I’ve recently gotten to speak with a few folks who work at an enterprise security company. I asked what their security researchers set as company rules for allowed laptops. My one datapoint so far is “Dell or Apple.” So for example, no Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is arguably the best work laptop.

I am curious what other large security companies (or any of you security minded folks) set as rules for trusted laptops. Can anyone share their lists and theories as to why I heard Dell and Apple? BIOS is more trustworthy?

For those of you who may be too poor to afford the latest AAA titles, or just don't want to support policies like micro-transactions and "If you're offended, just don't buy it", there are many open-source and/or free games that can tide you over. Some of my favorites are:

• FreeCiv: A civilization building game based on Sid Meier's Civilization 1 and 2
• OpenTTD: A transport network building game based off of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon Deluxe
• Dwarf Fortress: Not Open-Source - fortress colony management simulator with an additional RPG gamemode

Do you guys have any other free, possibly open-source games that you would recommend?

This is kind of a meta question I suppose, but I was wondering: where do folks here purchase books online?

(As an aside, I check out books from the library often and I would highly recommend that you do too, but there are certain books that I want to keep, highlight, and write on. The library usually doesn’t sell these.)

Why? My mouse, as well as my vision, are focused on the left. The vote box feels like its light years away on a 16:9 screen. It's on the opposite side of the screen from everything else I might click in the GUI. Its a waste of time/movement.

HTH!

Thanks to all of you who gave me guidance in the thread about password managers. It got me thinking I should expand the question to overall best practices regarding security, just in case I have any other important blind spots.

What are the essential do's and don'ts of digital security for the average person?

This is a general, "what books have themes or content that would make for great movies" question. Graphic novels are included here.

Could have posted in ~talk or ~movies, but I'm seeking the opinions of dedicated readers, who've had the thought in considering a story, "I'd really like to see the visuals for this", or "a movie/series adaptation could expand on these themes".

Also, what were your biggest disappointments in the rendering of a book into a movie/TV series?

My picks:
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Can't say that it's likely to get the nuanced treatment it deserves, but an even-handed visualization of socialist vs. capitalist societies is overdue, and it's got spaceflight and FTL information transfer.
Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan. Not that he's ever going to grant the rights, but this one's a no-brainer for American cinema - brash, loud, splashy, violent, with bigger-than-life characters and themes.
James Tiptree, Jr. (a/k/a Alice Sheldon), Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. I'd love to see a short series based on this collection.
China Mieville - anything from the New Crobuzon books. The baroque ruin backgrounding the scenes, and the panoply of characters, should make for amazing cinema; a little judicious editing will be needed to make the stories work for the screen.
[Obscure] Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron, subject to timely and relevant updates for 21st Century media. There's a great theme about how selective presentation of video clips and the editor's viewpoint influences the story being told.
K.W. Jeter, Farewell Horizontal, this one's gonna have great visuals, trust me.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, remade as a story about border migration.
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War - man, is it ever time for this one in the U.S.
Dan Simmons, Hyperion - the World Tree, the Shrike, and plenty of other opportunities for fine visuals.
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Another candidate for an anthology series; perfect for animation.
Tibor Fischer, The Thought Gang - it's a heist story, but also a comedy and a satire. Kind of amazed no one has made it into a movie before.

Biggest recent disappointment - The adaptation of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. Edited to completely discard the political messaging and amplify the sex/violence. Turgid, poor special effects, and gruesome acting.

A few people have expressed interest in my indoor, semi-automated growing setup so here's the lowdown.. In a corner of my workshop is a cupboard with a footprint of 1.6x1.2m, 2.2m high. This is insulated with a mixture of glasswool, foam board and expanding foam (depending on what I could install where), and lined with diamond pattern aluminumised mylar (the diamond pattern provides diffuse reflection to avoid hotspots).

Inside the cupboard I have 750W of full-spectrum LED lighting, a 500W oil-filled radiator, and a small fan to keep air moving around. There's a vent which pulls air from the outside and a extractor fan which also vents outside. Being able to pull cool air from the outside (even in summer) is extremely useful as the lights can put out quite a lot of heat.

