If you don’t subscribe to Naked Security from Sophia, you really should. I’d say 6 of 10 of the emails they send to me are pretty entertaining even if they’re covering topics I’ve already heard about and digested.
Usually I don’t even click through the email but did today for reasons that I can’t remember and near the end of the web version was astounded by the inclusion of videos from Sleep, Monolord, and the Melvins. It’s nice to see some familiar faces in security newsletters.
I logged very little time at a keyboard this weekend, hell this past week excepting work, and spent most of the time off either driving around on errands or figuring out the logistics of getting to some place on some day by a certain time. I feel like I spend a lot of my life trying to stack tasks up to get small pockets of time to do things I like. Ultimately this is nearly always a losing strategy since I end up too exhausted to really use those time slots fruitfully. Thus, some links:
1. I am not a scientist but I do enjoy reading about bug sex on the internet when long and interesting stories about the aforementioned topic become available. I can especially and completely away from the topic of the article relate to the author’s compound dread and fascination with spiders. I don’t like them either when we come face to face while they descend on a web but I am fascinated by them.
2. text.fish is an invaluable bit of web hackery that allows you to bypass the javascript hackery that hides new stories behind an overlay about how expensive it is to publish words on the internet after you’ve published them on dead trees already. I may start actually linking to stories published by a certain monochrome lady again if this continues to work since the text is the only thing I’m really interested in. Good stuff that I hope isn’t immediately detected and blocked by more disgusting JS.
3. I was going to link yet another article about Parler and the weird-ass continuing outcry about election fraud from the fringiest crazy people and then I realized I may have already posted something about that story or maybe it was quoting large chunks of something I’d already read a week ago. Call it exhaustion or a hangover of sorts from the first couple of weeks of post-election misdirection and chaos mongering by the right but I’m about out of interest and/or enthusiasm for anything related to crazy people and the 2020 election.
4. Growl is ceasing development which is kind of a bummer because it was a great case of how to deal with Apple not being equipped to handle a necessary interface element and devs stepping in to handle the shortcoming. As seems always is the case with Apple, they took some of their good ideas, pasted some shit and failure on top, and made it just barely good enough for interest to decline in something better.
We could all use a lot more Slow especially whilst cooped up during a pandemic that, at least in the Unites States, will seemingly never end. Creating some barriers between me and a potential purchase never seemed like a better idea.
From their website:
Passwords, long entry forms, 5-factor authentication, we got it all! Shop online and ask yourself “Do I really need this?” with an excessive amount of details.
This is utter timely genius. They’ve also made a Chrome extension available in case you’d enjoy the maximum amount of self flagellation while buying useless crap on the internet.
I’m trying to stick with my pledge to not make excuses for my absences because why would I? This typically means, and will in this case, a link dump but I should also mention some of the things going on away from the keyboard since that’s where my focus is most of the time lately.
I’m starting a new job in just over a week. I managed to scrape up a week off between the two which fills me with joy and dread simultaneously. Colorado is back up to Safer At Home Level 3 which means there won’t be a whole lot of anything going on in the city and my house has rapidly degenerated into a state approximate to a 1990s punk house while my wife has been in the hospital over the past three weeks. That’s one of the weirdest parts about being largely confined to home; you’re stuck in the middle of it, realize in full what a godawful mess it is becoming, and cannot summon any enthusiasm for doing anything about it. That’s where I am right now.
Speaking of hospitals and my wife, her projected release date coincides with my first day at the new job. It’s hard to say in just words how relieved I am that she’s getting ready to come home after the sheer number of ‘so scared that I spend the day trying to not break down’ scares that we’ve had over the past couple weeks. I have no clear idea yet what the fiscal impact is going to be but I’m fairly certain that a 3 week hospital stay will not be inexpensive even with relatively good, for a stagnant startup, insurance coverage. I’m trying not to even think about that now but it looms eternally in the background along with all of the other worries that come with stupid adult life.
Here are some sights I saw:
1. You may or may not care about skate shoes. I happen to care a bunch but mainly because I’m always trying to find vegan skate shoes that don’t look like a hacky sack wrapped around my foot. The Savier story is pretty goddamned interesting. I read this story during lunch and ended up falling down an incredible rabbit hole chasing down a bunch of shoes and people who make shoes mentioned in the story.
