AUDREY AUDEN'S "THE VOICE IN ALL"
I read Audrey Auden's new book, "The Voice in All", the first in her new "The Artifex and the Muse" series. Auden creates a lush, complex world filled with interesting, multifaceted residents. Tantalizing glimpses of science fiction sneak into the fantasy setting, hinting at a rich universe for the rest of the series. "The Voice in All" packs a surprising amount of development and story into a quick, fun book. Auden's piqued my interest and I'm looking forward to the next installments.
Read moreEASILY DELETE YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT THE HARD WAY
The folks at Conscious Digital have a nifty website, yourdigitalrights.org, that makes it easy to file a CCPA or GDPR request asking a website to remove all of your data. In particular, they make it easy to delete all your Twitter data. Delete your account, regain your privacy, and cause someone an administrative hassle with a single click. It’s perfect!
OF COURSE DOGS SMILE
I hang out on parts of the Internet where people often post pictures of happy animals. All too often, someone will share a photo of their smiling pooch, and a viewer who wants to sound smart will feel obligated to add a comment like "dogs can't smile." Their arguments reduce to one of several claims: Statement: They're not smiling. They're using the muscles in their face to pull the corners of their lips up.
Read moreCALIFORNIA 2022 MIDTERMS VOTING GUIDE
These are my recommendations for the November 8, 2022 midterm election in California. Propositions Direct democracy looks like a great idea on paper. In practice, we end up with awful laws like Prop 8. Because it's so hard to remove bad propositions once they're approved, it's better to vote "no" on ballot propositions you're unsure about. If it's a great idea — or even a bad one, in the case of Prop 29's predecessors — the proposers can try again in a later election.
Read moreWINDING DOWN
I knew the conversation wouldn't be easy when the veterinarian asked if this was a good time to talk. I still think of her as a puppy, even though she hasn't been one for many years. People are surprised to find that this tiny little dog is a full-grown adult. Although she's shaped like a miniature version of the real thing, it's hard to wrap your brain around something that small being anything other than a baby.
Read moreSURPRISE EERO HARDWARE END-OF-LIFE
Amazon is ending software support for 1st generation eero devices at the end of September 2022. That's fine. You can't support old hardware forever, and five years is a decent run. But it's not OK that I got less than a month's notice that it was happening, and no email or app notifications. I happened to open the eero app for unrelated reasons and saw a banner telling me my hardware will be obsolete later this month.
Read moreTRYING (AND FAILING) TO HACK THE WALL OF SHEEP
The Wall of Sheep is a popular exhibit at DEF CON. Participants run packet sniffers on an insecure Wi-Fi network and try to catch people logging into unencrypted websites and other services. If they see that happening, they post the person's username and password on a giant display. It looks something like: That's an excellent reminder to be careful when you're connected to an unknown network, and not to send your login credentials out in the open.
Read moreHOW QBASIC JUMP STARTED MY CAREER
When I was an enlisted sailor in the US Navy, I spent an awful lot of time on a deployment hacking away on our ancient laptops to write QBasic programs to automate some of our completely-not-computer-related work. For instance, I wrote a little program to format short text messages in a particular way and write them to a floppy. Then I could hand that floppy to the ship's radioman, and he'd run a program to load the messages and broadcast them over a packet radio to the MARS radio network.
Read moreSLACK WAS BROADCASTING HASHED PASSWORDS FOR 5 YEARS
I received an email from Slack on Thursday, 2022-08-04: We’re writing to let you know about a bug we recently discovered and fixed in Slack’s Shared Invite Link functionality. This feature allows users with the proper permissions to create a link that will allow anyone to join your Slack workspace; it is an alternative to inviting people one-by-one via email to become workspace members. You are receiving this email because one or more members of your workspace created and/or revoked one of these links for your workspace between April 17th, 2017 and July 17th, 2022.
Read moreNOT UPGRADING FOR STAGE MANAGER
Apple's iPadOS 16 features a new multitasking mechanism called Stage Manager, but only on very new iPad models equipped with Apple's M1 CPU. The ludicrous reason Apple gave for this limitation is that the recent M1 chip is the first iPad CPU capable of using swap space. If you listen quietly, you can hear millions of computer science graduates rolling their eyes at that ridiculous excuse. Far less capable computers have supported swap space for decades, and I won't bother going into details of how nervy Apple's claim is.
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