My main growsystem is an Amazon low-pressure aeroponics system, and I've also got some airpots to do some soil-based growing in. Aero on the right, pots on the left. If you're not familiar with aeroponics, it's a system where the plants roots hang in open space and nutrient-rich water is sprayed or misted over them. High-pressure aero uses mist and low pressure uses sprayers. High pressure aero is currently one of the best known ways to maximise plant growth but low-pressure is pretty good too and you don't need anywhere near as much gear like pressure vessels and solenoid and so on. I just have an aquarium pump which drives the sprayers. In my experience aero is considerably more efficient than soil, non-soil media or other hydroponics - but on the other hand it's very twitchy. If your nutrient balance is off or your pH is wrong or worse, you pump fails - things can go wrong very quickly.

The airpots are totally new to me. People say they're good but I have no idea. I have a mixture of compost, perlite and coco coir to go into them so we'll see how that works out. I'm going to use organic nutrients only on them, I have some seaweed derived stuff which should be good throughout the entire grow process.

So that's the hardware, now on to the fun bit - the automation...

On top of the cabinet is a board hosting a Raspberry Pi model A - these days I'd use a Zero W but they didn't exist when I built this. In it's mostly-bare state the board looks like this. Quick explanation - the red board is mains-rated relays which let me switch the connections above it on and off using the Pi. This is where the lights, fan and heater are wired to. The small junction block left of the relays is connected to mains.

The block up and left of the Pi is 5V, which drives the Pi, the relay control electronics and provides power to the junction block on the right. There are various sensors wired in to that block and connected back to the Pi.

Wired up on my bench for testing it looks like this, and in situ it looks like this (this was on a previous iteration of the cupboard but it's basically the same now). The orange cables on the left are lights, fan and heater. The black cables top are the sensors.

Temperature is monitored using five DS18B20 sensors, which are cheap and reasonably accurate serial devices so you can run a whole bunch of them off a single pin on the pi. I monitor my water temperature, the temperature at the plant stem, at the wall, inside my workshop (but outside the cupboard) and outside temperature. The wall/stem temperature is the important one, that determines whether heating or cooling is engaged. I monitor the exterior and interior temperatures to know how effective my insulation is being. If water temperature gets too high I might add an agent which protects against microbial infections that like warmer water.

I do have a DHT22 humidity sensor but they're hella flaky and it's currently not working. I will replace it at some point but past experience suggests humidity is high whatever I do.

The Pi has a python script which runs every five minutes. It reads all the sensors, decides what (if anything) to do, then logs everything in a sqlite database. If it's 'night' (which is actually day outside, for temperature management reasons) it turns the lights off, if it's 'day' it turns them on. If it's cold it turns the heater on, if it's hot the fan. There's a bit of smartness where it actually aims for a midpoint of temperature because otherwise it's always aiming for highest temperature then immediately cooling again, then heating and so on - a stable temperature is better for the plants. At 'night' I tend to run the fan to drop the temperature: plants often like it cooler during darkness, get some fresh air in and attempt to lower the humidity a bit.

There is a web interface which lets me see what's going on - current temperature and status, plus some lovely lovely charts (who doesn't love a nice chart?). I can also turn the lights out from here in case I need to go in an do some maintenance for anything. 750W of LED light is painfully bright, it's much more comfortable (and safer!) to turn them off while topping up reservoirs or changing water or whatever.

It would be relatively trivial to add sensors for moisture or pH to add an auto-watering or auto-adjusting nutrient systems, but I haven't felt the need to do that yet.

Happy to do my best to answer any questions anyone has.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Consider three examples:

1. I am a farmer. I have a piece of land that can grow just enough potatoes to feed me. I work this land, I gather potatoes, ad nauseam.

2. I am a farmer, but this time I have ten times the amount of land. I hire four workers and also work myself. Together we grow enough potatoes to feed all of us, and we also have a surplus. I sell this surplus potato for ¤5000. I am a greedy man, so I take ¤3000 for myself and give ¤500 to each of my workers.

3. The situation is the same as in 2, but this time I am a just man. I share the money equally, so everyone including myself gets ¤1000.

It seems to me that in the first case the land can be considered personal property, since there is no exploitation and no surplus is generated. In the second example the land is clearly a piece of private property, because I use it to exploit other people, taking most of the profit for myself.

But what about the third example? On one hand, the profit is distributed equally, so there is technically no exploitation, right? On the other hand, I am alienated from the workers, because I still have the power to fire one of them (or all of them if I know I can replace them) or to distribute goods unfairly (even if I don't do that). What is the Marxist point of view here?