2. Although this examination of Apple’s newfound commitment to lessening e-waste versus what you’re actually going to buy which incidentally comes in even more packaging is factually correct it is also a frustrating read for me. I have a cheap/old iPhone from Sprint-Mobile that is about ready to go back to the mothership because I have actual use for it. I’m also replacing my OnePlus 7 Pro 5G with a Pixel 5. It’s shipped and should be here shortly. Uh oh! I’m switching phones with different charging standards!! I have several warp chargers for my soon-to-be-ex OnePlus. Will I throw these chargers away? No, because they’re still useful as chargers for other USB-C devices. They may not charge what I’ve plugged it into up to 80% in a scant few minutes but in the wide world of Covid-19 I’m not away from home or even my desk very often. I can wait the extra 20 minutes in most cases. The point here being that because all of my phones excepting my cheapo iPhone all use a standard charging cable that magically just works (that phrase seems oddly familiar – perhaps from another lifetime?) with most of the devices that need charging. I need to charge my Kindle? Easy, just unplug the USB-C cable and plug the microUSB cable into the brick. The multiple wireless charging stands that I used with my Pixel 3 XL — they still fucking work with the new phone two versions later.
3. I really enjoyed reading one man’s 35 year history with Amiga machines as constant in his life. The stories about his nascent experiences with computers and the warm nostalgia that surround those memories was really heartening for me.
4. I also enjoyed this criticism of the odd design decisions Zoom made when implementing end to end encryption because it was a easily digestible and entertaining explanation even to someone who is really not all that interested in the specifics of encryption. The furry stuff creeped me the fuck out but I guess nobody rides for free?
My Pinebook Pro arrived today. I spent a little time poking around on it after dinner and am now typing this post up on it. I didn’t go in with crazy high expectations since I’m fairly experienced with working withLinux on the desktop with much more powerful hardware supporting it.
Here are my day one impressions so far:
1. It isn’t crazy fast for desktop-ish use so far. I’m running the Manjaro version that comes preinstalled on it and using KDE as my desktop environment and it doesn’t feel quite as responsive as my other machine but, of course, my other machines are for the most part i9 class processors with enough RAM that I scarcely even touch my swap partition so that comparison should surprise absolutely no one. For $200, it’s fucking great and it does everything I would expect and a whole bunch more. As long as you’re not expecting your inexpensive machine to miraculously hit Mach 1, I think this is a surprisingly great desktop experience. It probably won’t be my daily driver for heavy lifting tasks but it runs Chromium with the required gazillion tabs open, Guake, and a few other small applications without any noticeable difficulty.
2. Again, for the price, the hardware that you touch and interface with externally feels on par with some of the better Chromebooks. The screen is perfectly workable and clear. The keyboard is chicklet style and doesn’t yield at all when you’re typing. Trackpads in Linux have always been a bit of a sore spot for me since I tend to experience a ton of phantom clicks when text editing that are probably more the fault of the window manager/DE than the hardware but this one feels comfortable to use even with the constant fear that the cursor is going to magically move three lines up at any second. The trackpad is buttonless and requires a fair amount of force to generate a click which makes things a little louder than I’m accustomed to but those clicks are muted plastic thuds instead of the gunshots you’ll normally hear from cheap trackpad hardware.
3. Every other person has mentioned that the case is a complete fingerprint magnet and I cannot disagree with that assessment. After two hours of handling it looks like I simultaneously devoured a bag of potato chips while doing so with nary a shirt tail to wipe my freakishly oil covered hands on. This is not something I consider important but it becomes apparent pretty quickly that the pretty black case otherwise unadorned by a single logo is never going to look pretty again without swabbing it with an alcohol pad.
Anyway, those are my admittedly superficial impressions from the first couple hours of actually using this little beast. I’ll likely post more thoughts on it a little further into actual use. The very short review: It won’t ever be a primary machine for me but it’s a bit of a miracle in its price and quality bracket. The KDE battery widget says I still have eight hours of remaining battery life after using this laptop for around 45 minutes. I’d say that’s worth your time and money if you want to try something apart from the pack.
Here are the things that drifted dreamily across my sleeping browser while I was working on something longer and more substantial to post here. Pinboard keeps all of that stuff from disappearing and is worth every penny that I pay for that service.
1. Gizmodo threw down a sarcasm laced guide on how to avoid showing your coworkers your junk on Zoom that is hilarious but should not need to exist. The catalyst was a reporter for the New Yorker jerking off during a Zoom call which even if you think your camera is off is the very worst idea that you’ve ever had. Vice has the more explicit version of this story and I really hope that ‘Zoom dick’ doesn’t become a term that we remember fondly from those dark days in 2020.
2. Not even Microsoft wants you to use the new Edge browser apparently because if you try to download it with a sane browser then you end up being redirected to the local copy on your computer that you’ve thus far never opened on purpose. I don’t have a Windows machine handy to test this out right now but I will later tonight just to take my trip on the hilarity-go-round along with everyone who is actually trying to download this ill conceived aberration. No browser that is remarkable only for being less terrible than the old version of Edge should be this difficult to obtain.
