Geek Stuff category archive

Jess Zimmerman:

It’s a very large internet, after all, and it’s long been known as a prodigious generator of adult material for every occasion. You know the theory about how if you put an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, one of them will eventually write Hamlet? Thanks to the internet, we have now tried this experiment with several billion monkey descendants. We didn’t get Hamlet, but we did get pretty much every kind of smut imaginable (including Hamlet parody porn). There’s even a name for it: Rule 34, which is generally stated, “if it exists, there is porn of it.” (Don’t bother looking up the other rules; they pretty much all suck.)

She goes on to theorize that there might possibly be worthwhile stuff out there and to wonder why you have to look so hard for it.

I sifted through the blogroll yesterday and removed a few sites that are no longer publishing and added a couple of new ones.

I must say, it was not nearly in such disarray as the last time I caught up on my housekeeping.

The UK forms the Fighting Frolickers.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, February 5.

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

Der Spiegel.

Really, now.

Facebook reaches beyond satire.

The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman thinks “Facebook at Work” is a bad idea. I would consider it beyond bad.

A snippet:

Facebook, as you know, is already almost surreally confusing to use, unless you’ve given up trying not to be confused. Its plethora of privacy controls are impossible to keep track of, even in their newly simplified form, so you can’t ever be certain about who can see what. Meanwhile, since posts on the Newsfeed are selected by an algorithm, there’s no way to be sure your friends will see a post even if you do want them to, nor that you’re seeing theirs. You see what Facebook wants you to see.

Adding a Facebook at Work account more than doubles the potential for confusion; it squares it. How long before someone gets themselves fired – or, worse, outed – as a result of not knowing which network they were using? Or maybe we’re too cautious for that these days, and we’ll simply get even better at never expressing a thought or posing for a photograph that might undermine our workplace brand. Which isn’t, really, all that much less dispiriting.

Any workplace that chooses to enter the Zurkerdome deserves what happens to it.

When the writers created Linux Voice, they promised that, nine months after an issue was published, they would make that issue available under a CC-SA license and they’ve kept that promise.

You can download Linux Voice Issue One and Issue Two at no charge.

Full Disclosure:

I contributed to the LV Indiegogo campaign to found the magazine and am a subscriber. I contributed in appreciation of their fine podcast and continued my subscription because it’s an excellent magazine.

It’s the first computer mag I’ve subscribed to since PCMag went online only about 15 years ago. It’s worth it if only for the tutorials.

Heck, it was worth it for their vim tutorial alone, which is on page 106 of Issue One. There are oodles of tutorials for vim on the inner webs, but this was the first one I have seen that I found at all intelligible.

The “sharing economy” loses another early supporter.

The Zuckerborg plus a selfie equals a rescue.

Officials say a 911 dispatcher in training used Facebook to locate a Northern California hiker critically injured after falling a 150 feet down a cliff while hiking near Lake Berryessa.

You still won’t find me logged into the Zuckerborg.

An acquaintance of mine called me for help with her Win 8.1 computer; it had gotten really slow since New Year’s Day.

When I got there, I found the kind of Windows malware mess that you read about on rabidly partisan Linux websites–adware and pop-ups just flooding in, a true cavalcade of spots. It took me three and a half hours to wrestle that puppy into submission.

Read more »

The rush to blame North Korea for cracking Sony Entertainment’s network is increasingly looking misguided. In Japan Times, Leonid Bershidsky considers the weakness of the attribution:

Are North Korean spies so stupid that they couldn’t predict the explosion of interest in “The Interview” after the hack? I doubt it: no one should be so dumb. Certainly not the U.S. government, which itself triggered a kind of Streisand effect by making a highly public accusation and then withholding the evidence on which it was based.

Now, the hacking and anti-hacking communities will forever doubt the FBI’s judgment and alternative versions — especially the well-developed one from Norse, the reputable security firm, involving laid-off Sony employees — will circulate.

