Apple's iPhones and iPads are now certified for NATO classified data

Wow.  And just plain-jane iOS, too.  Out of the box. 

As someone who ran across (into?) "Secure Operating Systems" more than once, this is a big deal. 

Chuck Norris - The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You

Rest in peach, sir. 

The Eyes of the Ranger Are Upon You (Songwriter: Tirk Wilder)

In the Eyes of a Ranger, the unsuspecting Stranger, 
had better know the truth of wrong from night
Cause the rule of law and order starts at the Texas border, 
with the lone Star of the Ranger shining bright. 

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

In the Heart of a Ranger he'll never know the danger; 
from desperate men with nothing left to lose, 
the Ranger keeps on coming; so there ain't no sense in running, 
cause he's bound and sure to make you pay your dues.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; 
for that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

When a Ranger's on your Trail, he won't know how to fail, 
and you can't buy him off at any price; 
so if you decide to ramble, and with your life you'd gamble, 
know where you are before you roll the dice.

For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be.

If you see him coming' round the outskirts of town, 
never take that Ranger for a ride.
For the Eyes of a Ranger are upon you;
Any wrong you do, he's gonna see.
When you're in Texas look behind you; for
that's where the Ranger's gonna be. 

Yes, that's sung by Chuck himself.

But this is the song that I associate the most with him.  R.I.P. 

GPS jamming in the straight of Hormuz

This is not surprising, but it is pretty interesting, especially the guy in Dubai where Google Maps puts him in the middle of the straight. The discussion about why the Iranians probably have not mined the straight is also pretty interesting.

Update on the Herculaneum scrolls

As background, I've posted several times on the Herculaneum scrolls, here here and here.  That last link in particular is a fairly pain-free Youtube video about what the Big Deal is.

And a Big Deal it certainly is.  In short: when Mt. Vesuvius buried the Roman town of Pompeii in 79 AD, it also buried it's more prosperous neighbor Herculaneum.  One of the (very) rich Romans who lived in Herculaneum was likely the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and had one of the biggest libraries in the Empire.  The extreme heat of the lava flow carbonized the scrolls (books).  Researchers have been using CAT scans to image the carbonized rolls and have been applying AI to "unroll" the scrolls virtually and distinguish between carbon-based ink and just plain old scroll carbon.  They are starting to read scrolls that have been lost for 2000 years.

 Like I said, this is a Big Damn Deal.

If this interests you, there is a must read essay on what's been happening over the previous 18 months, the progress that's being made, and the challenges that are still present.  This part is really, really interesting:

So the central question has shifted from whether text could be recovered at all to whether it could be done routinely. At the current pace, processing the full Herculaneum library would take several years. The Vesuvius Challenge Master Plan, published in July 2025, outlines a series of steps intended to compress that timeline. These include improved surface extraction, deeper automation, and tools designed to reduce manual intervention at every stage.

According to Schilling, the problem is not that current methods fail outright, but that they require too much human steering.

“It’s not as fast or effective or cheap as it should be,” he told me. “Right now, we have solutions that work but that require human input.” What researchers want instead is a “global optimal solution” — a system that can isolate papyrus surfaces, unwrap them, and detect ink reliably across many scrolls without constant correction.

We're not there yet, but people are starting to figure out how to get there.  And it looks like there are a bunch of scrolls that were entirely lost over time that we will be able to read:

These scrolls are believed to contain Greek prose that largely vanished elsewhere, including philosophical works from the Epicurean tradition that were rarely recopied because they conflicted with Christian doctrine.

Very, very cool

 

An Open Source Intelligence assessment of the Iran war

Via a link from HMS Defiant (who is on quite a roll lately), this is a very interesting analysis of the war from Open Source Intelligence sources (i.e. non-classified published sources).  Very, very interesting indeed.

Turlough O'Carolan - various Irish tunes

Top o' the morning to you, and happy St. Patrick's Day (almost).  This is my traditional Paddy's Day post, mostly because I love the music here.

What is the "Classical Music" of Ireland? It's not (Italian) Opera, or (German) symphonies, or even an (English) homage to Ralph Vaughan Williams (who studied under an Irish music professor) "countryside music" in the concert hall. Instead, we find something ancient. 

