Because I don't have it in me right now to do a full writeup, here are some pictures from the iVardensphere and VNV Nation concert on 18 August 2017. They were taken at the San Francisco show of the Automatic Empire tour, in which VNV played both the Automatic and Empires albums back to back. iVardenSphere was a solo act this time around, and performed an all-improvisational set on his equipment, something that one person carefully characterized as an industrial algorave. VNV Nation took the stage with their usual aplomb and Ronan spent an unusual amount of time talking with …
quantum budget superposition - noun - A bank account's state of existence during the time in which you're waiting for your landlord to cash the rent cheque so you don't actually know how much money you have at a given time t. Spend too much and your rent cheque bounces. Spend too little and you put off important bills for too long.
Chances are you're running one of two major web browsers on the desktop to read my website - Firefox or Google's Chrome.
Chrome isn't bad; I have to use it at work (it's the only browser we're allowed to have, enforced centrally). In point of fact, I'd have switched to it a long time ago if it wasn't for one thing. I make heavy use of a plugin for Firefox called Scrapbook Plus, which make it possible to take a full snapshot of a web page and store it locally so that it can be read offline, annotated, and full-text searched …
gitmnesia - noun - That feeling when you receive an update email about some ticket on Github from a project that you haven't looked at in so long that you don't recognize its name. Generally a sign that you follow too many projects on Github.
icon blindness - noun phrase - The state of mind in which you search your desktop for minutes on end for one particular application's icon but don't find it. You give up and open it from the application menu, whereupon you have no trouble remembering which category it's in or what the name (in text) of the application is.
Some time ago I wrote an article about what Keybase is and what it's good for. I also mentioned one of my pet peeves, which is that, by default the fonts used by the Keybase desktop client are way, way too small to see easily on Windbringer. A couple of days ago somebody finally figured out how to blow up the fonts on the desktop, so I can finally see what's going on without putting my nose on the display (and making the mouse cursor jump around because Windbringer has a touchscreen). While I wish that this would be a …
This week, it was my turn to suffer a somewhat debilitaring kitchen accident.
Last week, Lyssa nearly took the tip of her thumb off with a chef's knife while helping to make pizza for dinner, an accident which resulted in several stitches to reattach the flap of skin that ordinarily formed the end of her left thumb.
Last night, while helping to make dinner I accidentally grabbed the handle of a skillet that had spent the previous half-hour in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven. With my entire hand. There are (still closed) blisters on four of the five digits on …
Well, I'm finally back from Defcon 25 and writing up my notes while in the throes of con drop before too much of the experience fades from memory. Suffice it to say that I have opinions about last weekend, which I will attempt to write as concisely as I can. I don't like being negative about things because my experience is my own, and I much prefer that people have their own experiences and make up their own minds about things. However, I would be lying if I painted a rosy picture of my attendence of the largest hacker convention …
So, after many years I've decided that it's my turn to write a first-timer's guide to Defcon. There are many like it, so I'll try to be as frank as I can about the topic. I'm going to try to write for people who've never been to Defcon before (but may have been to other hacker cons). I'm not going to lie or joke around (which some of the guides tend to do) and give as much personal advice as I can. I'm also going to try to not sound like your parents, because …
