I’ve published another super-simple tool.
A la whatismyip.com, but with no extra cruft (and no queer formatting of the IP address under the hood), welcome IPv4.cf to the world with me!
Category Archives: cool
new service – free, secure password generation
Today, I am formally announcing a brand-new service / website for secure password generation.
Go visit password.cf
Get yourself random passwords of commonly-required lengths and complexities*.
Password Varieties:
- 4 of 4
- upper & lower alphanumeric
- lower alphanumeric
Lengths generated: 12, 16, & 24 characters
Visit the GitHub project page ..
.. if you want to run the site on your own server.
You can view the source “live” ..
.. if you’d like to see how it works without visiting GitHub – and verify nothing is saved anywhere by the code: it’s just a script with no filesystem / database access.
It’s fast ..
.. load times tend to be under 0.15 seconds!
It will always be linked from my Projects page, and from the ‘External’ links menu on this blog.
*Also findable at password.ga – same server, same code
above the cloud storage
Who wants to go into business with me?
I’ve got a super-cool storage company idea.
Load up a metric buttload of cubesats with radiation-hardened SSD storage, solar power, and [relatively] simple communicaton stacks (secured by SSH or SSL, of course), and launch them into orbit.
You think cloud storage is cool? What about above-the-cloud storage?
Pros:
- avoid national jurisdictional rules, since the data will never be housed “in” a specific country
- very hard to attack physically
- great reason to use IPv6 addressing
Cons:
- expensive to get the initial devices into orbit
- software maintenance on the system could be annoying
- need to continually plop more cubesats into orbit to handle both expanded data needs and loss of existing devices due to orbital degradation
Who’s with me?
haiku appliance
I have been a fan of Haiku for years – and BeOS since way back in the 90s. I run a Haiku mirror, and try to pay attention to the project’s updates.
Today I am making available a Haiku-OS r1 alpha 4.1 virtual appliance!
Download it from me here (created in VirtualBox, but in .ova format, so should work “anywhere”). Download links for current editions (for new releases of Haiku-OS) will be maintained on my Projects page.
Specs:
- 1G RAM (could’ve easily gotten away with 512M or even 256M, but given everyone should have 1G free (especially if running VirtualBox), went with this size)
- 20G storage (dynamically allocated, of course), formatted BFS (because it’s better than NTFS – and doesn’t “actually” format the disk (it does, but only kinda – it’s akin to lazy zeroing in VMware)) in VMDK format (if you care)
- 2 CPUs
- 32M video memory
- network: NAT’d
Appliance [download] size :: ~250M.
i’m a medium plogger now*
(*Though most people would call me an XXXL blogger.)
Following in the steps of Dave Winer, I am now plogging (sorta) on Medium.
And, like Mr Winer, I’m doing it via IFTTT (though not via RSS, I’m doing it via the WordPress channel).
If you’d like to do the same, use this IFTTT recipe.
subaru isn’t groveling
Subaru released a new vehicle in the Japanese market recently called the Levorg (I saw it on Samurai Wheels on NHK World). It stands for LEgacy reVOlution touRinG.
It also spells “grovel” backwards.
From the review Samurai Wheels gave it, it certainly doesn’t grovel.
But it also purports to do something relatively difficult. Subaru has introduced EyeSight in this vehicle which uses cameras to offer assistive driving (automatic braking, automatic following, etc).
The interesting thing about this (and they are cameras), is that video processing is difficult. It is far easier to use something like FLIR, LIDAR, or ultrasonic sonar or another technique than it is to use object tracking in a video stream.
Which makes me wonder if Subaru is doing pure video object tracking, or if it’s combined with something else to make it work as well as it seemed to in the review I watched recently.
show only most recent facebook news feed
(Note: I did this in Chrome – it’ll be a little different in other browsers)
I have several complaints about the book of the face – not least of which is that it likes to reset your News Feed from “Most Recent” (aka most useful) to “Top Stories” (aka whatever Facebook wants you to see).
I also like to avoid the fluff off the other columns (ads, games, groups, pages, chat, etc) when all I want is the most recent stream. So, after some searching, fiddling, and tweaking, I now have my news feed (and only my news feed) appear on the side of my screen in chronological order.
How to do what I did:
- install the Auto Refresh extension for Chrome (only if you want the news feed to automatically update)
- go to https://m.facebook.com/home.php?sk=h_chr (this is the mobile Facebook view sorted by chronological order) in a new window (not new tab)
- right-click on the tab holding the mobile Facebook feed, and select Pin Tab
- click the Auto Refresh extension button and select how often you want your feed to refresh, and click Start
- resize the window to a comfortable reading width (mine is about 15% of my screen, or about 3″)
- slide it all the way to one side of your screen or another
- enjoy
There are some other ways to accomplish more-or-less the same thing:
- bookmark the mobile news feed URL
- set the mobile news feed URL as your home page
- sign-in to your Facebook account in more than one browser (instead of having two windows in one browser), and load the mobile edition therein
Hope this helps you like it’s helped me.