Dance Tango Tango
In 1977 I made a vow to stop dancing until the day it returned to the graceful splendor of the glory days. My audition as a troupe member for Santaren & The Loving Girls (I'm the one in green) is a chief example of these halcyon days.
Velodrome Sprints
I had a brief vacation in San Diego a few weeks ago and though I was working we went on a walk in the morning to check out the velodrome in Balboa Park. Amanda and Kayla were interested in the strangely sloped track and I tried to explain the weirdness of the races I'd seen online.
Watch the linked video. The racers go exceptionally slow at the start because they're trying to get into the second place position. The idea is to stay just behind the leader until the last lap when you use the slipstream of the person in front to catapult yourself past him at the finish. This dynamic makes the races interesting, the leader tries to fake out his opponent and they often come to a stop on the track. Then in the last lap they accelerate to 70kph for the finish.
As we stood watching the track a few older men and women drove in. I assumed they were referees until they reached into their cars and removed expensive looking, fixed gear carbon fiber bikes. I doubt they were were there to do any sprints but it would have been fun to see.
How long to brute force a password?
How long it takes computers to brute force a password. Brute force means just trying every combination.
Most password crackers are smarter than this but I always have a hard time explaining to people why they shouldn't use the name of their dog plus a number or an exclamation point. We need a simple image to explain how modern password crackers work.
I would also really be interested to see a video of how this table has changed every year since, say, 1980.
Google doesn't want me as user
On May 30, you may lose access to apps that are using less secure sign-in technology
To help keep your account secure, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account using only your username and password. Instead, you’ll need to sign in using Sign in with Google or other more secure technologies, like OAuth 2.0. Learn more
I just received an email from google telling me access to their servers using my email client (mutt.) was being deprecated. There are patches I can add to fetchmail but I'm not sure I care enough about google to bother. This news could have been devastating but I moved all my data away from google years ago. When they killed google reader I saw the writing on the wall.
The only google product I still interact with regularly is youtube. I'm still waiting for the day they force inline ads or kill the rss subscriptions. It will be a sad when this happens. Hopefully peertube will have grown into an alternative by then.
I bought a fastmail subscription as my primary email host a few years back and this morning, in response to this news, I upgraded my account to one that would allow me to use a customized domain. Now you can send email to to me at na@trousermonkey.net.
I will still receive mail on my old address but I will soon be encouraging people to update their address books. The reason this is worth an extra $33 a year is it gives me an escape route if fastmail is ever bought by some huge evil company. When that happens I will be able to just point my dns entries to another email service provider and people will still be able to reach me at the same address.
This got me thinking about what would happen if my domain registrar is bought by a huge evil company? I'm not sure. I have technical ownership over the domain but that doesn't help when some capitalist decides all .net addresses need to be squeezed for more money. Hopefully when this happens we'll be living in luxury gay space communism with distributed dns to non-NATed ipv6 addresses and it will no longer be a concern.
In related news, microsoft has decided I need to create a microsoft account to play minecraft. I am sad to see it go. I love that game but joining microsoft as a requirement for offline play is asking too much.
It's my own fault for accepting that deal back when it was owned by a little idie game company. On the same note, I expect valve and gog will eventually succumb to the pressures of capital. One thing I've learned from decades of computing is to never put faith in a for-profit company.
dummy robotic arm from scratch
This is an awesome project with a lot of polish. It's one of those things every engineer tells themself they could do if they could only find the energy. He mentions the software taking the most work. I can imagine.
Gemini is a gem
In a recent post highlighted by hacker news マリウス decided gemini was really bad because he had to install a new browser to view it. His argument is that everything gemini does could be handled by pre-existing protocols.
What's the point, he argues, if it doesn't advance technology with blockchain, IPFS, or ZeroNet?
Regarding the limited formatting options:
As for the actual content, it is easily possible to configure a modern HTTP server like nginx to respond with nothing but pure Markdown. Users could then install either of the dozens of extensions available for their web browser, to be able to visit the Markdown-only websites more comfortably.
He refutes gemini's stance of taking privacy seriously by claiming he could write his own gemini server and track everyone who visited.
Finally his solution:
If you don’t like how modern websites track their users and flood them with ads, then don’t do that on your website, contribute to projects like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Tor, and stop using websites that do track their users or spam them with ads. If you don’t like JavaScript, don’t use it or use it in a way in which your site will still function even without it, and stop using websites that won’t even load without JavaScript enabled.
I'm sad to say that ship has sailed. I do all these things and constantly tell people to stay off social networks, use firefox over chrome, linux over windows, and open source over proprietary software but nothing changes. People just don't care and it's too much bother to change.
Sure you could wire nginx to serve markdown and ask people to install a plugin to view your content but this will never happen. Apart from the insurmountable effort required from your users, your site would still be a sheep among wolves.
Gemini's greatest feature is once you're on the network, you don't have to worry about wolves. The overly restrictive one-request one-response protocol and the primitive markup makes it difficult to abuse. Sure Zuckerberg could move facebook to gemini and track people as they interact with a billion different pages on his server but apart from being astronomically unlikely, he couldn't abuse the protocol to do any more. It's too primitive for abuse and this is a good thing. I can relax when I follow a link in gemini because I know it won't have advertisements, tracking, or obnoxious media.
I'm reminded once again of devdocs.io and how they can somehow install persistent documentation to my browser that is viewable offline. This is cool but terrifying. How much other shit is stored on my system without my knowledge? I'm super careful about the sites I visit and I take so many precautions about 10% of the pages I visit won't render in my browser because of my adblocking, dns redirects, disabled javascript, and cookie policies but devdocs.io still works. The modern web is too complex for it's own good.
Mozilla recently decided to get into the ongoing scam that is cryptocurrency and were forced to back down after an outcry. This was just another of a long list of problematic decisions made by the company and I and many others would desperately like to move to something else but there are no better alternatives. The consensus among developers is the requirements to produce a new web browser are too high. Rendering the modern web with support for all the protocols we take for granted, like javascript and media decoding is already a prohibitively high bar - not to mention you would still be forced to follow chrome, a browser written by an advertising company with enough market share they get to steer the protocol.
マリウス's complaint raised the usual discussion including the blog post that triggered this one..
Everyone agrees the web is shit. マリウス wants to fight for change but I think it's already a lost cause. Gemini is a kneejerk reaction to the modern web and is designed to thwart the marketers, trolls, and authoritarians in charge of things today. I think there's an opportunity to invent the next Gemini protocol with a few more features but it will have to be designed with the wisdom of Athena because those fuckers are devious.
The infrequently updated blog.