linkmachinego.com

2 December 2014
[religion] God’s Lonely Programmer … fascinating story of a man who has crafted his own computer operating system inspired by God‘ The words pour out on TempleOS.org, a torrent of verified random numbers, news links, YouTube videos, and scriptural exegesis. It’s the dense work of a single, restless mind writing ceaselessly without an audience. After two months of emails and phone conversations, I know more than when I began; specifically, I’ve accumulated more raw data, more facts about his life and experience. But I suspect I’ve only sketched a shadow. The full reality remains unreachable, an irreducible mystery.’
27 November 2014
[war] A new report shows nuclear weapons almost detonated in North Carolina in 1961 … Eric Schlosser discusses various nuclear weapon accidents …

The Goldsboro bomb that almost detonated was known as Weapon No. 1. As the plane was spinning and breaking apart, the centrifugal forces pulled a lanyard in the cockpit–and that lanyard was what a crew member would manually pull during wartime to release the bomb. This hydrogen bomb was a machine, a dumb object. It had no idea whether the lanyard was being pulled by a person or by a centrifugal force. Once the lanyard was pulled, the weapon just behaved like it was designed to.

The bomb went through all of its arming steps except for one, and a single switch prevented a full-scale nuclear detonation. That type of switch was later found to be defective. It had failed in dozens of other cases, allowing weapons to be inadvertently armed. And that safety switch could have very easily been circumvented by stray electricity in the B-52 as it was breaking apart. As Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” That’s literally correct, a short circuit could’ve fully armed the bomb.

1 November 2014
[tech] 100 Technical Things Non-Technical People Can Learn To Make Their Lives Easier‘PDFs are Portable Documents. They are made by Adobe and work pretty much everywhere. This is a good format for Resumes. You can often Save As your document and create a PDF. Also, note that PDFs are almost always considered read-only. Word has doc files and newer docx files. When working with a group, select a format that is common to everyone’s version of Word. Some folks may have old versions!’
19 October 2014
[tech] The Internet Is Losing Interest in Computers … Alexis Madrigal analyses some stats from Google Trends and wonders if the internet is losing interest in technology… ‘So what’s really going on here? I have a couple thoughts: One, heavy users of technology used to have to search for ways to find software, to make software work, and the like. Now, especially on mobile platforms, the software is simpler and pretty much does what it’s supposed to. All the searches to discover software are happening in the App Store, and less troubleshooting in now required. One small bit of evidence for this theory is that searches for “Games” have declined. It’s not that people are playing less games, they’re just not looking to Google to find them.’
18 October 2014
[ios] Schrödinger’s Shift Key … a look at why the shift key in iOS 7.1 and 8 is an appalling piece of design … ‘Since 7.1, this confusing shift key has been the subject of instructional articles, mockery, and even an entire web site: IsMyShiftKeyOnOrNot.com. A whole OS release later, many of us boneheads still find ourselves wrestling an inscrutable toggle, trying to somehow, somehow type a lower-case letter.’
12 October 2014
[www] The Secret History of Hypertext … interesting look at some pre-computer visions of the World Wide Web … ‘Paul Otlet, a Belgian bibliographer and entrepreneur who, in 1934, laid out a plan for a global network of “electric telescopes” that would allow anyone in the world to access to a vast library of books, articles, photographs, audio recordings, and films. Like Bush, Otlet explored the possibilities of storing data on microfilm and making it searchable, with a web of documents connected via a sophisticated linking system. Otlet also wrote about wireless networks, speech recognition, and social network-like features that would allow individuals to “participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus.” He even described a mechanism for transmitting taste and smell.’
2 October 2014
[tech] Londoners Give Up Eldest Children In Public Wi-Fi Security Horror Show … seems like a reasonable deal to me! … ‘The experiment, which was backed by European law enforcement agency Europol, involved a group of security researchers setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot in June. When people connected to the hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to sign up to included a “Herod clause” promising free Wi-Fi but only if “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity”. Six people signed up.’
21 September 2014
[tech] These Two Guys Tried to Rebuild a Cray Supercomputer … recreating a 1976 supercomputer as a small computer using modern hardware … ‘The thing that turned out to be tricky, actually, was the software. No one had preserved a copy of the Cray operating system. Not the Computer History Museum. Not the U.S. government. It was just gone. Fenton searched high and low, eventually finding an old disc pack that contained a later version of the Cray OS…’
8 September 2014
[tech] Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1? … another interesting titbit of Windows history from Raymond Chen.
4 September 2014
[loremipsum] Lorem Ipsum: Of Good & Evil, Google & China … the strange story of finding hidden messages in Google Translate with Lorem Ipsum filler text as input … ‘It all started a few months back when I received a note from Lance James, head of cyber intelligence at Deloitte. James pinged me to share something discovered by FireEye researcher Michael Shoukry and another researcher who wished to be identified only as “Kraeh3n.” They noticed a bizarre pattern in Google Translate: When one typed “lorem ipsum” into Google Translate, the default results (with the system auto-detecting Latin as the language) returned a single word: “China.” Capitalizing the first letter of each word changed the output to “NATO”…’
22 August 2014
[funny] A Very Personal Computer … by Boulet.

