media

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Carving in stone

Oct 18, 2020 archiving media

I originally posted a version of this in the summer of 2016. I’m reposting it with some minor edits. A classic way to make something permanent is to carve it in stone. So much so we hold it in our language with phrases like “It isn’t written in stone yet.” Using a chisel and hammer the shapes …

Atomic floppies

Oct 1, 2020 floppies storage media floppies nuclear weapons

I previously posted this in 2016 and am posting the article again as the details are timeless. Reading the morning news I saw an article that piqued my interest. I had heard in previous news that the Air Force relied on floppy disks for some of the nuclear launch systems. Today TIME magazine took them to task on it in …