Manning Publishers has a liveBook offering.

And it allows for the type of mini transactions (through their self-hosted “token” system) that I proposed when writing about how I’d dumped Pi-hole last year.

Quoting from their recent announcement email

Book publishers follow a simple rule: put your content behind a solid paywall. At Manning, we believe you should be able to see before you buy. liveBook search and Manning Tokens make the paywall porous. Our new new timed unlock feature moves the whole wall further back!

That’s pretty dang cool, Manning.

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!

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}}

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?

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.

^{_{(*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 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.