A very long article about commercial VPNs, their marketing strategies, and the truth behind their privacy and security claims.

Last December, I was invited to a private bug bounty program to test a beta version of GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is a workflow automation tool integrated with GitHub. One common use case of GitHub Actions is for CI builds – a project can fairly easily…

Companies must move away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust.

Since I first read Kristen Roupenian’s viral story, I’ve wondered: How did she know about me?

Death Valley hit 130°F this hour, breaking all-time reliably measured world heat record of 129.9°F set August 16, 2020 at the same site. To see the obs, choose 24 hours and click Decoded Data from this link: bit.ly/3ww8odK. Final high may be higher; Saturday…

Capture cards, input hardware, and machine learning get around system-level lockdowns.

Under what conditions do groups outperform their individual members? This question is of paramount importance and has spurred many studies in management and organizational science, psychology, sociology, complex systems, and computer science. Here, we investigate…

Free intraday API, live stock chat, fundamental and technical data, social sentiment screener, and much more...

Introduction In our previous post Why We Need Build Systems we examined the need for Build Systems in modern software development. In this post we will examine how to use CMake to mange the build process for a cross compilation project. CMake can be described…

Attention Kmart shoppers! When Mark Davis worked at Kmart stores in the 1980s and 90s, he saved the cassette tapes (full of soft-rock hits, sale announcements, and "elevator music") that played over the in-store audio system. Years later, the digitized audio…

On rabbit experience

Recently I decided to control my old Marantz PM-62 programmatically. There were a few reasons to do so: Original remote control died and "compatible replacements" were not good enough. I …

One of my posts was trending yesterday on HackerNews. The difference between what report @Cloudflare (DNS metric based - can't block) and @googleanalytics (noscript easy to block with an adblocker) are mindblowing. GA reported only 20% of the visitors. Is GA…

During a recent RAID 5 recovery attempt, John made an interesting discovery inside the two failed disks. The plastic ramp that the heads park onto when idle had snapped in the same position on both drives. We don’t know if the heads got damaged first, and…

HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility. It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from…

Researcher accidentally spots tiny insect walking on the underside of the water surface as if it were a pane of glass

Death Valley, California will have high temperatures near the 125 degree mark over the next few days, but this is still short of the all-time record there that occurred way back in 1913. On July 10th, 1913, the weather observer at Greenland Ranch in Death…