Posts

Showing posts from 2017

When both Google *and* AppStatus is down

Here is a link where you could theoretically monitor Google outages: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status I had a problem with Google services just recently. However, as I wanted to verify whether the problem is on my side, this monitoring site was down as well. At the same time, the third party reports on alternative sites started to grow: http://outage.report/google http://downdetector.com/status/google http://aussieoutages.com/status/google This highlights why we should not put all our eggs into the same basket.

Unmelodic music - Ukashan experiments

Back in the 2000s,  The Future Sound of London  published the experimental album  The San Montana Tapes  under the pseudonym  Heads of Agreement . Their experiment tries to questions the basic definition of western music. [It is] described by them as  "Experiments in polyrhythmic" . It is described as very unmelodic with sparse percussion loops [...] They had been offering free 192kbps MP3 downloads for years. Unfortunately, the original link went broken recently. You can still sample one of the tracks  from the archive if you are curious. It still seems to be available for sale in studio quality  in case it fits your taste.

Stateless password keychains

There are several solutions to saving you from the hassle of having to remember a multitude of passwords. One common way is to install a password manager . These store your randomly generated or manually created passwords in an encrypted manner. You need to devise a method to synchronize these passwords between your devices. A different approach to this problem is to generate all your passwords in a deterministic manner on the fly without saving any state. This spares you from the pains of synchronization and potentially losing all your passwords in case your vault gets damaged. Here are a few of these: https://github.com/waldyrious/hash-my-pass/ http://plevyak.com/dpg.html https://passwordmaker.org/ (old site: http://passwordmaker.sourceforge.net/ ) http://angel.net/~nic/passwd.sha1.html Of course, both methods require using a really strong master password that you can learn by heart.  My personal recommendation is to use at least two separate vaults with different

WiB - ultra wideband efficient UHF broadcast

[[Teracom]], inspired by earlier research {{cite journal|author1=Yiyan Wu|author2=Bo Rong|author3=Khalil Salehian|author4=Gilles Gagnon|title=Cloud Transmission: A New Spectrum-Reuse Friendly Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting Transmission System|journal=IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting|date=21 June 2012|volume=58, Issue: 3|pages=329 - 337|doi=10.1109/TBC.2012.2199598|url= http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6222350/?arnumber=6222350 |accessdate=25 June 2017|publisher=IEEE|issn=1557-9611}} , introduced a new system concept dubbed "WiB", that aims to improve [[frequency reuse]] in the [[Ultra high frequency|UHF band]] while at the same time enable savings in both operating power and capital expenditures costs. {{cite conference|author1=E. Stare|author2=J. J. Gim̩nez|author3=P. Klenner|title=WIB РA new system concept for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT)|conference=IBC 2016|date=16 March 2017|url= https://www.ibc.org/tech-advances/wib--a-new-system-concept-for-digital-terres

Why dash cams should be more widespread

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_memory#Encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_effect#Basic_methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_conformity#In_and_out_of_lab_settings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_identification#Causes_of_eyewitness_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_testimony#Reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcam Lessons to learn from dashcams: live traffic accidents (not for the faint of heart) birds surfing vehicles (funny)

Airplane scatter - talking through the sky

Airplane scattering (or most often reflection) is observed on VHF through microwaves http://www.nitehawk.com/w3sz/AircraftScatteron10and24GHzMUDv5a.pdf and, besides back-scattering, yields momentary propagation up to 800 km even in mountainous terrain. The most common back-scatter applications are air-traffic radar, bistatic forward-scatter guided-missile and airplane-detecting [[Bistatic radar|trip-wire radar]], and the US space radar. It is also a less common propagation mode used by [[Amateur radio operator|radio amateurs]]. == History == Airplane scatter itself had been invented in 1930, but HAM usage lagged until the late 80s. The advent of inexpensive [[Software-defined radio|SDR]] based and [[Tracking (commercial airline flight)|distributed real time flight tracking]] enabled precise scheduling, increasing feasibility. http://www.nitehawk.com/w3sz/W3SZ-NEW-AirCraftScatterNEWS2014.pdf http://www.vk3hz.net/ae.htm == Radio amateur usage == Compared to a single trail