A Very Personal Computer

17 August 2014
[tech] Browsing speeds may slow as net hardware bug bites… BBC News on the 512K routing bug … ‘This may come as a surprise to non-specialists who view the internet as a high-tech affair comparable to the bridge of the USS Enterprise of Star Trek fame, in actuality, the internet is more akin to an 18th century Royal Navy frigate, with a lot of running about, climbing, shouting, and tugging on ropes required to maintain the desired course and speed.’
2 August 2014
[tech] Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all right-thinking programs?‘And then a bug report came in from a beta tester who wanted Ctrl+F to forward rather than find, because he had become accustomed to that keyboard shortcut from the email program he used before Exchange. That beta tester was…’
22 June 2014
[war] America’s Nuclear Arsenal Still Runs Off Floppy Disks‘The control room was not what Stahl—or I—expected: There’s no “big button,” but there are floppy disks. Like the old, big 8-inch floppy disks. Like the kind, […] that are often featured in a computer history museum or found in your attic, beneath old DOS manuals. Like, not even the newer, 3.5-inch model of floppy disk. That’s how they control our nuclear missiles. At 23 years old, the deputy missileer said she had never even seen a floppy disk before finding one that can help wreak untold carnage on planet Earth.’
8 May 2014
[tech] Wat HiFi? … amusing collection of reviews for high-end HiFI equipment … ‘This [$600] USB cable is simply revelatory in its combination of ease and refinement on one hand, and resolution and transparency on the other. Although capable of resolving the finest detail, Diamond USB has a relaxed quality that fosters deep musical involvement.’
7 May 2014
[tech] How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch‘The problem was that I had no knowledge of BASIC, just a bare memory that it had line numbers from that 3-day high-school experience. So I picked up a BASIC manual late one night at HP and started reading it and making notes about the commands of this language. Mind that I had never taken a course in compiler (or interpreter) writing in my life. But my friend Allen Baum had sent me xerox copies of pages of his texts at MIT about the subject so I could claim that I had an MIT education in it, ha ha. In my second year of college I had sat in a math analysis class trying to teach myself how to start writing a FORTRAN compiler, knowing nothing about the science of compiler writing.’
2 May 2014
[security] 4 Simple Changes to Stop Online Tracking … some great tips from the Electronic Frontier Foundation … ‘Get Adblock Plus. After it is installed, be sure to change your filter preferences to add EasyPrivacy.’
26 April 2014
[tech] Previously Unknown Andy Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985 … another story of digital archeology … ‘It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol’s imagery existed on the floppy disks—nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the Club’s forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol’s style by the AWM’s experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol’s signature.’
25 April 2014
[tech] The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos … a wonderful story of digital archeology …

The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.

They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, but it wasn’t until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together.

When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action.

