. Criminals mess with the wrong citizens. Including a criminal cat. Instant justice. Beta soyboy cuck gets into someone's face, jamming his bird-hand into the guy's face as he rants at him, and discovers he's not in his safe space any longer.
Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (224) | Trackbacks (Suck)
Collins doesn't have to match him in any poll. In her last three wins, the rigged polls drastically underestimated Collins' support. In 2008, polls were 8 points under her final vote performance. In 2014, polls again understated her support by 8 points.
In 2020, polls understated her support by 12 points. That's at the end of this clip. The Nazi had been "leading" in the rigged polls -- by less than 8% -- but while stupid liberal-leaning women are willing to vote for a Nazi, they don't want to vote for someone who abuses women and lies in wait for burglars, getting an rape-erection when he hears someone at the window.By the way, Lyndsey Fifield sent a text in August 2025 identifying Platner's tattoo as a Totenkampf. Platner himself -- who claims he's a "military expert" and "history buff" -- claims he did not know it was a Totenkampf until October 2025. When asked about this, he says she never told him it was a Totenkampf, so how could he, the owner of the tattoo and allegedly a "military expert" and "history buff," know what a highly-identifiable symbol from the most documented war of all time know?
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Democratic challenger Graham Platner are in a dead heat for the November Senate election, according to a recent survey. Platner has faced a litany of scandals since he started his campaign, including having a tattoo featuring Nazi symbolism, and increased in recent days and weeks with revelations about sexually inappropriate social media posts and extramarital sexting. Platner and Collins each earned 46% support among likely voters, with 8% undecided in the latest survey from Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, a Trump-aligned pollster. Among those voters, 39% said they would "definitely vote for Collins, while 40% said they would "definitely" vote for Platner. Politico first obtained the survey.
The most recent RealClearPolitics.com polls average has Planter leading by 7.4%. Platner's scandals appear to have contributed to the narrowing of the contest.
How did Lindsey Fifield know it was a Totenkampf if Platner had not, as she said, called it "My Totenkampf"? I don't want to be a sexist, but it's men, not women, who are interested in World War Two and military history. It's not women watching the History Channel. (Though maybe they are -- isn't it all Aliens and Bigfoot now?) So how did she know what his Totenkampf tattoo was before the military-expert war-buff who owned the tattoo did?
Some Democrats are starting to run away:
Posted by: Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:40 PM | Comments (140) | Trackbacks (Suck)
JD VanceCarl Benjamin said that we should view the UK police as the "colonial police" -- the colonial police protect the interests of the colonizers, and enforce the colonizer's will against the indigenous, conquered people. Brendan O'Neill:
@JDVance Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it. Henry was far from the first to so needlessly lose his life, and I fear he won't be the last. Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response--the only response--is righteous anger. One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse. It is because we love the West that we want to preserve it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children. And nobody--nobody--should ever die the way that Henry Nowak died. May God comfort those who loved him, and may God rest his soul.
[T]his horror speaks to a deeper moral rot: It reveals the corrosive effect the ideology of wokeness has had on the institutions of our society. The reason the cops believed the knife-wielding monster and dismissed his dying victim is simple: The killer was a brown-skinned man, and his victim was a white-skinned man. Critical race theory is rife in Britain's police forces. Under official guidance, cops must believe every accusation of a "hate crime." They're trained to always be on the lookout for racism. Indeed Hampshire Police, which covers Southampton, boasts of its devotion to the woke state's holy mission of hunting down "hate." Its "race action plan" fizzes with the kind of critical-race drivel you hear on every Ivy League campus. It describes the Minnesota death of George Floyd in 2020 as a "pivotal moment" for Britain's police, too. That tragedy compelled the force, it says, to be "anti-racist" in all police actions. The irony is thick: This force claims to have "learned the lessons" of the death of a black man who cried "I can't breathe" -- yet just six years later its officers are horribly mistreating a white boy who pleaded the same. It's precisely their embrace of the post-Floyd BLM mania that led these cops to grossly demean young Henry. Having imbibed the infantile script that casts whites as oppressors and non-whites as oppressed, they were primed to believe Digwa and to doubt Henry. To them, he was just a white man, and what could be worse than that? ... Prime Minister Keir Starmer and virtually our entire political establishment took the knee for the career criminal Floyd. They've done no such thing for the kind, thoughtful Henry Nowak. And there it is: the "virtuous," obscene racial prejudice of the woke elites.David Lammy, a top Labour politician commu-splains why he refuses to take a knee now: He says he took a knee for George Floyd because that was "during Covid" and it's different now because it's not during Covid. What? They're all pretending there is no two-tier policing -- despite having previously explicitly demanded two-tier policing:
The Telegraph
@Telegraph 1h Police may not always need to treat people of different racial origins equally, David Lammy has said. The Justice Secretary suggested there could be cultural circumstances in which police officers might treat someone from an ethnic minority differently
James Talarico's "church" is totally "Christian" you guys.
