Hi, Links from Tuesday's conversations. First up, an important one regarding security if you've a Google account, e.g. Gmail...
If anyone has a Google account I'd recommend ensuring Google's two-factor authentication method is enabled. I put it off in the past because I often don't have a mobile signal to receive the one-time authentication code by text nor carry a smartphone with me to run a local app to generate one but then I found, from this article, that a one-time pad of ten codes can be generated whenever you like, old pads are automatically revoked. It includes a link to "Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack". http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-two-step-authentication/ XKCD featured quite a bit, thanks to Tim's T-shirt. Starting with a probable repeat, the superior `correct horse battery staple', now seen on Post-Its stuck to monitors everywhere, method of password selection compared to `Tr0ub4dor&3' measured with bits of entropy. http://xkcd.com/936/ What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? http://what-if.xkcd.com/4/ A teeny wasp and an amoeba at the same scale. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/11/30/how-fairy-wasps-cope-with-being-smaller-than-amoebas/ Pocket, formerly Read It Later, saves the essence of web pages for later reading offline on your Android device, Kindle, etc. http://getpocket.com/ The modern DCC method of controlling model electric trains, switches, and other gubbins by wiggling their bipolar DC line between positive and negative at different rates to include a binary signal. The broadcast across the rails is picked up by the various parties which are all configured with their own address. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Command_Control Does my `Unguessable123' password exist anywhere on the disk? May throw up false positives by design to avoid the act of searching from creating what's being searched for. LC_ALL=C grep -boa 'Un......bl...3' /dev/sda Wifi signal analyzer app for Android. Find unused channels near you. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farproc.wifi.analyzer Modern drives have Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, SMART. `sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda' lists all of that drives statistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. dstat(1), from package dstat, can be a useful improvement on the traditional `vmstat 1' for observing where the machine's expending effort. Initially ignore all the complexity suggested by its web page, running just `dstat' is useful. http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/ The Commode, sorry, Commodore 64, reaches its 30th birthday. (Spot the ZX Spectrum owner.) https://plus.google.com/109197758463316568589/posts/dWA3eG183ni And The Final Cartridge for said home computer. http://ar.c64.org/rrwiki/images/b/b0/Commodore_Horizons_Issue_22_1985_Oct_FC1.jpg Eleven-second delay between human action and generated sound on a pipe organ. http://www.mmdigest.com/Archives/Digests/200001/2000.01.26.07.html Tim's method of counting from 0 to 99 on your fingers; didn't catch the name. Index to little finger is 1-4, thumb adds 5, same fingers then give 6-9. Second hand gives tens' column. I thought of using one hand to count units and the other to tally fives as a kid but that leads to ambiguity; 5 could be 0,5 or 1,0, it should really be tallying the less `natural' sixes. All tends towards binary of course for the highest range with simple in/out of fingers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_counting http://timharford.com/2012/07/the-undercover-economist-a-free-chapter/ has a PDF of the new chapter in the second edition of _The Undercover Economist_ about the ongoing financial crisis. It mentions how often one expects to see a "three 25-standard deviation days in a row"; it's a lot of zeroes. "Parallel computer with a million ARM processors to produce brain simulations". https://plus.google.com/108065586321333973698/posts/hSLbWAEQLqi. By Prof. Steve Furber, designer of the original ARM's circuit, with the help of ARM. Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Dorchester, Tuesday 2012-09-04 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
