Yesterday, i said a sad goodbye to an old friend at ABC No Rio. Cookiepuss was a steadfast companion in my volunteer shifts at the No Rio computer center, a cranky yet gregarious presence. I met her soon after moving to New York, and have hung out with her nearly …
Articles in the misc category
half a minute for science!
A friend is teaching a class on data analysis. She is building a simple and rough data set for the class to examine, and to spur discussion. You can contribute in half a minute! Here's how:
- get a stopwatch or other sort of timer (whatever device you're reading this on …
Support privacy-respecting network services!
Support privacy-respecting network services! Donate to Riseup.net!
There's a lot of news recently about some downright orwellian surveillance executed across the globe by my own government with the assistance of major American corporations. The scope is huge, and the implications are depressing. It's scary and frustrating for anyone who …
gpg --ask-cert-level considered harmful
Occasionally, someone asks me whether we should encourage use of the
--ask-cert-leveloption when certifying OpenPGP keys withgpg. I see no good reason to use this option, and i think we should discourage people from trying to use it. I don't think there is a satisfactory answer to the …OpenPGP User ID Comments considered harmful
Most OpenPGP User IDs look like this:
Jane Q. Public <jane@example.org>This is clean, clear, and unambiguous.
However, some tools (
gpg,enigmailamong others) ask the user to provide a "Comment:" field when they are choosing a new User ID (e.g. when making a new key). These …It's Advertising all the way down
Today i saw a billboard on the side of a bus. It was from a cable TV channel, bragging about how well-connected their viewers are (presumably on the internet, social media, blogs, etc).
It shows a smiling, attractive man, with text next to him saying something like "I told 9000 …
Make a Woolly Mammoth (thanks, inkscape!)
I feel like i've done a lot of blogging recently about failing to do things with proprietary software. That's annoying.
This post is about something i made successfully with free software (and some non-software crafting): I made a Woolly Mammoth for my nephew!
I documented the pattern (with pictures!) that …
proprietary software activation fail
i have a colleague who is forced by work situations to use Windows. Somehow, I'm the idiot\^W\^W\^W\^W\^Wfriendly guy who gets tapped to fix it when things break.
Well, this time, the power supply broke. As in, dead, no lights, no fan, no nothing. No problem …
visualizing MIME structure
Better debugging tools can help us understand what's going on with MIME messages. A python scrap i wrote a couple years ago named
printmimestructurehas been very useful to me, so i thought i'd share it.It reads a message from stdin, and prints a visualisation of its structure, like …
in memory of Aaron Swartz
I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of …