22 March 2014
[tech] Spring Cleaning Who Has Access to Your Social Media Data … useful tips for managing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn … ‘Just like the spring cleaning rule that says, “If you haven’t worn it in six months, throw it out,” you should use the same edict with your online data: “If you haven’t logged in to an app or site in six months, revoke its access.”’
14 March 2014
[tech] Good advice from a Fortune Cookie‘You will never get back the years of your life you spent pointlessly rolling your own CMS.’
21 February 2014
[power] U.K. National Grid status … Statistics about the UK’s electicity supply in near real time … ‘Gridwatch was born, first of all to scrape the data off the BMreports site every 5 minutes and inject it into an SQL database where it would be easy to perform specific searches and do statistical analysis. Then, in a rather retro and humorous way, to display the data in terms of analogue instruments and moving graphs. This is pure personal amusement, I like dials and graphs.’ [via As Above]
19 January 2014
[web] Have I Been Pwned? … a service that allows you to check if any of your usernames or passwords been compromised in recent website security breaches.
13 January 2014
[tech] Source Code in TV and Films … an amusing look at where the Source Code displayed in TV and movies is really from … ‘In the film Terminator, the HUD shows a listing of 6502 assembly language which appears to have been taken from an Apple II.’
20 December 2013
[tech] 11 parental IT support issues you can expect if you go home this Christmas‘No, change the screen resolution back, please. I prefer all my windows to be blurry and weirdly elongated.’
9 December 2013
[mobiles] The Second Operating System Hiding in Every Mobile Phone … all your worst fears about computer/phone security are true … ‘So, we have a complete operating system, running on an ARM processor, without any exploit mitigation (or only very little of it), which automatically trusts every instruction, piece of code, or data it receives from the base station you’re connected to. What could possibly go wrong? ‘
14 November 2013
[work] Hyperemployment, or the Exhausting Work of the Technology User … Whatever happened to Keynes idea of a Leisure Society? ‘The economic impact of hyperemployment is obviously different from that of underemployment, but some of the same emotional toll imbues both: a sense of inundation, of being trounced by demands whose completion yields only their continuance, and a feeling of resignation that any other scenario is likely or even possible. The only difference between the despair of hyperemployment and that of un- or under-employment is that the latter at least acknowledges itself as an substandard condition, while the former celebrates the hyperemployed’s purported freedom to “share” and “connect,” to do business more easily and effectively by doing jobs once left for others competence and compensation, from the convenience of your car or toilet.’
13 November 2013
[retro-computing] Google BBS Terminal … How Google search would behave if it had been created in the 1980’s.
25 June 2013
[security] Anatomy of a Hack: How Crackers Ransack Passwords Like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” … A fascinating look at how easy it is to crack passwords … ‘Even the least successful cracker of our trio—who used the least amount of hardware, devoted only one hour, used a tiny word list, and conducted an interview throughout the process—was able to decipher 62 percent of the passwords. Our top cracker snagged 90 percent of them.’
6 May 2013
[windows] Solitaire.exe … a real life pack Windows Solitaire playing cards … ‘Solitaire.exe is a physical pixel-for-pixel recreation of the popular computer card game included in the Windows 98 operating system.’
4 April 2013
[tech] The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame) … the first computer art was apparently created by an anyonymous IBM employee … ‘A young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen. The year was 1956, and the creation was a landmark moment in computer graphics and cultural history that has gone unnoticed until now. Using equipment designed to guard against the apocalypse, a pin-up girl had been drawn. She was quite probably the first human likeness to ever appear on a computer screen. She glowed.’
19 March 2013
[tech] It’s OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad … amusing rant about the awfulness of technology … ‘Tablets are a complete luxury item—PURE luxury—and owning one makes you an asshole, instantly, categorically. It’s a wonderful toy. But a toy. A big boy toy. Nobody needs an iPad. Nobody. Not a single person, unless you’re literally so stupid and/or infirm that you can’t use a keyboard and mouse like the rest of the industrialized (or barbaric) world. iPads are a status symbol, a second computer that’s built expressly for convenience. You’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make your cushy life even cushier by carrying a beautiful computer you don’t need that you can use while flopped down on the couch or leaning against an airplane window like the bourgeois brat idiot you are. You don’t need this thing, and you know you don’t need it. You need a PC-yes. You need a PC to be part of modern society. But you don’t need an iPad, and the entire notion of the luxury device is noxious and offensive…’
12 March 2013
[drink] What Coca-Cola Contains‘The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are not only chains of tools, they are also chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead — the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space.’
6 March 2013
[tech] How Qihoo 360 Won the Browser War in China … a look at how a virus company leveraged it’s position to create China’s most popular web browser … ‘When a user tries to uninstall the 360 browser, they are presented with three choices: Repair, Change to IE9, or uninstall directly. If they choose to change to IE9, after installation another popup occurs and when you click “Next”, it reinstalls the 360 browser and makes it the default.’
5 March 2013
[books] The Book-Writing Machine … What was the first book ever written on a word processor? … ‘It was 1968, and the IBM technician who serviced Len Deighton’s typewriters had just heard from Deighton’s personal assistant, Ms. Ellenor Handley, that she had been retyping chapter drafts for his book in progress dozens of times over. IBM had a machine that could help, the technician mentioned…’
1 March 2013
[tech] The Restart Page … Re-experience the thrill of watching your favourite retro operating systems reboot.
11 December 2012
[google] The best way to use Gmail and Google Calendar on your iPhone … useful guide to using Google services with the iPad and iPhone … ‘The trick here is combining the Gmail app with two syncing protocols called CardDAV and CalDAV (don’t worry, you’ll never actually need to know what these are to get them to work). You’ll need an iOS device running version 5.0 or above to take advantage of these, but each offers better and more powerful integration with Google’s services than just tapping “Gmail” when you first set up your email accounts on your phone. Much like the momentary pain of digging into your Facebook privacy settings, the five or ten minutes spent setting up this system will save you email stress for months to come.’
15 November 2012
[web] The Hacking Of A General’s Mistress … a look at how long it takes to hack a password used by General Petraeus’ girlfriend … ‘Using oclHashtcat, it’ll take 17 hours to crack her password using a GPU accelerator trying 3.5-billion password attempts per second, trying all combinations of upper/lower case and digits. After doing this, you’ll discover the original password is “vsKLVg8L”. This is a fairly strong password, consisting of random upper/lower case letters and numbers, which is why it takes 17 hours to crack.’
8 October 2012
[comics] Wisdom Of The Ancients‘Who were you, DenverCoder9? – WHAT DID YOU SEE?!’