Electric shocks wherever you go? Try these

Solving unintended static discharges is a tricky question. You can build up a respectable amount of charge on your body if one of the following applies to you: Either the flooring, your chair, clothes or shoes are made of non-conducting, synthetic fabrics You rub the said fabrics a lot by walk or moving You touch grounded surfaces rarely Your skin is poorly conductive (dry) The air is low in humidity (the last two can be exaggerated by HVAC operation) Here are some things to try: Replace clothes or shoes Ground yourself through your shoes (wires and aluminium foil come to mind) Make the flooring or furniture more conductive Moisturize your skin Increase air humidity Wear uncoated conductive accessories (like a cold necklace or bracelets) Wear uncoated conductive accessories having (lots of)  pointy ends - tips may or may not be needed, but they can be made safer by wrapping in small tubes, it's the sharp air contact that matters. Some say a single safety pin i

Funny BASH snippets

echo howdy /bin/echo howdy /bin/../bin/echo howdy /bin/echo* howdy cd /bin echo* howdy *echo howdy ec*ho howdy ech? howdy ??h? howdy ech[o] howdy cd /tmp ec${howdy}ho howdy echo$howdy howdy ec''ho howdy ec""ho howdy 'ec'ho howdy "ec"ho howdy 'echo' howdy "echo" howdy ech\o howdy ec``ho howdy ec$()ho howdy ec`true`ho howdy ec$(true)ho howdy $yay echo howdy `` echo howdy `true` echo howdy `echo echo` howdy :&echo howdy if echo howdy;then :;else echo howdy;fi ! echo howdy { echo howdy ;} (echo howdy) eval echo howdy xargs echo howdy < /dev/null sh -c 'echo howdy' bash -c 'echo howdy' ssh localhost 'echo howdy' cd /tmp printf "all:\n\techo howdy" > Makefile make cd /tmp echo echo howdy > bash chmod +x bash ./bash cd /tmp cp /bin/bash bash echo echo howdy > bash ./bash . ./bash bash bash PATH=. bash alias howdy='echo howdy

Faster horses

This is the problem with gossip . Lack of a web of trust signature scheme  or a CRC  allows information distortion at each hop. Stemming from the clever analogy in 1999: "if Henry Ford canvassed people on whether or not he should build a motor car, they’d probably tell him what they really wanted was a faster horse." many people nowadays tell the story as if Ford really said that. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Henry_Ford#.22If_I.E2.80.99d_asked_people_what_they_wanted.2C_they_would_have_asked_for_a_better_horse.22 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/

Sticky note - almost thrown away bad glue, reused by accident

I heard somebody starting to spread the rumor that sticky note was invented by accident. The anecdote went on to say that they'd first invented a bad glue, almost threw it away, but then found a use for it after somebody accidentally applied it on the back side of a small piece of paper. This is plain simply false . This invention has seen an exhaustive proof of concept phase by an individual, being demoed in a trade show, and then being blatantly copied and entering mass production after a slow and difficult start. [Alan]  Amron said his idea in 1973 came about with chewing gum. He was looking for a way to stick a note on his refrigerator for his wife and used gum, providing inspiration for the adhesive he would use on his Press-on Memo. That year he took the sticky notes to a New York trade show and met briefly with two 3M executives, Amron said, but nothing came of the meeting. Fry and Silver [from 3M] came up with what 3M originally called the Press ‘n’ Peel memo pad in 19

The Computer Language Benchmarks Game

= The Computer Language Benchmarks Game The Computer Language Benchmarks Game is a free software project for comparing how a given subset of simple algorithms can be implemented in various popular programming languages. The project consists of: * A set of very simple algorithmic problems * Various implementations to the above problems in various programming languages * A set of unit tests to verify that the submitted implementations solve the problem statement * A framework for running and timing the implementations * A website to facilitate the interactive comparison of the results = Supported languages Due to resource constraints, only a small subset of common programming languages are supported, up to the discretion of the game's operator. https://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/ * Ada * C * Chapel * Clojure * C# * C++ * Dart * Erlang * F# * Fortran * Go * Hack * Haskell * Java * JavaScript * Lisp * Lua * OCaml * Pascal * Perl * PHP * Python