Anticryptography

Matter

Jan 1, 2025 3d-printing anticryptography archiving file-format

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D printing lately. No, I didn’t get a new printer for the holidays, but I’ve been on streak of productivity and my setup has allowed me to do more with less time. That got me thinking about how 3D printing is an enabler for Anticryptography. Storage Like most people, this is …

Executable

Dec 30, 2024 applications file-format packages stopping-bad-practices technology

Stop putting your crap in my system! We have a 2 fold problem. One is a searching for a solution. The second is created by trying to solve the first problem, but poorly. I’m talking about software distribution. I’ve lived this problem for the last 3 decades. Either as the recipient or as the creator (I …

Social media isn't yours

Jul 9, 2023 social-media ownership

Cover photo from Wikipedia Don’t think social media owes you a damn thing Over time different people get mad at things social media sites do and complain as if they are entitled to some level of service or performance from the site. This has happened a lot in the last year. Twitter has shifted operational …

Signatures

Apr 17, 2022 Anticryptography Archiving Signatures

Signatures Image from Kurtis Garbutt. Putting data out in the environment allows everyone to access it. The problem is that it allows any one to alter and recreate that data in their own vision. Sometimes that is great, other times it is disastrous. I love the idea of someone using public data to make something, but I …

Books

Jan 16, 2022 Books Ownership

Remember when O’Reilly sold books? Books I know they still sell books, but try to find where. No really. You go to O’Reilly and try and find a book, just a single book. On that first page I find the word book once and it is a range reference implying that books are the low order item and conferences are the …

Backups

Jan 1, 2022 Archiving Lifecycle Media Storage

Like flossing, backups are something we should do all the time, but for many it is often overlooked for spans of time. Partly because it is a lot of work. Partly because it has been a moving target over time. Backups The basic idea is to take a snapshot of either your whole system or the parts that are important to you …

May you own a little more this year than in the last.

Jan 1, 2022 Ownership Technology

I’m not talking about having being more materialistic or going out to consume and shop. No, I’m talking about the things you think you already own, but do you really? Ownership There were a lot of things to worry about in 2021. I’m not going to touch most of the ones that come to mind. What we …

Quite Ok Image format, first official

Dec 26, 2021 File-format Images Anticryptography Encoding

QOI, the standard Earlier this month I wrote about an exciting new image format that was an option for simple and fast encoding while also being on par with state of the art formats. QOI was lossless, compressed about as well as PNG and was about as fast as an image can get to encode and decode. Dominic Szablewski …

Celebrity?

Dec 22, 2021 Attention Conventional-wisdom Marketing

Why do I care what a celebrity thinks? We get blitzed with these messages all day long. Famous athlete/muscian/actor endorses X. Unless it is something that is directly part of their success story (like a work out technique for an athlete) why would I care? Why should I care? Any random person on the street can give me …

Quite Ok image format

Dec 5, 2021 File-format Images Anticryptography Encoding

QOI There is a new image format in town. It is about on par with PNG for compression, and only encodes RGB and RGBA. What is interesting about it is how simple it is, and as a result of that simplicity how fast it is. So fast that it has achieved essentially O(n) which is the optimal performance scale for an image. …