Whoever hacked Sony — and this point, it’s wise to reserve judgment — the lesson for governments and other hacker targets, is that there is no point in publishing one’s suspicions unless a lot of detail can also be released.

High-cholesterol twits.

Because our Fearless Leader is sick, the meeting has been rescheduled to Thursday. FL expects to be better by them.

Learn about the wonderful world of free and open source. Learn how to use computers to do what you want, not what someone else wants you to do.

It’s not hard; it’s just different.

What: Monthly TWUUG Meeting.

Who: Everyone in TideWater/Hampton Roads with interest in any/all flavors of Unix/Linux. There are no dues or signup requirements. All are welcome.

Where: Lake Taylor Transitional Care Hospital in Norfolk Training Room. See directions below. (Wireless and wired internet connection available.) Turn right upon entering, then left at the last corridor and look for the open meeting room.

When: 7:30 PM till whenever (usually 9:30ish) on Thursday, January 8. (Note: TWUUG normally meets on the first Thursday of each month.)

Directions:
Lake Taylor Hospital
1309 Kempsville Road
Norfolk, Va. 23502 (Map)

Pre-Meeting Dinner at 6:00 PM (separate checks)
Uno Chicago Grill
Virginia Beach Blvd. & Military Highway (Janaf Shopping Center). (Map)

The TechBros at Uber step in it again.

They do seem a charming lot, do they not?

I saw a local police car recently. Since the last time I had a close view of one, they seem to have grown license plate scanners pointing in every direction.

James Lileks has some wonders about those license plate scanners.

I’m not paranoid on this issue. I don’t brace the paper-delivery person every morning and say “how do you know I live here?” I can see why the police would want a searchable database of everything that ever happened. Your profession colors your view of what’s reasonable and necessary. . . .

But there is the small matter of protecting that database of license-plate pictures. You know how this will go: City announces gigantic 40 terabyte database of license photos “so secure God himself could not hack this file, and I say that fully aware that such a taunt led to the sinking of the Titanic.” An hour later a group called iC3B3RG puts every license plate picture online.

Discovery in divorce trials could romp through the data and uncover so many things.

By the bye, Lileks has some great collections of memorabilia on his website, which I first stumbled over back in early days of the innerwebs.

After almost a decade and a half, I’m kicking the Opera browser to the curb.

I saw this coming when the President and founder of Opera was ejected from his company, reportedly over different visions of the future of the Opera browser.

I have seen the vision of the future of the Opera browser with Opera v. 26 for Windows and it is not pretty.

Most of the features that I most liked about Opera–its configurability, the integrated mail and RSS client, the integrated sidebar notes–are gone (though the mail and RSS client has been released as a separate program for Windows and seems to work quite nicely).

Over its history, Opera invented (and did not get much public credit for) many features that users of other browsers now take for granted, such as mouse gestures, the Speed Dial, integrated notes, and tabbed browsing, to mention four that have become second nature to my browsing habit. It’s “vision” seems now to involve gutting the product.

Since the management shake-up, Opera has ignored its Linux users. The most recent release for Linux, v. 12.16, was released nearly a year and a half ago (I guess I should be thankful, as it still retains the functionality that made me a loyal user and proponent of Opera for so long); nevertheless, more and more frequently I’ve encountered bumps along the information superhighway that have required me to open Firefox or Konqueror to view various websites.

I have moved to Seamonkey on the recommendation of one of my fellow LQ members. It also has integrated mail, RSS, newsgroups, and IRC (which I don’t use–I guess I’m not an IRC kind of guy).

Seamonkey is from Mozilla, as are Firefox and Thunderbird, but I find it preferable to either or both.* By installing plugins, I’ve been able to get mouse gestures, speed dial, and notes working in Seamonkey (the “notes” plugins I’ve tested are inferior to Opera’s sidebar notes, but I can live with that).

It’s been a good run, but it’s time for Opera to take its curtain calls, because the fat lady has sung and the Opera is done.

______________________

*In particular, I’ve never liked the Thunderbird interface; I find it klunky (that’s not a criticism; it’s just a matter of taste).