Bob Culbertson jamming with his muse…
The Strange Pathways Knowledge Flows This looks like a great movie.
Originally shared by Will Hill
The Strange Pathways Knowledge Flows This looks like a great movie. Thanks, Roger Friedman for pointing it out. I had not noticed until a few friends were snickering about some technical details. https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4917057
Please, Roger, forgive what looks like unkind words. That big publishers and big companies hide free software from people is something of a sore spot. Apple is a big BSD user that got their browser from the KDE project. Microsoft borrows free software all the time and their most successful current investment, Facebook, is wholly driven by gnu/linux. Even Google hides their use of GNU/linux from users Chromebook, etc. There are even GNU/Linux distributions that don’t mention GNU. Such thoughtlessness is often malicious and is almost always offensive.
I don’t think an entertainment writer should be held up to those standards but would like to help, if you have the time.
Edward Snowden used Tails, a GNU/Linux distribution designed to protect people’s privacy, especially journalists and whistle blowers.
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tails/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tails_(operating_system)
I imagine he used Lenovo because it’s the best choice of what he might have been offered as a contractor. IBM Thinkpads have an excellent reputation in the free software community for sturdy build, good size/power balance, excellent documentation and easy repair.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
“Citizenfour”: Laura Poitras’ secret Snowden documentary is electric
Originally shared by Will Hill
https://www.salon.com/test/2014/10/13/citizenfour_laura_poitras_secret_snowden_documentary_is_electric/
Network Theory
Originally shared by John Baez
Network Theory
The world needs some new kinds of math, which deal with networks. So, check out this video! I start with a quick overview of network theory, and then begin building a category where the morphisms are electrical circuits – a warmup for more complicated kinds of networks. You can also read lecture notes:
• Network theory (part 30), http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/network-theory-part-30/
With luck, this video will be the first of a series. I’m giving a seminar on network theory at U.C. Riverside this fall. I’ll start by sketching the results in this new paper:
• John Baez and Brendan Fong, A compositional framework for passive linear networks, http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/circuits.pdf
A couple of weeks ago I talked about having a Hangout on Air, but I didn’t get my act together in time to set one up with a camera of high enough quality to make my writing readable on the long whiteboard in this room. So, I decided to use a videocam provided by U.C. Riverside. It can’t hook up directly to my laptop, since I don’t have FireWire, but it creates mp3 files that I can upload later. These have a maximum length of about 30 minutes, but using Windows Live Movie Maker it was easy to stitch them together into a single file. Then I uploaded this to YouTube.
So, that’s the best I’ve been able to do so far. If you have questions about the seminar, you can ask them here – or even better, on the Azimuth blog, where the conversation has already started, and you can write in TeX:
• Network theory seminar (part 1), http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/network-theory-seminar-part-1/
In the future, I’ll announce seminar videos on that blog.
I thank Blake Pollard for filming this seminar, and Muhammad “Siddiq” Siddiqui-Ali for providing the videocamera and technical support.
My friend, Bradley Kuhn, a longtime activist on behalf of free software and copyleft, has started using Gratipay to…
Originally shared by Michael R. Bernstein
My friend, Bradley Kuhn, a longtime activist on behalf of free software and copyleft, has started using Gratipay to accept personal donations.
If he reaches a sustainable level of $800/month, he’ll be able to continue his work without interruption for paid software development side-gigs.
I, for one, am truly grateful for the years of work Bradley has devoted to these causes, and hope he will reach a figure 10x that in recognition of the expertise he brings to bear in this area if nothing else.
Meanwhile, if you’ve read this far, check out the free tutorial book he is writing and editing on GPL Compliance: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/articles/copyleft-book.pdf
a common trick when generating random passwords is to Base64-encode random bytes
Originally shared by Sakari Maaranen
On UNIX and Linux systems, a common trick when generating random passwords is to Base64-encode random bytes; for example, this generates an 18 character long Base64-encoded password:
echo $(base64 /dev/random | head -c 18)
That’s fine, but the plus and slash (also underscore and hyphen) characters used in standard Base64-encoding schemes are laid out differently on the keyboard depending on country. This can cause trouble when trying to log on the machine, if the locale setting doesn’t match that of the actual keyboard used.
One way to solve this in environments where you need to deal with many locales, is to generate passwords using only those characters that are laid out the same regardless of locale.
Now try this:
echo $(cat /dev/random | tr -dc ‘!%,.0-9A-Xa-x’ | head -c 20)
Use one of the following strings between the single quotes on the above command line:
This generates a strong password that works the same with US, UK, German, and Scandinavian keyboard layouts:
!%,.0-9A-Xa-x (N=62)
If you don’t care about the German layout, you can use:
!%,.0-9A-Za-z (N=66)
If you want to support French as well, then you can only use:
0-9B-LN-PR-VXb-ln-pr-vx (N=50)
You can find the appropriate password length by replacing the desired bits of entropy for H and the above given value for N, typing the following in Google search:
H / (log(N) / log(2))
Always round the result up.
If you don’t know how many bits of randomness you need, just use H=96, but be warned: If you’re working on anything serious, you’d better educate yourself and make sure you know how many bits you want.
I’m back from my trip :D
Originally shared by Yi Yao
I’m back from my trip 😀
I currently have solar panels on about 35% of the roof area of my house, and I have reduced my electricity cost to…
I currently have solar panels on about 35% of the roof area of my house, and I have reduced my electricity cost to near (but not quite) zero. With 80% roof coverage, then, I could provide a surplus equal to what I am using.
According to the chart, Total Electrical Generation is 38.1 quads (with 25.7 going to “rejected”, 67% waste — what’s up with that??).
What’s interesting here is that the electrical infrastructure, unlike other energy infrastructure, is intrinsically bi-directional — if the consumers were turned into producers, they can send power back out over the same wires that they are currently using to receive power.
This means that if residential and commercial customers turned into producers (eg, residential and commercial solar that on net produced as much surplus energy as they had been using), they could completely supply the current industrial use of electricity, even accounting for a 2/3 energy loss (to “rejected”).
So, from a pure capacity and distribution infrastructure point of view, all current electric power generation facilities could be replaced by distributed local generation and storage, using the current grid.
The FREE Complete User Guide to Ello
Originally shared by Mark Traphagen
The FREE Complete User Guide to Ello
I’ve published what I believe to be the first Complete User Guide to Ello. Read it on the web for free at http://stonet.co/ElloUserGuide
The guide covers every aspect of Ello, including:
➢ Creating an account and profile
➢ The Ello home page
➢ Following users
➢ Finding users
➢ Posting and commenting
➢ Ello best practices: How to become a super user
➢ Extras: Text formatting, Emojis, and Ello services
Feel free to share a link to this guide anywhere and everywhere. I’d only ask that you not reproduce it anywhere without permission. I’ll have a downloadable PDF version available soon.
Here’s an easy to share link to the guide: http://stonet.co/ElloUserGuide
Let me know if you see any errors or anything I left out that you’d like covered!