We seem to have reached a unique point in history: Available to your average home user are gargantuan amounts of disk space (8 terabyte hard drives are a thing, and the prices are rapidly coming down to widespread affordability) and enough processing power is available for the palm of your hand that makes the computational power that put the human race on the moon compare in the same was that a grain of sand does to a beach. For most people, it's the latest phone upgrade or more space for your media box. For others, though, it poses an unusual …
I've updated my .plan file yet again. As per usual, NSFW content, out of context quotes, and things that put your keyboard and display in danger at work abound.
Now that ISPs not selling information about what you do and what you browse on the Net is pretty much gone, a lot of people are looking into using VPNs - virtual private networks - to add a layer of protection to their everyday activities. Most of the time there are two big use cases for VPNs: Needing to use them for work, and using them to gain access to Netflix content that isn't licensed where you live. Now they may as well be a part of everyday carry.
So: Brass tacks. Here's a quick way to set up your own VPN …
kinetic pattern baldness - noun - The characteristic hourglass-shaped pattern of hair loss in both men and women that results from tearing one's hair out in frustration on a regular basis.
As not bleeding edge, nifty-keen-like-wow the XMPP protocol is, Jabber (the colloquial name for XMPP I'll be using them interchangably in this article) has been my go-to means of person-to-person chat (as well as communication protocol with other parts of me) for a couple of years now. There are a bunch of different servers out there on multiple platforms, they all support pretty much the same set of features (some have the experimental features, some don't), and the protocol is federated, which is to say that every server can talk to every other server out there (unless you turn that …
debuggery - noun - The unshakable feeling that your code is completely fucked when you spend multiple all nighters in a row tracking down a single annoying bug that winds up not being in your core code, nor any modules you've written, nor any of the libraries you're using, but in a different part of the system entirely. In other words, your code is so poorly architected that you can't tell when problems aren't actually in your code.
Last Thursday I made the probably unwise decision to see the live-action interpretation of Ghost In the Shell starring Scarlet Johannson at the local movie theater. The terrible weather in the Bay Area aside (continual rain, Washington DC-like cold, gusts of wind up to 50 miles per hour), it's just not a good movie. I was expecting a half-assed retelling of the original movie's story with additional Hollywood elements, and I wasn't disappointed in that respect.
tl;dr - Don't bother. ScarJo's new movie is a bad cosplay that'll leave you feeling like you just took some pills a random person …
Something that's always bugged me about science fiction is the lack of common sense of characters' bionic enhancements.
No, I'm not going to call them cybernetics. RPGs and movies have it wrong. Those aren't cybernetics, they're bionics. The former is a feature of the latter.
Characters pretty much always seem to have their augmentations installed bass-ackwards. Most of the time their positioning doesn't make sense at all. Let's look at some handedness statistics: Depending on where you are, between 2% and 12% of people are left-handed. Depending on your upbringing (if you were born left handed in some places, whether …
High Gibson - noun, genre - Science fiction in the cyberpunk genre that makes no bones about being inspired by William Gibson's classic works. Stylistic influences, tropes, and character archetypes are easily recognized as being inspired by the Sprawl Trilogy and the Burning Chrome short stories. Compare with high fantasy.