XKCD Cartoon

24 September 2012
[funny] The 13 most enjoyably passive-aggressive WiFi networks in the short history of WiFi

Amusing WiFi Network Names

10 September 2012
[phones] Auto Crrect Ths! … James Gleick on auto correct on phones / computers … ‘ In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be. Earlier this year, the police in Hall County, Ga., locked down the West Hall schools for two hours after someone received a text message saying, “gunman be at west hall today.” The texter had typed “gunna,” but Autocorrect had a better idea.’ [via YMFY]
7 August 2012
[security] How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking … a sobering look at how one man’s digital life – Google Account, Apple Account – was compromised and his iPhone and Mac were remotely wiped … ‘I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to Gizmodo’s Twitter account? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.’
19 July 2012
[history] This Is the Oldest Record In History—Scanned and Recreated From a Photo … a remarkable story about how the worlds oldest recording was been recovered from a picture of the record … ‘[Patrick] Fester is an expert on resuscitating records from photographs. He scanned that image at a very high resolution. Then, using image processing software, he enhanced the resulting image. After obtaining the sound profile hidden in the shadows of the print, he used software to recreate the actual sound. What he heard left him speechless: it was the voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner…’
11 July 2012
[art] Disassembly … a fascinating pictures series of disassembled old machines with their parts laid out in a forensic fashion ..

Flip Down Clock Disassembled

5 July 2012
[books] Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books? … another of those article on the death of the book / E-books / and what happens to your books after you die … ‘…the question of what to do with books that outlive their owners has only been a common problem since the mid-19th century, when the steam-powered press and the advent of cheap paper caused a vast expansion of the book market. Before that, few families would have had the problem of a surfeit of books. Now, though, we may be reaching the end of the 150-year-old print boom, and with it a transformation in the way we have shared books, reader after reader and life after life.’
13 June 2012
[tech] In Memoriam: Our Favorite Apps and Services That Have Gone Belly Up (and Their Replacements) … useful list from Lifehacker … ‘Delicious (Web): 2003-2011 – The history: Delicious is a web-based social bookmarking app that is technically still around, but it isn’t really the same site it used to be. Many users have jumped ship entirely to other similar services instead. What’s taken its place: We rounded up our favorite Delicious alternatives back when it was headed for death, and Pinboard is still our top choice.’
22 May 2012
[gmail] Gmvault … great little cross-platform backup solution for Gmail which dumps your email in flat files to a local disk.
26 January 2012
[tech] The Wirecutter | A List of the Best Gadgets .. if you’re thinking of buying some technology this would be a great place to visit before making the decision.
23 January 2012
[funny] In Which I Fix My Girlfriend’s Grandparents’ WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero‘The people did beseech the warrior to aid them. They were a simple people, capable only of rewarding him with gratitude and a larger-than-normal serving of Jell-O salad. The warrior considered the possible battles before him. While others may have shirked the duties, forcing the good people of Ferndale Street to prostrate themselves before the tyrants of Comcast, Linksys, and Geek Squad, the warrior could not chill his heart to these depths. He accepted the quest and strode bravely across the beige shag carpet of the living room…’
9 January 2012
[tech] Computers in space … a look at the supposedly antique technology used in space missions … ‘The ISS is packed with processors to keep its crew happy, or at least alive, but at the core of its operational hardware are the Command and Control Computers. They’re 80386SX-20s. But they’ve got 80387 co-processors! A couple even have hard drives!’