Tag: computers

I’m really starting to wonder about the wisdom of plugging everything into the internet. This also includes the need to create another online account to go with each device.

So for 2016 I’ll be asking myself the following question before buying anything network enabled:

I’m also going to guess that in most cases the answer will be “no.”

And yes, I’m going to start with the idea that network security is an afterthought in most of these things.

In researching the how-tos of podcasting one of the more interesting things is the amount of data used in downloading files.1 I also noticed that audio is seen as the poor cousin to video. Video files are much larger, but very few people pay for their own video hosting. I doubt YouTube would be as popular if it required a monthly fee to keep your videos online.

Killed by spam. But not just closing, everything will be deleted.

I watched the Apple event this morning so you wounldn’t have to. Tim Cook covered a lot ground in the 90 minuite event. The last half-hour was devoted the Apple Watch.

One of the great features of Mac OS X is having Time Machine backups of your data. Time Machine can work with an external hard drive plugged in to a USB port, or it can operate over the local network. I have a laptop that spends most of its time on my lap. An external hard drive is just inconvenient. I also don’t want my backups to happen only when I remember to plug the drive in.

This all traces back to the Clinton administration. The US government wanted decided that cryptography was the same as military weaponry. This led to an export ban in which US designed crypto apps couldn’t be sold outside the US borders. This was also a time when most software was shipped on physical media. There also a belief that software respected international borders.

What happened then was “export grade” (i.e. weak 40-bit encryption) became the default used in “international” versions of things like web browsers. This was one of the first attempts to create an encryption backdoor. The idea was that the US could decide who gets strong crypto. Then it could eavesdrop on the countries or groups that had the weak encryption.

In 2010, the Library of Congress announced it had started archiving all of Twitter.

That’s right.  Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. §

With a $35 pocket computer, you can read SSL (🔒) traffic from a Superfish infected Lenovo laptop.

I already yell at my computers. I don’t want to yell at them just to make them work.

Hazel is a all-purpose file moving tool for the Mac. It can move and rename files based on rules for a given folder. But it can do a lot more.

This is how I use Hazel to manage my screenshot workflow. I don’t like a bunch of files littering the desktop. This action sweeps them up and renames and resizes them for me.