So what’s it going to be tomorrow? Prisoner’s dilemma or miner collusion? #asknostr

New tool. Great when used with optional scattering lens, mounted underbarrel on a Winchester 870 tactical. Or as a single focused beam for pointing at things in the next zip code, pointing for star gazing, scattering pests, and igniting paper. The average classroom or keychain laser pointer is 1-5 mW. This model is all I could justify buying at 550 mW. Available up to 6W! Range: 24 miles There’s a Spruce tree 500yd south of me by the lake that I can see the square dot on, and the dot illuminates the entire top of the tree. Beam fully visible in full daylight. Even the reflected light off nearby surfaces is enough to temporarily impair vision. ALWAYS WEAR LASER PROTECTION EYEWEAR WHEN HANDLING! Not to be used carelessly. (Hence the custom labels I felt I should add inside the case in the event I die and someone finds it. Imagine what the military has access to if we can get these in 7 days from Shenzen. 👀 I can see restrictions being tightened in the near future. I wonder how it works on flock camera sensors? That may be an urban myth. Maybe not. I’m cautious about when and where I’ve tested it, with a military airbase and a few civilian aerodromes within 50 miles of here. Don’t need that heat.

Has anyone been through the @Start9 migration to 0.4.0. Given how important the Bitcoin node implementation has proven to be in the past week, and with BIP activation upon us this weekend, I don’t really feel like footgunning myself by messing with a smoothly operating Electrs instance in the next couple of weeks or until I get a redundant box set up. Thanks for comments. #asknostr

Hey does anyone have a resource for how to export the key from a Cold Card to a Sparrow wallet and also to another signer with full TX signing capability? Exporting to Sparrow by the normal means still leaves the physical Cold Card as a requirement for signing. Thx.

Now that my main migration away from seeds generated by CC4's with compromised firmware is long complete, I did a test tonight. I wanted to try this in light of reports of devices "bricking" immediately after installation of the new 5.6.0 firmware. I had 5 MK4's purchased over the course of 5 years. Some for use, some for testing. Anyway, I followed the same procedure for all five. Flash the new firmware, restart, enter pin, select seed tools, destroy seed. It worked on 4 out of 5 devices. On the fourth device, which happened to be bought at the same time in 2025 when I got another one, for which the process went smoothly, it bricked immediately after I destroyed the seed. The firmware install had worked and upon restart allowed me to enter my pin and get back in, to do the seed destruction. Immediately after I wiped the seed, it threw an error. I unplugged it and plugged it back in, using the same cable and power block as the last 7 devices. And the picture was the result. Has anyone isolated under what conditions the newly flashed devices will brick? I read about some of our Paraguayan brothers who encountered this as a result of variable power via weaker 9V batteries and cold power cables. The only thing I can think of that would have led to a possible power variation while I was performing the tests was the fact that we got a severe thunderstorm halfway through the batch. I am wondering if the rest of the working units are now somehow vulnerable to spontaneous bricking. So I thought I’d post about it. GN.

From the CounKite blog entry Sunday: “We destroyed our remaining COLDCARD inventory manufactured with the vulnerable firmware, and shipment was halted when the vulnerability was confirmed.” Why would they not just update the firmware instead of binning all that inventory? Seems like a larp.

Touching grass and trying to take a little break from obsessing over new approaches to self custody. The garden is starting to yield some good stuff. But I was pretty shocked when I woke up at 5 AM to see that we haven’t even officially made it to mid summer and we were into single digit plus temperatures overnight. Hopefully it’s just a temporary cold front.