Geek Stuff category archive
Echoes of That Thing You Did 0
Elie Mystal explains that you can have no expectation of privacy from your Amazon echo. A snippet:
Looking Beyond the Surface 0
Microsoft Surface ad during Monday Night Football goes horribly wrong.
Microsoft has some experience with horribly wrong.
What’s in a Name? 0
Well, if the name is “Samsung Galaxy Note 7, quite a bit, it would appear.
Droning On, Facebook Frolics Dept. 0
El Reg reports that Zuckerborg’s junior bird men don’t seem to be doing so well.
The United States’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) late last week published a report about the incident that says “On June 28, 2016, at 0743 mountain standard time, the Facebook Aquila unmanned aircraft, N565AQ, experienced an inflight structural failure on final approach near Yuma, Arizona. The aircraft was substantially damaged.”
No Place To Hide 0
In the snares of the snaring economy:
Spangenberg, who was hired by Uber in March 2015 as a forensic investigator, goes on to say, “Uber collected data regarding every ride a user requested, their username, the location the ride was requested from, the amount they paid, the device used to request the ride, the name and email of the customer, and a myriad of other data that the user may or may not know they were even providing Uber by requesting a ride.”
And that’s just for starts.
Uber, natch, is shocked! just shocked! that anyone would think there is gambling in their establishment . . . .
Days of Future Passwords 0
Avoid forgotten passwords: Use a password vault.* I recommend KeePassX. It’s cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux and Unix, including the BSDs) and compatible with KeePassDroid on your Android phone. If you update the database on one machine, you can just copy it to the others to keep them all up-to-date.
It does not require you to sign up for some online service, trust your passwords to the cloud somebody else’s server, or add a plugin to your browser or be restricted to a particular browser or GUI envirnoment. It just lies there on your own computer safeguarding your passwords; the only password you need to remember is the KeePassX password.
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*The review at the link contains a factual error about KeePassX. The author states
. . . in order to sync your passwords across devices, you’ll have to upload your encrypted password file with an online storage service like DropBox or Google Drive.
No, you do not have to use DropBox or Google Drive. You can use an application such as AirDroid or ES File Explorer which allows you to connect to other computers in your home network via your local wireless connection to transfer your files.
The Vivaldi Browser 0
I used the Opera browser from version 3, which I think was the first version released to the public, up until they kicked out their founder in their quest for mammon. When I started using it, I was hanging out in an HTML newsgroup because I was working on my first website, and the regulars there had great respect for Opera for its attempts to remain as standards-compliant as possible. (This was in the early days of Microsoft Internet Exploder, when Microsoft was attempting to turn the world wide web into something that worked only in Windows.)
Opera was my go-to browser, email client, and RSS reader for over a decade. Opera invented many features that have since been adapted by other, better-known applications, including tabbed windows and mouse gestures.
When I took a look at the new Opera for Windows a couple of years or so ago, I decided I wanted nothing more to do with it. Many of the features that made me an Opera loyalist were gone, including the integrated email and RSS feeds and the rich granular configurability.
I have since used Seamonkey and Firefox and found them satisfactory, but a bit clunky, and I quite like Seamonkey’s integration of browser, mail client, RSS reader, etc.
Recently, I have been using Vivaldi; the Vivaldi project is led Jon von Tetzchner, the deposed president of Opera. I find Vivaldi nimble and responsive. It still has some growing to do, but, frankly, right now, I’m all in for Vivaldi because my decade or more of using Opera has given me reason to trust the work of Jon von Tetzchner.
If you want to learn more about users’ experiences with Vivaldi, you can read my thread at Linux Questions.
Digital Pravda? 2
Badtux takes to the command line to track down Wikileaks.
Geeking Out 0
For a brief moment, my Windows 7 VirtualBox virtual machine and my Slackware desktop showed the same wallpaper (that’s “background” in Linuxspeak).
Geeking Out 0
Listening to Old Time Radio with Real Player in a VirtualBox virtual machine of Windows 7 on Slackware —Current.
OTR.NET is one of the better Old Time Radio sites; I have made small donations to it several times. Unfortunately, all the files are in Real format, which is one of the most heavily encumbered codecs and requires use of their proprietary, but free player. There was once a Linux version of RealPlayer, but it was abandoned about five years ago.
In case you are wondering, the VM is running a legitimate activated copy of Windows 7 that I purchased via Amazon. Windows 7 CDs are cheap these days.
I’m working with Windows in a VM because there are certain specific items I wish to test. Windows is still a kludge.
Geeking Out 0
Windows 7 in a VirtualBox virtual machine running on Slackware —Current on a Zareason Limbo desktop viewed through a Virtual Network Connection using the TightVNC viewer on Mint 17 running on a Zareason Strata laptop to connect to the X11vnc server on the Slackware box. In the foreground is the apt-get man(ual) page in the Terminator terminal emulator.
(The VNC window falls off the screen because the monitor of the target computer is larger than the monitor of the viewing computer, but it can be moved about with ALT-Left-Click-and-Hold. I would not be surprised that there’s some way to manage that more effectively, but I haven’t learned it yet.)
Droning On 0
What’s in a name? A drone by any other name would reap the same.
No Place To Hide 0
The snaring economy wants to shadow you like a cheap detective.
Meta: QOTD 0
For those who breathlessly wait for QOTD to arrive every day, I have created a QOTD category and moved all the QOTDs (there are almost 2500 and counting) into it, with the help of a nice little WordPress plugin called “Batch-Move Posts.”
The plugin works very nicely, though it could do with clearer instructions.
Aside:
I would have preferred doing it with an SQL query, but I couldn’t find where in the tables WordPress hides the link between the categories and the posts, as it’s changed since I first started using WP.
Droning On 0
Once more, it’s only a matter of time . . . .
At one point, Joseph Roselli allegedly flew the drone as high as 1,500 feet, which is restricted for use by Philadelphia International Airport.
Roselli was charged with risking a catastrophe and recklessly endangering another person, court records show.
Aside:
I was in my local drug store the other day. They had quadcopters for sale on the toy rack.
Thinking is a lost art.