3. I would agree that the press that Trump sees so blatantly biased against him is actually giving him the idiot questions because he’s a hostile idiot and seemingly can’t handle a question necessitating an answer longer than a single sentence. I’m assuming he’s also wired as fuck on Adderall and his stem cell and steroid cocktail. Stimulants, fragile arrogance, and generally having the least experience dealing with the details of daily life of any president in history lays some great groundwork for his eventual Darwin award. Well, probably not unless he’s confronted by a particular scary ramp but I’m hoping the rubber/glue ratio reverses itself and he can be the lucky recipient of some of that ‘locking up’ he enjoys yelling about.
4. Chaos Ink is good hypnotic fun in your browser. I tinkered around with it for 15+ minutes which is more than I can see for most web things that serve a definite purpose these days.
Most of the music that really resonates (ha!) with me is guitar driven. This is also generated through a guitar with an insane amount of signal processing and other stupid guitar tricks to produce experimental nightmare music that, for me at least, goes somewhere definite sonically:
I’d love to see what the signal path for this rig looks like.
I really enjoyed this guide on answering questions in a helpful way because I answer so many questions in a given day and, these days, through more avenues than I have in the past. I always try to give equal attention to either a question about something technical in my workplace as I do someone asking about which Chromebook to buy for their child who has now been learning at home for more than half a year at this point. I think this guide is a good very litmus for whether or not you’re being an asshole when asked a mediocre question by giving you some somewhat obvious (if you’d thought about what you were going to say instead of just spitting out whatever popped into your head) tools to better your participation in the troubleshooting process. I have the habit of casting everything as a troubleshooting process because that my actual marketable skill. I think in this case it is very much a collaborative effort to troubleshoot an issue just not as linearly as I’m used to.
It’s something worth considering because if you’re getting a proper question posed after doing a little bit of prep work before passing it on to me then I feel like I’m being met half way between let me Google that for you dismissiveness and a question so specialized in an area where my knowledge might be lacking and will have to do more research than you would to learn how to even begin looking for an answer. I’m always happier with the amount of effort I have to make if I feel like the person asking the question has done a little bit of pre-work. I’m not even sure if that preparatory business necessarily helps the process but it makes me feel like I’m another piece of helping someone find an answer instead of just a convenient sucker to pass the thinking on to. Cynical? Yeah, a little but I think it’s at least defensible given the tendency of people in general to throw up their hands in surrender when confronted with something that isn’t immediately familiar.
I’m going to categorize this one as a ‘Don’t Forget’ as well and keep the link handy for those days when questions are coming in at a relentless pace and I forget that people aren’t doing it because they’re clueless jerks. People are asking me because they’ve tried and weren’t successful or they aren’t even sure what exactly they’re even looking for.
Some things I ran into while stumbling around the interwebs:
1. Uhmmm should be an mandatory installation for all companies who’ve decided to replace all of the pointless meetings we used to endure in person with virtual meetings where we’re expected to sit attentively while nothing really happens. I’ve been in a few working sessions that would have benefitted tremendously from being reminded that we didn’t need to be in a meeting in order to communicate during that work. A little elevator music to remind you that no one is saying anything or really paying attention to the meeting you’re stuck in? Sound fucking great.
2. TypeLit is a service that gives you practice typing while you literally (or should that be ‘literar-ily’) retype over classic novels. My typing speed wasn’t as quick as it might have otherwise been because I was reading the text while I was typing. For me, it’s most valuable as a hybrid experience that places actually reading the book somewhere in the mix.
3. Buy For Life is a great idea for cataloging products that are durable and not intended to use for a year or two and discard. The contents aren’t extensive yet but the inspiration behind this site are worthy of attention. I own a few of the things they feature but I think this is mostly because I tend to spend too much money on things and despise cheap crap for the most part. I’ll definitely check back here a few months from now to see what they’ve added. More useful things and less disposable garbage is something I can endorse.
4. If you play guitar, then check out Guitar Dashboard. I know nothing about music although I’ve played guitar for nearly thirty years and I picked up on some music theory concepts while fooling around with this tool.
One of the only pleasant side effects of the Covid-19 shutdown of public life is that the tedium of confinement to certain spaces and the disappearance of physical interaction gave people a bunch of time to fill. Many of us just watched everything on Netflix while others built silly and amazing stuff like a DOS subsystem for Linux. The underlying mechanisms are totally bonkers and it’s pretty amazing that it works given the amount of emulation that’s going on.
It’s available from here if you’re looking for something pointless and rewarding to play around with.
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