Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse.  I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to understand data format that was easy to index, and did not use any third party services (like IFTTT or Zapier).  I thought about it a bit and came up with a reasonably simple solution that uses three Huginn agents to collect, process, and write out posts as individual JSON documents to the same box I run that part of my exocortex on …

I'd beg the forgiveness of my readers for not posting since early this month, but chances are you've been just as busy as I've been in the past few weeks. Life, work, et cetera, cetera. So, let's get to it.

As I've mentioned once or twice I've been slowly getting an abscessed molar cleaned out and repaired for the past couple of months. It's been slow going, in part because infections require time for the body to fight them off (assisted by antibiotics or not) and, depending on how deep the infection runs it can take a while. Now I …

Back in 2002, the desktop security company Symantec bought out Securityfocus, which at the time was one of the biggest clearinghouses of information security related information. Everything from mailing lists to archives of whitepapers can be found there, and for many years it was pretty much the first place to go if you wanted to monitor vulnerability reports and software releases. After Symantec bought them out there was some concern that Securityfocus would decline in quality as time and energy might no longer be spent maintaining and updating the website. That didn't happen, thankfully, but last week the other shoe …

After much deliberation, I've decided to put the archives of my old memory logs online. There's a lot of text in there, dating all the way back to the year 2002 - from my final year at Pitt to my last few years in Pittsburgh to just after moving to Washington, DC. I've fixed all of the screwy filenames that accumulated over the years and deleted the intra-page archive references that used to be at the end of each file. I haven't fixed any broken links inside of each page, however - the ones outside of my site are gone, probably for …

The Bush regime has been notorious from the beginning for violating a basic federal law, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (44 USC 2201-2207), which states that all presidential correspondence and communications must be permanently archived. Bush is interesting in that he is the first president to outright ignore e-mail from his constituents, which caused a minor scandal until American Idol hit the airwaves back in the early years of this decade. At any rate, this matter keeps popping up like a bad penny, most notably White House staff members using GOP e-mail servers to avoid the archival of their …

Over at textfiles.com, Jason Scott is adding to his already voluminous archive by acquiring and putting online the contents of archive CDs, such as the shareware, text file, and artpack CDs that we used to burn our connection minutes on downloading files. Herr Scott says that, because he's downloaded these collections of files from the Net there's no way of knowing if they're complete, but you're likely to find something that you remember from back in the day.

As always, he's accepting donations of files to add to his collection.