Geek Stuff category archive

You may have noticed that I rescale embedded media to 500 pixels in width. When I started blogging, 800×600 monitors were still not uncommon, and 500px seemed a sane choice. I’ve maintained the practice for consistency’s sake.

At one time, I maintained a spreadsheet of common dimensions and their scaled values. I could enter the existing values and it would calculate the scaled ones, then I could save it with the additional data.

Ultimately I replaced the spreadsheet with a command line alternative, which works quite nicely (if you can remember high school math, you’ll recognize the equation; piping the output to bc is necessary because BASH by itself can parse only integers):

Code:
echo 500/[original width]*[original height] | bc -l

This outputs the proportional height.

Here’s an example:

Code:
bash-4.3$ echo 500/640*423 | bc -l
330.46875000000000000000 <---I round the output to the nearest integer

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Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website devoted to checking the factual accuracy of US politicians’ words, appears to have been hacked so that it secretly mines cryptocurrency in visitors’ browsers.
(snip)

Coin Hive is a legit outfit that offers free JavaScript to web admins . . . .

However, the code hidden on Politifact.com at this moment appears to be malicious: it is completely non-throttled, and kicks off eight instances of the miner, which means it hammers the visiting machine’s processor, taking up 100 per cent of spare processor capacity.

The story goes on to say the malware was removed within hours after discovery.

(Link fixed.)

Listening to Old Time Radio with Real Player in a Virtual Machine of Windows 7 in VirtualBox on Slackware –Current.

Is nothing sacred?

AOL Instant Messenger will be shut down in December.

I still have an AIM account. Mostly I use the associated email account as a spam trap.

I think the last time I used the instant messenger was in 2008.

I have a new podcast up at Hacker Public Radio.

Debian Sid with the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Delusions of grandeur frolics.

There’s a reason I seldom log into Facebook. (When I do, it’s because that, if you want to do reach-out, you must reach out to where the people are).

Facebook as a company–remember, it’s company that desires profit, not a community–is a vortex of [de/il]lusion.

Even as it preys on its users, Facebook pretends that it is a community.

It’s not.

It’s a milking-machine for profit. It’s a really well-designed milking-machine, but a milking-machine that is suckling on your anatomy none the less.

Do not fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

I suspect the mope is having second thoughts right about now.

After a three-day trial this week, Mittesh Das, 48, of Atlanta, Georgia, was found guilty by a jury in North Carolina of knowingly transmitting malicious code with the intent of causing damage to an Army computer used in furtherance of national security.

Specifically, Das deliberately introduced malware – seemingly designed to delete files and knacker services – into the US Army Reserve payroll systems after his employers lost the contract to provide the technology. The military estimates it cost $2.6m to fix the damage.

The Enlightenment v. 21 desktop environment* on Mageia 6.

________________

*Some contend that E is a window manager. They’re wrong for this reason: Enlightenment configuration is managed using GUI tools, not text configuration files. That lifts it out of the “window manager” category.

My hosting provider has notified me that it will be doing maintenance on my VPS (and, I suspect, numerous other VPSs) starting this evening. The site may be unavailable for short periods over the next 24 hours.

Slackware 14.2 with the Window Maker window manager.

Window Maker is the one major *nix window manager I haven’t played with, other than the tiling window managers, which are not to my taste. I’ve used Blackbox (there once was a Blackbox for Windows but the maintainer’s site got hacked and he abandoned the project, but it was a pleasure to use); IceWM; Fluxbox (my favorite window manager); and even TWM, the oldest (some would say “most primitive”) of all.

Window Maker is much more versatile and configurable than I expected. It’s been around for a long time and is still actively supported.

I expect to have fun playing with it.

Afterthought:

Window managers are unknown on Apple and Windows; their default interfaces are “desktop environments.” If the terms puzzle you, this may help.

September 6, 2017 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Geek Stuff | Bookmark this post