Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 10 Posts
  • 538 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said this week it will retest 4,000 DNA samples and open an internal investigation after learning that it used potentially flawed test kits for eight months.

    Sheriff’s officials said Wednesday that a test kit manufacturer sent a letter in August warning the department to stop using certain kits that were prone to giving incomplete results. However, the letter was received by a civilian employee who didn’t discard the kits or send them back, according to a department statement.

    The department used the flawed kits from July through February, testing thousands of samples from criminal investigations.

    The problem was discovered Monday when a supervisor at the department’s Scientific Services Bureau found the manufacturer’s letter.

    The department said it has opened an internal investigation to assess how much the faulty kits have affected criminal cases, and will retest some 4,000 DNA samples.

    “We take the integrity of our criminal investigations and the reliability of our forensic testing very seriously,” Sheriff Robert Luna said in a statement. “The Sheriff’s Department is working diligently to assess the impact and to prevent such situations from occurring again.” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said his office had begun working with the sheriff’s department to determine the extent of the problem. Sheriff’s officials said the bad tests might have led to incomplete results, but they are "not likely to have falsely identified any individual.”

    The department declined to name the manufacturer.




  • I’m physically quite large, but most people will outrun me for medical reasons, but you can’t tell just by looking at me. It wasn’t until #metoo that I considered what it might be like to walk on the street and be afraid for your safety all the time.

    My partner shared a few historic experiences which made me want to throw up.

    I’ve read the responses here so far and I’ve done similar things for the same reasons, noise, humming, nodding, etc… I’ll also cross the road if I think my presence might make someone feel uncomfortable, or if I feel uncomfortable.

    I have also walked off a footpath onto the verge to give the person coming towards me, space to move.

    I’d be interested to hear what that feels like for people who are experiencing this kind of interaction.



  • If your partner dies before you do, consider what happens to your joint mortgage, your internet, email and phone accounts, your car repayments, if it’s coming out of a joint account that’s suddenly frozen because one account holder has died.

    What happens if your partner sets up your home network and TV subscriptions and their email account is locked because you’re not the account holder.

    For example, Netflix doesn’t have “multiple account holders” as an option, it belongs to one person, the one who pays the bill. Neither does Google, Facebook, Disney, Amazon, Apple, or anyone else.

    This is repeated across every single aspect of modern life. Your robot vacuum cleaner is linked to a single person, as are your IoT lightbulbs. It’s absurd.

    The list goes on, public transport payment system, car ownership, home ownership.

    I know people who have had to borrow money from family and friends, just to eat food because the bank needed a death certificate after their partner died, but the process took weeks, some even months.

    One person was an executor of their recently deceased parent who was required to produce the non-existent death certificate for the other parent who had died 40 years earlier. Took more than a year.

    Dying during a holiday is a special form of torture for the family.

    None of that is easy, convenient or handled.

    Why not?


  • I write software for a living, an exception in software means something unexpected, out of the ordinary, it’s treated as a “special case”.

    In a lifetime, death is not unexpected, it’s expected, even guaranteed. The only variable is time, but that’s true for many aspects of life.

    Take for instance moving house, it’s got a high likelihood of happening during a lifetime, multiple times. There’s processes to update your address, tell your bank, the utility company, insurance, etc. There’s address change services, some even run by government that all but automate this.

    Why is it that such a thing doesn’t exist for death?

    The absurd amount of effort that family members after a death need to get through to deal with things like this is insane.