🆕 blog! “It is 1939 and you want to use public-key cryptography”
Imagine, just for a moment, that a mathematical breakthrough had occurred on the eve of the second World War. Perhaps Turing or Rejewski or Driscoll realised that prime number theory held the key to unbreakable encryption. This blog post attempts to answer the question "could public-key …
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To be clear, we don't *need* the money. I can afford to keep paying the hosting and API costs myself. But it is nice when people help us out.
Please don't give if you can't afford it.
🆕 blog! “Grinding down open source maintainers with AI”
Early one morning I received an email notification about a bug report to one of my open source projects. I like to be helpful and I want people who use my stuff to have a good time, so I gave it my attention. Here's what it said:
😱 I Can't Use On This Day 😭
Seriously, What’s Going On?! 🔍
I’ve been trying to use…
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🆕 blog! “Get the location of the ISS using DNS”
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish).
Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space,…
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Holy shit! I've found a contactless payment app which works on #GrapheneOS!
Google Wallet refuses to play nicely with nonofficial OSes.
All UK credit card providers seem to go via GPay.
But Curve - the virtual card app - works perfectly! I added my credit card, set up their contactless wallet, and just paid for a bun using NFC 😃
Only works with Visa & MasterCard, but that's good enough for me.
Obligatory referral link (sign up and get £10).
🆕 blog! “Reading NFC Passport Chips in Linux”
For boring and totally not nefarious reasons, I want to read all the data contained in my passport's NFC chip using Linux. After a long and annoying search, I settled on roeften's pypassport.
I can now read all the passport information, including biometrics.
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🆕 blog! “Why do people have such dramatically different experiences using AI?”
For some people, it seems, AI is an amazing machine which - while fallible - represents an incredible leap forward in productivity.
For other people, it seems, AI is wrong more often than right and - although occasionally useful - requires constant supervision.
Who is right?
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You should become a donor. They give you free biscuits!
