yaleman.org

Many countries’ veterans struggle to integrate back into civilian life and find purpose outside the military, but the problem is especially acute for legionnaires. Having shed their nationalities and left friends and family behind, foreign-born soldiers often base their identities on the Legion itself. Retirement means losing home, community, and employment all at once … So while the IILE houses wounded veterans, the fields that fill with camo-wearing men picking grapes each harvest address the emotional and financial hardships that former legionnaires face.

[Read More]

From a New York Times article on disasters which strike America, their frequency, location and financial impacts.

Only about 4 percent of all hurricanes that make landfall globally hit the United States, said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University who studies the damage caused by hurricanes. Yet 60 percent of worldwide damage from hurricanes happens in the United States.

Dr. Mendelsohn attributed this partly to federal government programs that discourage citizens and local governments from building walls to protect housing near the coast. Only in the United States do relief programs and subsidized insurance make it attractive for people to move toward disaster-prone areas, he said.

[Read More]

Tank, a short by Stu Maschwitz created entirely in Adobe After Effects.

The way I made TANK is a little crazy. I made it entirely in Adobe After Effects, with equal parts animation elbow grease and nerdy expressions madness. This video is part behind-the-scenes, part After Effects tutorial, and part therapy session.

Well worth checking out - the video is 80’s gamer porn - but the making of is just incredible.

This was the front page of the New York Daily News, 19th March 2018.

With yesterday’s Texas massace, there have now been more students or teachers killed by guns in U.S. schools than active-duty military deaths in 2018. No headline can do this justice.

Just a quick note - the recommended “Generic PCL 6/PCL XL LF Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.13” settings worked fine for me on Debian/Kali.

The only tweak I had to do was to set the IP address instead of the local hostname - but that was more about our network than CUPS.

The first time I saw this ad, I couldn’t look away, nor did I want to. It’s powerful in its message and presentation, and spectacularly well done.

A delightful tale of a stop-motion artist. Well worth your time to check out.

I’ve never found it particularly tough to talk about my ongoing journey through the fun of having a bent brain. The journey itself’s the hard part, and to read another person’s story reminds me that there’s a lot of people out there, and they too have wonderful people to help them.

Hi, I’m Wil Wheaton. I’m 45 years-old, I have a wonderful wife, two adult children who make me proud every day, and a daughter in-law who I love like she’s my own child. I work on the most popular comedy series in the world, I’ve been a New York Times Number One Bestselling Audiobook narrator, I have run out of space in my office for the awards I’ve received for my work, and as a white, heterosexual, cisgender man in America, I live life on the lowest difficulty setting – with the Celebrity cheat enabled.

[Read More]

Setting up proxy auto-configuration on pfSense has a handy documentation page, but sadly the first thing they say is that you have to run the webConfigurator GUI in HTTP mode, which is kind of annoying.

Given the auto-config of nginx (which runs the pfSense GUI) will likely blat any changes I make, I decided to use lighttpd instead.

In short, we’re going to:

1. install a web server
2. make a pac file
3. make it available at a couple of different URLs via that web server
4. have cake

Here’s how I did it…

This is current for v2.4.1, and is by no means a configuration I’d stand behind as far as being terribly secure for anything you should care about! :) I’ve got a static IP address, so I have a DNS entry that points at my router. If you’ve got a dynamic address, it’d be worth configuring Dynamic DNS to make connecting to your VPN possible.

Here we go… it’s all done in the pfSense webUI of course.