We find something that easily might not have been.  Turlough O'Carolan (1670 – 25 March 1738) was the son of a blacksmith.  His father took a job for the MacDermot Roe family; Mrs. MacDermot Roe gave the young lad some basic schooling and saw in him a talent for poetry; when a few years later the 18 year old Turlough went blind after a bout of smallpox, she had him apprenticed to a harpist.  He soon was travelling the land, composing and singing.

This tradition was already ancient by the early 1700s.  it was undeniably Celtic, dating back through the Middle Ages, through the Dark Ages, through Roman times to a barbarous Gaul.  There bards travelled the lands playing for their supper on the harp.

This was O'Carolan's stock in trade.  He rapidly became the most famous singer in the Emerald Isle.  It is said that weddings and funerals were delayed until he was in the vicinity.  One of his most famous compositions - if you have spent any time at all listening to Irish music, you know this tune - was considered too "new fangled" by the other harpists of his day.  Fortunately, he didn't listen to their criticisms.

 

He married very late, at 50, and had many children.  But his first love was Brigid, daughter of the Schoolmaster at a school for the blind.  He always seemed to have carried a torch for her.

 

So why is this post in the normal slot reserved for Classical Music?  Listen to this composition of his, and you see the bridge from the archaic Celts to Baroque harpsichord.

 

And keep in mind how this brilliance might never have blazed, had Mrs. MacDermot Roe not seen the talent in a blind Irish boy and set him upon a path trod by many equally unexpected geniuses, all the way back to St. Patrick.  It is truly said that we never know what our own path will be until we set our foot down on it.

But his was an ancient path and he inherited much from those who trod it before him.  His "Farewell to Music" is said to be more in the traditional mold, and might have been appreciated at a feast held by Vercingetorix before the battle of Alesia.

This music is a bridge between modern and the ancient that disappears into the mists of legend.  Perhaps more importantly, it is a music that is still alive today, after a run of perhaps two and a half millennia.  

And it is a music where you still hear the yearning of a young blind man for his muse, Brigid.  That is a vitality that should not be exiled to a single day of celebration, even if it is for as illustrious a Saint as Patrick.  On this Feast Day of St. Patrick (almost), remember just how deep the roots of our civilization run.

(Originally posted March 16, 2014)

Paddy Treacy - Charlie's Bar

Country music is alive and well in the Emerald Isle.  Glór Tíre is a long running and highly rated country music talent competition on Ireland's TG4 channel.  The last season's winner was Paddy Treacy with this song.  It's Irish (for sure) but it is indisputably country.  I love this video - it looks like he and his mates had a blast filming it. 

Nightnoise - Night In That Land

Nightnoise is one of the most famous Irish jazz ensembles, combining jazz with traditional Irish themes.  As we come hard into St. Paddy's Day, this seems a fun kickoff that a bunch of you should like. 

Write Europe off

As HMS Defiant points out, there's no There there:

The knowing world watches and mocks as the mighty Royal Navy and Great Britain struggle to get ONE SINGLE SHIP underway 12 days after the war started and still the damned thing is unable to leave port ...

You can say exactly the same about all of the Britain's pantywaist partners in NATO. Not one single one of them has ponied up a ship or fighter squadron or bomb wing to send off to do something about the sudden and complete dramatic disruption to their oil and gas supplies. NOT ONE OF THE BASTARDS HAS STIRRED.

I have watched as people are concerned that poor Britain is struggling to get a ship underway but that really isn't the real problem. You see, any relevant and serious government would have seen the damage to their economic fortunes by the oil and gas embargo and sortied the entire fleet and sent every other fighter and bomber to the Middle East to squash the Iranians and as we have all noticed, not one of them lifted a finger.

Yup.  If they don't care about oil from the Gulf being cut off, let them buy Permian Basin fracked oil.  Otherwise, His Majesty's Government would tell Lloyd's to keep insuring tankers.  But they don't.

The USA has let them act like children for so long that they no longer know how to act like adults.  c.f. German Chancellor Mertz' comments yesterday that shutting down German nuclear power was a huge mistake, but it's too late to change the decision. Maybe you should try adulting sometime, Chancellor.

And the last word goes to HMS Defiant:

I think the first wave of European refugees is looking around now and beginning their research; where do they want to settle when they pick themselves up and their families and maybe even their businesses and move lock, stock, and barrel to the United States or Western hemisphere as they start fleeing the dire fate their elites have arranged for them all.

This wave of destruction is now unstoppable.

