Anticryptography

NFT

Jun 18, 2021 Blockchain

Cover photo from Wikipedia WTF is an NFT? Non Fungible Token (NFT) is an assertion of owning a specific copy of a pile of bits, often being a media file (images, audio, video, etc). That has been the crux of what it is and the jokes about still not understanding them. There are a lot of reasons to not understand NFTs. …

Ransomware

Jun 11, 2021 Storage Cybersecurity Ransomware Archiving

[cover image comes from Wikipedia] It’s all about the backups Ransomware is all over the news right now. It has gone from a harassment for payment in cryptocurrency to shutting down medical care and crippling supplies of food and fuel. These attacks are hitting all of us and have become a real problem, but the …

Scams

Dec 29, 2020 Scams Spam Marketing Stopping Bad Practices

Scams, they are all scams. If you have followed any of this blog you will know I’m a advocate for information being extended through time and space. While it is a general good, I’ve been reconsidering if all data should enjoy the same effort. Today I have had one too many cases happen to me where it some …

Quora

Dec 20, 2020 Media Blogging Social Media Blogging

Quora If you know me even a little bit you know I’m not a participant in social media. I don’t have a Facebook account. My presence on Twitter is minimal and I never enjoy reading the feed. For the other social media outlets I may not even be able to tell you what their name is reliably (Instachat and …

Two ideas

Dec 17, 2020 Conventional wisdom Best Practices Unintended Consequences

Autopilot is a convenience not a preferred mode As I have talked about in my last few posts, I’m getting fed up with people not thinking. Basically not using their minds. Just going on autopilot to some degree or another. Walking the dog today I had more reason to think this way. (Not because of the dog as he …

Immortality drive?

Nov 29, 2020 media anticryptography archiving storage

I really don’t like the feeds on social media. I joined Twitter purely for this blog and it is rare that anything there is more than noise to me. That’s why I did not install the app on my phone and I only check it with relation to this blog (which is not really worth it either). Last night I checked for …

Data literacy

Nov 28, 2020 Statistics Media

Facts? Cover photo is from Wikipedia and showed up when I googled “liar” so it must be true [tic]. I really wanted to blog about something else for the last few days, but I’ve been kind of depressed by the state of data literacy and I had to talk about it. We have more information available at our …

Galactic trash

Nov 11, 2020 aliens anticryptography

Big News and space trash Big news last week was also that NASA had upgraded it’s Deep Space Network and sent commands 11+ billion miles to Voyager 2. Of the events in the last week Voyager 2 will probably hold more space in history books in the long run. It was one of our first grand tours of the Solar System and …

Characters get complex

Nov 7, 2020 media characters unicode

I originally posted this in 2016 and thought it still resonated today. Characters Characters have been the life blood of communications between people since the creation of written language. Limited sets of characters have been key to simple printing and communication with humans via machines. For example, English only …

PBM, the crayons of image formats

Nov 1, 2020 file-format images

Image standards, so many to choose from… Even before people had powerful graphics abilities in their PCs (remember until VGA was widely adopted in 90’s most PCs only supported 1, 4 or 16 colors) there were a literal sea of image formats. Most of them you will have never seen, heard of or used. Many were …