umbraroze

There’s two kinds of crypto scams: Ones that actually involve crypto and ones that don’t.

Vague, possibly impossible to implement promises about proposed future functionality are an integral part of the crypto sphere!

Damn, OneCoin was bad. Ruja Ignatova was the first crypto scammer I’ve seen talked about in national news and she was also made fun of in a news comedy show over here. A true scam pioneer.

Brief history of YAML:

“Oh no! All of these configuration file formats are complicated. I want to make things simpler!”

(Years go by)

“…I have made things more complicated, haven’t I?”

YAML is generally good if it’s used for what it was originally designed for (relatively short data files, e.g. configuration data). Problem is, people use it for so much more. (My personal favourite pain example: i18n stuff in Ruby on Rails. YAML language files work for small apps, but when the app grows, so does the pain.)

And that there is the real crime. It’s a real shame no one’s making a tape drive at the consumer market price point. Tapes are a hell of a lot more convenient for backups and archival than the giant weird pile of storage formats we’ve seen over years.

Turtles are such underrated creatures and most people don’t realise how important they are to computer science. Turtle robots! Turtle graphics! Not to even mention the very concept of shell access! And yes, turtles are probably very happy that Secure Shell was invented.

Personal homepages. What we used to call 'em in the nineties.

I was about to comment on this, but my Android phone spontaneously rebooted.

Anyway. Before I was so rudely interrupted, I was about to say: Firefox. It is a thing. An awesome thing.

Microsoft got repeatedly hit over this kind of shenanigans in MSIE during and after the anti-trust lawsuit.

Sadly, that was 20 years ago. I’m not having much faith in American justice system doing anything about this nowadays.

If Chrome is known for one thing, it’s absurd User-Agent strings. Why not make it even more absurd???

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (Ahahaha; Fuck you Google; This is actually) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0

Depends on the type of account, but here are some of the common methods of how this might happen:

• The attacker could be straight up guessing the password. (One possible way to mitigate this: the website can go “wow, 10 failed login attempts from that source. I’m going to ignore all attempts from there for 24 hours.”)
• The attacker could be using previously exposed passwords. (One possible way to mitigate this: The websites should immediately require password reset for all users when that kind of data breach happens. For users: never use same password for multiple different services, certainly never reuse a compromised password even if it’s for a different service. Also: haveibeenpwned.com)
• The attacker, currently using the same network, could hijack the session. (This was a really huge problem back in the day. In this day and age, websites should be using HTTPS, which limits this very much. Still possible if the site doesn’t use HTTPS, and through some other vectors, e.g. malware or hijacked network hardware).

Also: Malware is a really scary big problem in that they’re rarely targeting you specifically. Why do that, when they can million people at the same time and sift through that stolen data for most valuable stuff, right?

Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024

Welp, another Google service that was too beautiful for this world.

Time to move my subscriptions to other podcatcher then. [taking a quick look at various migration options] Hmmm. What to write on Google Podcasts gravestone? “Here lies Google Podcasts. It never supported OPML.”

with listeners migrated to YouTube Music

Damn. I migrated my Google Play Music purchases to YouTube Music and to this day I have no idea where they actually went. If I hadn’t downloaded the local MP3 copies with the terrible joke of a client software they had, I’d have been screwed. Went back to just buying music on iTunes.

That’s right! However, remember that bananas have potassium-40 in it, which is radioactive. Not much, though. So be very very mildly careful around bananaphones! /old joke

Well, Google Photos shouldn’t be considered a “backup” solution to begin with. Never mind that both Google and Apple scan the content in their respective services, but there’s just no guarantee that they don’t modify the data on cloud. “Oooh guys, we just invented a revolutionary new photo compression algorithm! Also hosting data is kinda expensive! So pay up if you want your originals.” …and there’s occasional reports that these services just straight up corrupted some old files while no one was looking at them. Good going.

I just treat my Android phone like any other camera I own and use. Copy the files from phone to PC and from there to my NAS, and I use ACDSee’s DAM functionality.

Olivetti, from Italy, was pretty famous in Europe as a typewriter manufacturer. So it wasn’t much of a surprise my father’s first PC (and the first PC compatible I could use) was Olivetti PCS 386SX, circa 1992.

Turns out Olivetti is surprisingly important in computer history too. Olivetti made Programma 101, which was the first programmable desk computer/calculator, way back in 1965. If NASA bought a bunch of these, I guess it was serious shit.

There was some commercial for the Commodore 64 which basically lambasted the IBM PC for being twice as expensive while having the the same 64K memory.

I was, like, “yeah, but nobody ever bought the 64K model of IBM PC. That would have been just ridiculously limited, right? Right? Everyone got memory expansions, surely?”

Well, 64K was the stock configuration, so I’m sure those memory expansions sold like hotcakes. There was even the option for freaking 16K memory. (Now, I’m sure next to nobody bought that.) Even option to getting no floppy drives, because you could always put your glorious BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Like a caveman. (This also sounds like a rare option.)

Scrivener is still the absolute best word processor for ginormous writing projects. There are FOSS projects that do some parts of it right, but fall far behind in the others. It’s particularly frustrating because my usual FOSS approach would be to use other tools that make up for the inadequacies, but Scrivener pretty much nails the “what to include and what to leave out” equation. It’s a great combo of a word processor, project management tool and a research/notes tool, all rolled into one.

I have a Zyxel NAS server that just offers a SMB share. I’m just dumping my photos there under YYYY/MM/DD scheme, and converting all of my Nikon NEF files to DNG. (For importing photos to the NAS and generating backups, I have a PowerShell script and a PowerAutomate action. Also mild usage of Dropbox to transfer files from my cellphone.)

For actual management of photos, I use ACDSee Photo Studio Professional, and it just writes all tag information to the files themselves, so I can basically use any other software for photo management. For actual photo editing, I use DXO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo most of the time.

Funny thing is that I’m not sure if governments should run official Mastodon servers where all political parties blend into one. I’m from Finland, and we currently have a mild problem called “dipshit party having actual political reach”. Including several members of parliament who have tweeted Not So Savoury Things which would be a banworthy offence in pre-Musk Twitter (if anyone at the staff comprehended Finnish language, that is). So maybe the task of running Mastodon servers for candidates and actual serving members of political machinery should fall to the political parties. If an entite dipshit party gets defederated, maybe that’s a signal they should consider.