UPDATED: 18 March 2019 - External display adapters that actually work with this model (and Arch Linux) added.
For various reasons, I found that I had a need to upgrade Windbringer's hardware very recently. This might be the first time that a catastrophic failure of some kind was not involved, so it's kind of a weird feeling to have two laptops side by side, one in process and one to do research as snags cropped up. This time around I bought a Dell XPS 15 Touch (9570) - I was expecting things to be substantially the same, but this did not seem …
Some time ago I began a search for a decent note-taking tool that I could carry around with me. For many years I was a devotee of the notes.txt file on my desktop, constantly open in a text editor so I could add and refer to it as necessary. When that ceased to scale I turned to software that replicated the legions of sticky notes on my desks at work and home, such as Tomboy. And that worked well enough for a while, but when I started relying upon my mobile more and more for things it too stopped …
A couple of weeks back, as part of our continuing education program at my dayjob I ran a hands-on class on locksport, the quasi-science (perhaps art) of picking locks for fun and... well... fun. I'm a security wonk so most of the talks I run have some security content in them, but I wanted to do something that was fairly suitable for everyone (coders and not). So, I got the go-ahead to expense a few more locks and some intro picksets to give away from The Lockpick Shop (no consideration for mentioning or using them, they had what I needed …
A couple of months back I did a brief writeup of Keybase and what it's good for. I mentioned briefly that it implements a 1-to-n text chat feature, where n>=1. Yes, this means that you can use Keybase Chat to talk to yourself, which is handy for prototyping and debugging code. What does not seem to be very well known is that the Keybase command line utility has a JSON API, the documentation of which you can scan through by issuing the command `keybase chat help api` from a command window. I'm considering incorporating Keybase into my exocortex so …
I've been promising myself that I'd do a series of articles about tools that I've incorporated into my exocortex over the years, and now's as good a time as any to start. Rather than jump right into the crunchy stuff I thought I'd start with something that's fairly simple to use, straightforward, and endlessly useful for many purposes - a wiki.
Usually, when somebody brings up the topic of wikis one either immediately thinks of Wikipedia or one of the godsawful corporate wikis that one might be forced to use on a daily basis. And you're not that off the mark …
Quite a few years (and a couple of re-orgs) ago on the Zero State mailing list we were kicking around the idea of building an unhosted social network to keep in touch, which is to say, a socnet that was implemented only as a single file, with all of the JavaScript and CSS embedded at the end. Some of the ideas included using a distributed hash table so each instance could find the others, as many crazy but feasible ways as possible to bootstrap a new member of the network into the DHT, and using using the browser's built-in local …
Some time ago, I found myself using a Kryoflux interface and a couple of old floppy drives that had been kicking around in my workshop for a while to rip disk images of a colleague's floppy disk collection. It took me a day or two of screwing around to figure out how to use the Kryoflux's software to make it do what I wanted. Of course, I took notes along the way so that I would have something to refer back to later. Recently, I decided that it would probably be helpful to people if I put those notes online …
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 …