matty

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Finally got a DallE invite. Please enjoy “Rockwell painting of an Amish farmer loading a bushel of corn into an alien UFO” and “Notorious cybercrime hacker, by Johannes Vermeer.” This is the stuff the Internet was made for.

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Good night sleep tight

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Phishing is no longer just broken-English emails that are blatantly obvious. Hardware 2FA keys with origin binding seem to be the only thing that stopped it. I’m not convinced origin binding is infallible, though.

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An interesting Monte Carlo simulation of various identity-verification schemes and how bad they are in terms of false positives.

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I have an NTP server in the pool, which is periodically seeing bursts of well over 1,000 queries per second. The actual load on the system is trivial; at peak times NTP is using about 3% CPU.

But apparently, stock ntpd, being single-threaded, has a hard time actually saturating a 1Gbps port. (A problem very few will face, I’d expect.) Enter rsntp, a multithreaded Rust app. It looks like it’s essentially a cache in front of ntpd. Kind of neat, even if it’s not solving a problem I currently have.

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CDMA to last for several more years

My last post reminded me about something I haven’t thought about in years: CDMA-based time servers. One of the better ways to get a precise time reference for an NTP server is a GPS signal, but GPS tends to have poor indoor coverage, and data centers tend to be concrete bunkers.

CDMA requires an extremely precise time reference, and that time reference is slaved to GPS time and broadcast from CDMA base stations. Cell signals generally do penetrate into data centers. A few companies make CDMA NTP servers. The obvious question is: how long will CMDA be around?

The answer appears to be: years. Surely, you can’t turn up a new CDMA phone, but Sprint and Verizon (at least) both still operate the networks. Verizon had pledged to shut down their CDMA network at the end of 2019, but is leaving it running longer for machine-to-machine customers. Sprint apparently has several years left as well. For something that’s just watching the base station’s timing reference, rather than requiring an actual reference, that’s all you need.

That might explain why they’re still pretty pricey on eBay.

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in case you were wondering

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I know this is a few years old, but Aunt Sue is absolutely my favorite character ever.

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I’ve been a Linux nerd for something like 20 years at this point, but right now my desktop is an iMac and my work laptop is a MacBook Pro. I’ve been thinking a lot about building out a Linux desktop.

I’ve been browsing /r/UnixPorn a bit looking at slick desktop setups, and i3-gaps setups like this one keep impressing me.

Not pictured in this screenshot, but gotop is pretty slick, too: a top equivalent with graphs.

That said, some of what I’ve seen of Plasma impresses me as well, even if I’m not really a KDE guy.

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Continuing with the “I’m kind of behind the times but...” series, I discovered Unsplash recently. I have a few collections there of breathtaking images I’ve found, including a gallery that I use as desktop wallpapers.

This lead photo is this one, by Tina Rataj-Berard.

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I’m late to the party but I just discovered Strange Planet and it is my new favorite thing.

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Royal Palm Island

With the Powerball in excess of $600 million, I spent a little bit of time doing important “research” on where I might like to move. Royal Palm Island is a 6.5-acre island in Belize, for sale at $4.5 million. It appears to be a small operational resort at the moment.

Although Belize borders Mexico, Guatemala, and is a stone’s throw from Honduras, Belize’s official language is English. And though there is still a lot of room for improvement, its LGBT rights have improved to where the country should be somewhat safe.

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Confession time

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I have a thing for old, 17th-century era typography. Igino has worked to digitize a bunch of them. The Wikipedia page on Caslon has some interesting (if you’re warped like me) information as well.

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A neat video on what you can do with a tilt-shift, and how it works. I just rented Canon’s 24mm TS-E to tinker with and can’t wait until it shows up tomorrow. “Miniature-effect selective focus like in Instagram” is just one of the capabilities.

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Weather Station links

Thinking it’d be cool to build a little weather display, inspired by https://shop.dakboard.com/products/wall-display-v2-plus but I have a mess of spare LCDs.

DarkSky’s API documentation: https://darksky.net/dev/docs#forecast-request  -- Free for up to 1,000 daily queries, it seems.