If you’re talking about being able to regain access with no local backups (even just a USB key sewn into your clothing) your going to need to think carefully about the implications if someone else gets hold of your phone, or hijacks your number. Anything you can do to recover from the scenario is a way an attacker can gain access. Attempting to secure this via SMS is going to ne woefully insecure.

That being said, there are a couple of approaches you could consider. One option is to put an encrypted backup on an sftp server or similar and remember the login and passwords, another would be to have a trusted party, say a family member or very close friend, hold the emergency codes for access to your authentication account or backup site.

Storing a backup somewhere is a reasonable approach if you are careful about how you secure it and consider if it meets your threat model. The backup doesn’t need to contain all your credentials, just enough to regain access to your actual password vault, so it doesn’t need to be updated often, unless that access changes. I would suggest either an export from your authentication app, a copy of the emergency codes, or a text file with the relevant details. Encrypt this with gpg symmetric encryption so you don’t have to worry about a key file, and use a long, complex, but reconstructable passphrase. By this I mean a passphrase you remember how to derive, rather than trying to remember a high entropy string directly, so something like the second letter of each word of a phrase that means something to you, a series of digits that are relevant to you, maybe the digits from your first friend’s address or something similarly pseudo random, then another phrase. The result is long enough to have enough entropy to be secure, and you’ll remember how to generate it more readily than remembering the phrase itself. It needs to be strong as once an adversary has a copy of the file they jave as long as they want to decrypt it. Once encrypted, upload it to a reliable storage location that you can access with just a username and password. Now you need to memorize the storage location, username, password and decryption passphrase generator, but you can recover even to a new phone.

The second option is to generate the emergency, or backup, codes to your authentication account, or the storage you sync it to, and have someone you trust keep them, only to be revealed if you contact them and they’re sure it’s you. To be more secure, split each code into two halves and have each held by a different person.

I was more suggesting that it might be a bit eldritch, but sometimes humor doesn’t come across quite right/

The linked paper is focused on studying the ‘perforation-type anchor’ they use to hold the tissue to the mold as it grows, rather than keeping it alive afterwards. During growth the tissue and mold were submerged, or partially submerged, in a suitable medium to keep the cells healthy, and it was only when the resulting models were tested that they were removed (although one test did seem to involve letting it dry out to see if the anchors held). Growing the various layers of cells seems to be a solved problem, and I suspect that includes keeping them supplied with nutrients and such, so the authors aren’t examining that. What’s not solved is how to keep the tissue attached to a robot, which is what the authors were studying.

Do you really want to know? There are some things that the human mind is not meant to contemplate.

It looks like AssDB uses a weird SQL syntax? Is it worth upgrading to, I hear it’s great at pulling information out of unstructured and even imaginary data sources?

Ah, memories. That was me on a Spectrum. It’s all fun and games until you forget to save (to tape) and your code hangs the machine, losing everything.

The article says:

The photons travel through a resonant metasurface, where they mingle with a pump beam.

From that, I think it’s suggesting it needs a separate beam of photons to amplify the signal, much like a transistor needs a supply current to amplify the signal it gets.

They also say:

This new tech also captures the visible and non-visible (or infrared) light in one image as you look through the ‘lens.’

Which sounds like it produces an image showing both the IR and visible spectrum in the visible range.

Mind you, re-readind it, most of the article just talks about IR, so I’m not certain what it’s actually doing. It could just be transparent to the visible spectrum. It wouldn’t be much good for driving if it did that though, the windscreen blocks a lot of IR and you’d need IR headlights!

The material captures visible light too, so headlights would be brighter, but I wonder if there’s a way to reduce the contrast by either filtering out some wavelengths (like driving glasses) or the material simply not boosting it’s output past a certain level?

The device captures visible and infrared light, just like a typical night vision scope. They’re working on expanding the spectrum too, which could lead to some interesting and useful results. I understand that, for instance, skin cancers are more visible under certain UV wavelengths, so imagine a doctor being able to just put on a pair of glasses that convert that wavelength to give you a once over during a checkup.

It doesn’t really matter whether the FMR is one in a hundred or one in a million, for the uses it’s being put to it’s still too high. If it was only being used as one factor for authenticating someone (I.e. the ‘thing for are’) but still required the other factor(s) (the ‘thing you know’ and the ‘thing you have’) then it’d be adaquate.

As it stands, when it’s being used either to pick someone out without further scrutiny, or to make payments with no further checks, it’s simply unacceptable. There’s good arguments to say it’s not just the error rate is unacceptable, but that the technology simply shouldn’t be used in those scenarios as it’s entirely inappropriate, but that’s a separate discussion.

Is he still on the team? If so, why? Are they all this twisted and broken?

That may be your perfect search engine, I jyst want proper boolean operators on a sesrch engine that doesn’t think it knows what I want better than I do, and doesn’t pack the results out with pages that don’t match all the criteria just for the sake of it. The sort of thing you described would be anathema to me, as I suspect my preferred option may be to you.

Bah, a magnetised needle and a steady hand is the one true way to edit code on your prod system.

I haven’t had any issues painting most plastics with the general hobby type spray paints. I know there are some that’ll fail or damage the surface, but I’ve had good results with Plastikote (other brands are available, etc).

I should probably have been more specific about using spray paints for plastics rather than general ones.

Maybe a good pair of headphones and the careful application of some spray paint? Mask and holes or areas you don’t want to colour, then apply several light coats until suitable pinkness is achieved. I suspect you’ll get bonus points for personalisation.