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 …
And now, hopefully sooner than the last set, my notes taken during the Transhuman Superpowers and Longevity Conference held on 12 July 2015 in Oakland, CA. Everything's behind the cut, with references as applicable. Personal observations (are on separate lines in parenthesis) to differentiate them from the speaker's material. Vertical Farm Civilization - Karl Doerrer
At long last, here are my notes from the Transhuman Strategies conference held by the Brighter Brains Institute on 21 March 2015. It took me a while to find the notebook I wrote them in, so that's why they're a few months late in coming. Anyway, my notes are under the cut.
Hank Pellissier - Transhumanitarian Projects
Goals: Extending life, increasing mental ability
Life expectency in Japan is 80, in Sierra Leone is 35
Hunger is still the greatest killer
Shipping food or backing projects
De-worming - parasiting infections in children
The energy deficit incurred by parasitic infection lowers IQ in children …
Midway through December of 2014 Windbringer suffered a catastrophic hardware failure following several months of what I've come to term the Dell Death Spiral (nontrivial CPU overheating even while in single user mode, flaky wireless, USB3 ports fail, USB2 ports fail, complete system collapse). Consequently I was in a bit of a scramble to get new hardware, and after researching my options (as much as I love my Inspiron at work they don't let you finance purchases) I spec'd out a brand new Dell XPS 15.
Behind the cut I'll list Windbringer's new hardware specs and everything I did to …
As I've mentioned several times before, every couple of week the Brighter Brains Institute in California holds a Transhuman Visions symposium, where every month the topic of presentation and discussion is a little different. Last month's theme was Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity, a topic of no small amount of debate in the community. Per usual, I scribbled down a couple of pages of notes that I hope may be interesting and enlightening to the general public. A few of my own insights may be mixed in. Later on, a lot of stuff got mixed together as I only wrote …
Behind the cut are the notes I took during DefCon 22, organized by name of presentation. Where appropriate I've linked to the precis of the talk. I make no guarantee that they make sense to anybody but me.
I happened to be in the Bay Area with Amberite for the Fourth of July this year, and as we are wont to do we got it into our heads to do a little road testing of some costumes we've been talking about for a while, namely the trollsSollux Captor and Terezi Pyrope from the webcomic Homestuck playing Men In Black.
A couple of weekends ago I attended one of the IEET's conferences in California on the topic of Religion and Transhumanism. While I was there I took notes during the speakers' presentations, and I promised some people that I'd put them online at my earliest convenience. Here they are, in the best order I can conceive of and with whatever links I can dig up to elucidate my somewhat cryptic chickenscratch. Please note that I took notes on things I don't necessarily agree with, and that I advise you to follow some of the links before jumping to conclusions …