Sure looks that way to me.

Secure Your Home Network: Simplified Mint Linux Installation

It used to be a real pain to install Linux.  My first Linux distro was Slackware on a v0.99 kernel that came on 35 floppy disks (ask your parents, kids) way back in the early 1990s.  Things have come a long, long way since that.  You don't even need to muck around with dd and create a boot USB anymore.  Super easy. 

Somehow I missed this

Sometime in the last two or three weeks the odometer here ticked over 20 Million page views.  Seems kind of weird that I wasn't tracking that, but whatever.  In three months we will celebrate the 18th blogiversary here.

Silicon Graybeard has an interesting theory about all the traffic lately. 

The shameful decline of the Royal Navy

His Majesty's fleet seems to be entirely unable to protect His Majesty's subjects abroad.  There seems to be only a single ship (MHS Dragon) that can be sent to Cyprus for anti-missile defense, and it has taken more than a week to prepare to sail.  And they still haven't left port.

The Royal Navy is no allied force worth considering.  Perhaps HMS Defiant can comment on his place. 

As they point out, the Royal Navy was ready to sail in three days when the Iron Lady Maggie Thatcher told them to stand ready in the Falkland crisis. And then they had something like 100 ships.  Now they can't get a single one.

As Donald Trump would say, sad!

Although I like what he says about the "1000 ship Navy" at about 11:40 into the video.  'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But after all, what today is the "special relationship" or even the transatlantic alliance?  But it's really weird that we're getting more support from Germany than from Great Britain these days.

Whatever you do, don't mention the war. Gosh, the darn Krauts have no sense of humor ... 

The Royal Navy is the fleet of Great Britain.  You know Great Britain, right?  It used to be where Britain is now.  Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Jeremy Clarkson on the USS Eisenhower

This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show.  They still had F-14s on the carrier.  This is a very cool look back to Old America when it still was America. 

The Blues Brothers - Soul Man

The 1980 film assembled an all-star cast of musicians.  This was perhaps the weakest song in the movie. 

How far back in time can you understand English?

The English language has evolved for basically as long as there has been English.  A great book on this subject is Robin MacNeil (and company) in The Story Of English (highly recommended if you are a history nerd like me). 

Well, via a link from someone I've forgotten (sorry! Midwest Chick? A Large Regular?) there is a fabulous demonstration of this where the writer starts in the present and where each paragraph goes backwards in time 100 years.  I started getting lost around 1200 AD, and I've messed around casually with Old English before.  I would catch the odd word before 1200 but the overall gist was a mystery.

And I love the URL for his site.  LOL.

But at the end of his post he links for a Youtube video of a guy who speaks the different versions of English, starting in 400 AD and going forward 100 years at a time.  I found this a lot harder than reading, only starting to pick up some comprehension around 1500 AD.  But when he turns on transcriptions it's amazing how far back I recognize a lot of words.

Wild.  I've embedded it here.  Highly, highly recommended. And I guess I'm not the only one who's interested - 1.2 Million views in two months?  Yowser.

New Zealand Navy grounding update

I posted about this 15 months ago. Midwest Chick has an update:

The New Zealand navy was so proud and happy to have a lesbian from Britain come on board that they gave her a $100M survey and dive vessel, which she crashed and sank.

The lesbian “diversity hire” captain of a Royal New Zealand Navy ship that ran aground and sank off Samoa has been charged with negligence along with two other officers over the loss of the vessel.

The $100 million HMNZS Manawanui, which was under the command of UK-born homosexual Yvonne Gray, crashed on the south side of Upolu on October 5, 2024, due to human error including failure to turn off autopilot, an inquiry found last year.

This is the official inquiry report which is leading to Commander Gray's Courts Martial.  Obviously the entirety of His Majesty's New Zealand Navy is a bunch of dirty misogynists ...

Midwest Chick adds this tidbit that I had missed:

This isn’t the first time that a NZ naval diversity hire damaged a ship. It happened in 2024 with a different female captain.

And that’s what happens when you choose diversity over competence. Wonder if the New Zealanders will actually learn from this??

Now maybe our own Navy could do something about our (multiple) female commanders who run into ships on the high seas. 

 

Bravo Zulu, Coasties

A cruise ship got stuck in the ice off Antarctica, and the Coast Guard (by chance) had an icebreaker nearby.  Well done.