Category Archives: Mathematics

The Real Risk

Thoughts on vaccine-mandates and collectivism, from Sarah Hoyt.

[Update a while later]

“Read my lips. We’re not going back to masks and lockdowns again.”

After a few weeks of freedom, I saw yesterday that CVS put up the mandatory mask sign again when I went to get some ice, for no reason other than the idiotic dictate from the LA County health department, which the sheriff has said he’s not going to enforce, because there’s no scientific basis for it.

Bash/Vi Issue

So I’m trying to dig my Windows product key out of my recovered files. I run this pattern on all of them with ‘egrep -r ‘^([A-Za-z0-9]{5}-){4}[A-Za-z0-9]{5}$’ *’

It says it finds it in three files:

Binary file recup_dir.7567/f2079240352_unregmp2 matches
Binary file recup_dir.7574/f2082184960_pidgen_dll matches
Binary file recup_dir.7576/f2082580864_pidgen_dll matches

But when I go into vi to search for the string itself with the same regex, I get “No pattern matches.” Is the syntax for regex different in vi than in bash?

[Wednesday update]

I still haven’t found it, but amazingly, I seem to have installed a working version of Windows 10 without it.