1. A long-forgotten Commodore game. Was it ever released?

    17 January 2017

    UPDATE (20210214): The game has, in fact, been found (along with its manual) and is playable online at the Internet Archive.

    UPDATE (20170120): The game may have been found!

    Many years ago, maybe a year after 321 Contact magazine merged with Enter magazine, there was a review of a video game which seemed like it was a tie-in for the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact.  The scenario was that you'd just gained access to the USS Discovery, and you had to repair all of the systems on board the ship to win the game.  As I recall, a …

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  2. James O'Keefe caught trying to pull another fast one.

    16 January 2017

    So, there's this guy named James O'Keefe.

    He's got this problem: He likes trying to play Mission: Impossible and wreck the careers and lives of people he doesn't like by pulling scams, editing videos in interesting ways to set people up, and generally being the sort of person you'd eject from the party for being such a huge asshole that the Alpha Betas would throw him out on his ear.  He spent all of Election Day in 2016 tailing buses taking people to the polls in an attempt to intimidate them into not voting.  He's cost a couple of people …

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  3. What's it like having synaesthesia?

    10 January 2017

    What's it like not having synaesthesia?

    That sounds like a flippant answer, but it's quite the truth.  I can't remember a time when I didn't experience sounds (music, in particular) in a deep, visceral way that involved more than just my sense of hearing.  For the longest time I thought everybody's experience of life was like mine.  I thought everybody cried when they heard violin music.  I thought everybody felt waves of cold and prickles when they heard sounds made up of square waves (yeah, I'm dating myself, aren't I?)  Didn't everybody shiver and see starbursts of pink and purple …

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  4. Upgrading Bolt CMS to v3.x.

    09 January 2017

    Since PivotX went out of support I've been running the Bolt CMS for my website at Dreamhost (referral link).  A couple of weeks back you may have noticed some trouble my site was having, due to my running into significant difficulty encountered when upgrading from the v2.x release series to the v3.x release series.  Some stuff went sideways, and I had to restore from backup at least once before I managed to get the upgrade procedure straightened out with the help of some of the developers in the Bolt IRC channel on Freenode.  If it wasn't for help …

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  5. Neologism: Disk Paranoia

    08 January 2017

    Disk paranoia - noun - That occasionally well-founded sense of creeping dread one feels when repartitioning, reformatting, or clearing a USB drive.  The dread stems from the fear that one is not, in fact, doing something terminal to the correct drive and you're actually zorching one of your internal drives (usually the one with all of your data on it).  This leads one to recheck the terminal window once every nine or ten seconds to make sure you're messing with the correct drive.  This may also include opening multiple other terminal windows to display the list of currently mounted devices, cross-checking the …

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  6. Linking the Signal CLI with Signal on your mobile.

    05 January 2017

    20170107: It's not "group name" it's "Group ID."  I don't know how to find that yet.

    The communications program Signal by Open Whisper Systems is unique in several respects.  Firstly, its barrier to entry is minimal.  You can search for it in the Google Play online store or Apple iOS appstore and it's waiting there for you at no cost.  Second, it's designed for security by default, i.e., you don't have to mess around with it to make it work, and it does does the right thing automatically and enforces strong encryption by default (unlike a lot of personal …

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  7. A toast.

    03 January 2017

    Here's to the sysadmins, who fight to keep everything up and running.  And reboot printers along the way.

    Here's to tier-1 tech support, who know the answers but are only allowed to recite from their scripts.

    Here's to the pen testers, who keep plugging away.

    Here's to desktop support, who occasionally see things they can never unsee.

    Here's to the red team, who throw everything from Devo costumes to pork chops to ballroom gowns to the kitchen sink at the mission.

    Here's to the hacktivists, who toil endlessly to make the world a better place.

    Here's to the open source …

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  10. Why I dislike loud parties.

    26 December 2016

    Generally speaking, I dislike loud and busy parties.  I find that my senses become overloaded in a very short period of time - all the voices, all the background sounds, all the random noise, the echoes from hard surfaces... it's very unpleasant.  After a short period of time in such an environment, my vision is all but useless.  The fog, the mist, the random colors.. on top of that, my tactile sense goes nuts.  Being rubbed down with wet and dry sponges, fans blowing on the front and back of my head at full blast, my legs vibrating backwards and forwards …

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