For many self-described religious Democrats, squaring their support for abortion and radical gender ideology with their faith is a challenge. But at Texas Democrat James Talarico's church, supporting abortions is part of the congregation's "goals for the world." At the Texas church where the Democrat senate hopeful preaches sermons on the need for abortion in the "trans community," church funds are sent not only to abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but also to radical organizations that pay to help facilitate out-of-state travel for women to kill their unborn babies, and an organization that runs a summer camp for transgender-identifying kids as young as 11. St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, the woke Austin church attended by Talarico, lists Planned Parenthood, which ends the lives of hundreds of thousands of unborn babies every year, as one of the organizations that shares its "vision and goals for the world." The church, which The Daily Wire reported last week stocks sexually explicit books aimed at young people in its library, sets aside money every year for Planned Parenthood, according to its website. It also describes itself as a "Reproductive Freedom Congregation," meaning it believes that "abortion is a blessing."
...
The church's position on abortion is in line with Talarico's own support for codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law to create a so-called right to an abortion. Talarico grounds his support for abortion in the biblical account of an angel visiting the Virgin Mary and telling her that she would miraculously conceive and give birth to Jesus Christ. "I say all this in the context of abortion, because before God comes over Mary, and we have the incarnation, God asks for Mary's consent," he said during an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. "You cannot force someone to create... so that's how I come down on that side of the issue." ... The radical pro-abortion groups are just a sliver of the liberal causes supported by the church. Other organizations St. Andrew's lists on its donation page included Out Youth Austin, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Evergreen Action, and the Carbon180. Out Youth Austin describes itself as a group that provides "a safe space for LGBTQ+ youth to come together, receive support, and make friends who understand who they are." One of the programs it offers is a summer camp for kids between the ages of 11-17 who identify as gay or transgender.
NY Democrats just passed a bill to call mothers "gestating parents" and fathers "non-gestating parents."
The bill was sponsored by Democrats Amy Paulin in the State Assembly and Senator Luis Sepulveda in the State Senate. The bill now proceeds to New York Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul's desk for approval.SO CLOSE TO PRIDE MONTH?!!! "Pride" events struggling as corporations close their wallets to gay evangelization.
Pride celebrations across the country continue to lose out on large sponsorships as corporations, a key source of funding, shrink their affiliation with diversity causes and LGBTQ+ events. Corporate sponsorships of celebrations in several cities, including New York City, Salt Lake City, Louisville, St. Louis, Orlando, and Pittsburgh are down from previous years, organizers said. Jordan Braxton, co-president of the United States Association of Prides, which supports Pride celebrations nationwide, said that while some smaller Prides have seen a growth in sponsorships, a majority have seen a reduction. She said the Trump administration's dismantling of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, has scared corporations away from sponsoring Pride celebrations. "I think that's why some of the corporations have pulled back, because they don't want that government scrutiny," she said.
Randi Weingarten thinks she found the Real Villain responsible for plummeting student performance, and -- here's the shock -- the Real Villain is not Randi Weingarten.
Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She's calling it a "call to action." She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place. For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push "reckless," "callous," and "cruel," and threatened the possibility of safety strikes. Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures. Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions. So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood. The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s. Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo. In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she "...led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible." That's a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did. Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were "... things we really didn't get right," including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn't accountability. It was a pivot. The same union that lobbied to keep students off school grounds is now positioning itself as a champion of children's well-being, pointing an accusing finger at Silicon Valley while the learning-loss data keeps compounding.
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