Anticryptography

Paper less, the right way.

Nov 14, 2021 Stopping-bad-practices Best-practices

Go paperless! You have probably had every business you interact with ask you to go paperless. The reasons are sound. Reduce waste from the printing and mailing. It can also declutter the house as you don’t have to file a small stack of paper each month. The problem is that it isn’t going paperless so much …

View source

Nov 12, 2021 Technology Conventional-Wisdom Inappropriate-use

View Source I’ve been using browsers for almost 30 years and I can’t remember a time that there hasn’t been some sort of “View Source” option being present as I right click on a page. Of course there were some ham fisted attempts to hide it with JavaScript. I’ve even seen pages pull …

ML winter

Nov 11, 2021 Machine-learning Artificial-Intelligence

Is the next winter in computer science coming? You may hear the term “AI winter” dropped here and there. For those that are older, we can remember when the hype of AI had peaked before and the period of nothing right after it. AI has been a concept for many decades in computer science. Originally is was …

A modest word

Nov 7, 2021 Archiving Encoding Storage

Cover image from Wikipedia. Word sizes We have a range of word sizes with computers. If you have used a wide range of machines you may have even seen bytes with more or less than 8 bits. We have standardized on 8 bits in a byte in the last 40 decades. Characters can be 8, 16, 32 or a variable number of bytes depending …

Bits for life

Oct 17, 2021 Archiving Storage

How long can a bit live? This question is both nonsensical and serious at the same time. The base concept of a bit says it doesn’t have a life time so much as it encodes a hint at the probability distribution. In real life though we use those bits to encode almost everything today. Looking around my house I can …

Spam

Oct 8, 2021 Spam Marketing Attention

Just because I decide to do business with you once doesn’t mean I want to hear from you every day. I know marketing specialist insist just the opposite, but they are on the verge of mass alienating a large swath of customers and destroying tools we communicate with. Spam Let’s quickly run through the …

8-bit nostalgia

Sep 5, 2021 Nostalgia 8-bit Futile

8-bit: Back in the 70s and 80s we had a lot of fun with 8-bit machines. You could buy them for the cost of a used car and run them at home using your television as the screen. There were of course variations on this theme for years, but most people of my generation first experienced computers in this way from a limited …

Identity loss

Aug 29, 2021 Scams Conventional-wisdom marketing FUD

Identity Loss It’s a real thing and it can be really bad when it happens. The damage it can cause ranges from annoyance, loosing property all the way to ruining a life. Society has taken steps to minimize the damages and make the crimes punishable, but at this point we each need to protect ourselves more than …

Visual Studio code

Aug 21, 2021 vscode editor

Editors are a religious thing. Many of us spend more time in an editor, or something with an edit feature, than anything else on the keyboard. For an accountant it might be the cell editor in a spreadsheet (which acts like an overgrown typewriter IMHO). For many office workers they have blurred the line between …

It wasn't supposed to be like this

Jun 22, 2021 Ownership

Where did we go wrong? There have been on going jokes about where is my jet pack, flying car, robot, space station vacation, and so on; for years. A lot of views of the future have come and gone and they rarely look like what we have today. Artist and dreamers views aside, there were views of the engineers who set the …