Really good career retrospective obituary in Rolling Stone this morning:
And Mark Hamill’s tweet:
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Yeah, I grew up with this guy’s voice in my head all the way from Conan to Star Wars.
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Just when things in the area couldn’t get worse or weirder. What an insane story. This is some next level scary shit.
I’m seeing reports say as many as 8 deaths and almost 3000 injured. Any ideas why the prevalence of so many pagers in use by Hezbollah members? Is it just simple lack of access to more advanced tech? Or because they don’t have GPS, they can’t be tracked like a mobile, have shorter ranges and are harder to intercept messages to? Or a combination of both? Either way, someone clearly figured out a way to isolate the pager numbers or something and seemingly managed to overload the circuits to the point of turning them into frikken personalised IEDs on the fly.
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Pretty much this, more or less. I am hearing it is a new batch of pagers they just received lately, was a bulk order, so it might have even been happened in the supply chain.
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I always dread seeing a notification of new posts in this thread. It’s never good news.
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“Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted a small amount of explosives inside 5000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.”
Diabolical.
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Going to make it a mission to try change that on the regular! 
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So, technologically speaking, a pager is a very simple device. 1 part GSM receiver/transmitter (transmission is require to keep connection to the cell tower) and one part cheap LCD screen and its driver. This is useful for reasons:
- It works wherever GSM is, no internet is required. The GSM networks are much more robust in most countries than the internet, and I’d wager doubly so in war torn Lebanon.
- Less points of failure. 1 GSM chip, 1 LCD screen, 1 LCD driver, and 1 CPU to bind them all. Compare with an iPhone with hundreds of individual components that could each fail and cause cascade failures in the device, causing downtime. We might be comparing 99.9999% availability with 99.9%, but in a massive, hard worn operation like an army, than hundredth of a percent could have a significant impact.
- Much cheaper to produce than most other tech. These components are all in surplus, so you can practically get them for free.
- Working in area’s with no GSM? Put down a signal booster between you and the next tower. These things go for less than R5000 in ZA, which is a drop in the bucket for a group like this.
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And now their walkie talkies too:
South African Awarded ‘Best of Nation’ Medal at WorldSkills Competition!
Fridges and HVAC units simply stand no chance against South Africa’s Philippus Saayman. While most competitions tend to award sparkling creatives or fierce sportspeople, Philippus has earned international praise for a more practical practice thanks to his recent moment in the sun at the WorldSkills Competition!
Hosted in France’s Lyon from 10 to 15 September, 1,400 people boasting an array of practical powers, from welding to floristry, united for the unique competition of nations, representing a myriad of countries and skill sets. A big deal, the event held an opening and closing ceremony, making it something of the Olympics for skill sets.
(This one especially for @Viper!)
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He is a cool dude.
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