The Flash plugin is being forcefull killed off by Adobe now, years after Apple first banned the plugin from safari and started the trend. Adobe's newly distributed plugin will come with a time-limit baked in and eventually stop working. This is another reason I'm glad I don't upgrade my software to the same versions across all physical machines.

I have a 2006 era computer with 2010 era software. A 2010 era computer with 2013 era software. A 2013 era computer with 2016 era software. All but the last is well outside of official software support. But I'll always be able to easily play Flash media if I want to because I can just load it up on my 2010 era machine. And on that machine the Flash plugin creates /proc/ temp files on disk so you can directly interact with the swf files. The old machine's HTTPS cypher set and TLS protocol might not be acceptable to a modern fancy website but I can always use a $modern era machine to grab the files w/curl-or-wget if I'm not loading from disk.

This also applies to things like GNU Radio. I can still run any GR 3.6, 3.7, or 3.8 flowgraph I find online. No more loading up a flowgraph to see a bunch of missing blocks. Instead of having to try to port things each generation I just leave them in-place, working, and then wait a couple years longer than most people to adopt the newest version of things on an entirely new machine. Like the xkcd comic says, it pays to live in the past.

Obviously this means security holes that aren't patched. I can't backport everything or provide static compiled deps for all of userspace. But for the most security problematic programs, like browsers, the kernel, x.org, it's usually possible. But these days security is more about attacks through your browser's VM or router's interface than your actual OS's programs.

Stargate SG-1 is the best scifi TV show that has existed so far. Some of it's spin-offs were pretty good. Others, like Stargate Universe, were just okay. But Stargate Universe did have a very interesting plot device. In it they were in a spaceship traveling across galaxies setting down a chain of stargates (wormholes). The ship itself seemed to be trying to read a message in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Neat, right? But the tone of the show was weird and not stargate'y so it was canceled after the first season with no explaination of any of the plots.

I always thought the best resolution of the Stargate Universe plot was that the Destiny spaceship was traveling across the universe in order to get enough baseline distance and so interferometric resolution to see the data encoded in the fine structure of cosmic microwave background. When the ship calculates it is far enough away that the detail encoding the message can be resolved they'll fire up the chain of gates connecting Destiny back to the first end of the telescope, manufactured by the Ancients, creating an interferometer the size of an entire galaxy cluster.

It gives a reason for the ships behavior that's both scientifically plausible and fits in perfectly with the canon plot.

I've been growing "Titan" sunflower seeds for about 6 years now. They result in large white/grey seeds. Last year some of my Titan plant heads were cross pollinated and came up with black seeds. When I planted those black seeds this spring these purple seeds resulted. The purple was pretty intense. It even stained my fingers.

I was harvesting the seed heads early because the squirrels (and birds) had taken more than half of them. I could see the local squirrel was very upset by my audacity to take any of the seeds for myself. It stared at me the entire time alarm calling and flicking it's tail.

A few years back I put some lame jokes in my robots.txt and said a hello to any human reading it. Yesterday someone(?) took a string from that greeting and set it as their bot's user-agent while mirroring a large part of the site.

...
User-agent: Zombies
Disallow: /brains

User-agent: Killer AI
Disallow: /~superkuh/

User-agent: The person who is reacting to the lame jokes that is reading this robots.txt right now. Yes, you.
Allow: /hello/awarenessofthemeta/
...

83.159.xx.xx "GET /whysospurious.png http://superkuh.com/radio-filter-simulations.html" "awarenessofthemeta"
83.159.xx.xx "GET /fig-3-from-bandstop-paper-by-guyette.png http://superkuh.com/radio-filter-simulations.html" "awarenessofthemeta"
83.159.xx.xx "GET /library/Space/Radio%20Astronomy/Time-scale-of-solar-effects-at-1AU.png http://superkuh.com/libra
ry/Space/Radio%20Astronomy/" "awarenessofthemeta"

Well... hello person. I really enjoyed the out of band mechanism you've used to talk back. Either it's that or some very weird bot behavior pulling substrings from robots.txt as a random user-agent.