I have two recreational programming projects active now.
The first is a deterministic password generator [1] which is designed to be easy to use and manage. I've been using it myself for a couple months and have a couple UX improvements in my head that need to be done before I'd recommend it to anyone else.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/nealtucker/whose/
The second is an infrastructure project which my brother and I are building as an opportunity for him to learn about automated infrastructure and security. Terraform starts by instantiating an automated private CA for the purpose of securely issuing certificates to all instances, and then all other instances come up with an agent that generates keys and calls the CA (along with a signed auth blob provided by the terraform run) to obtain certs. Nomad server also comes up, using the same certs, and controls all the other nodes. All communication is MTLS from the start and I'm in the process of adding ssh hostkey signing to the CA so at the same time the instances get certs, they get their hostkeys signed so we don't have to TOFU the ssh hostkeys. We have no idea what we'll do with it, but it's fun to build and teaching both of us a lot.
I love this kind of stuff. The fact that we (people in our field; not me specifically) had to and could do stuff like this must seem crazy ancient to the younger folks here. I did boot my first computer from a cassette tape, and I can still remember what it sounded like and it's so, so very nostalgic. And many of us did get our first internet access via these crazy noises as well. I'm sure I could also listen to a modem connecting and tell you what speed it had negotiated from 1200baud all the way up to 56k, since each new sound was, at one point, the pinnacle of excitement since I'd just upgraded to something new (and then I heard it thousands of times).
You will enjoy this classic.
It's a lovely image showing the dialup handshake . My first modem was a Hayes 1200 baud. Every modem after seemed to double. The protocols got better too. Bidirectional transfers, wow.
My first modem was a Hayes-brand 300 baud modem. Atari 800 computer.
So I'll kindly ask you to get off my lawn, whipper-snapper.
(BTW I listen to a lot of ambient / noise / drone music, and a while ago, some artist took those modem sounds, slowed them down, put in some reverb, etc. and it was downright ghostly).
The fun things about 300 baud was I could pick up the phone and hear the individual keystrokes being sent. I couldn't distinguish what particular character was being sent, unless of course I was the one typing.
Same here. I loaded programs from cassette tape into a Soviet clone of a Sinclair computer. Each program started with some sort of a loader block that produced a constant pitch. I would use a screwdriver to adjust the magnetic read head of the cassette player and listen for the pitch to be just right during the loader block in order to get the actual program to load correctly. Good memories.
When I first saw an ad for a "soon to be released" 9600 bps modem, I excitedly mentioned it on a local BBS, where all of the older wiser users told me it was impossible and the ad must have been a joke. 1200 baud was still relatively new at the time and error prone even with a parity bit so I could understand some of their skepticism. The central offices were still in the process of being converted over to digital and lines were still noisy at times. As the quality of the local loop improved, so did modem speeds.
Well never can afford one then. Did saw many a couple of years which use this to win 7! It finally come at end as the patch of win 10 s too large to bear. But nice to see some 56k us robotics after so many decades.
I always hated that damn modem screeching sound. I once popped off the speaker on the modem itself, because it was so annoying.
And then I recall, there was always a commercial playing on the radio, that had that sound. Maybe it was for the now dead U.S. Robotics. I can’t recall.
I could tell what speed my first modem connected at because my DEC modem had a physical switch to select between 300 and 1200 baud. It also had a physical switch between line and data: no acoustic coupler required for this baby.
I actually did write a license at one point, but I realized that the core issue here was buy-in from the rest of the hacker community. It's like trying to end slavery. Until there are enough of us willing to work an underground railroad the best strategy is evangelizing the issue and collectively coming up with something that works for all of us. I also think that there are good billionaires out there, like Bill Gates and Paul Graham, I don't want a war. I want something that the existing billionaires that are pro-social will sign onto and we need their input and ideas too.
This is a great observation about the home inspector being more likely to give you an impartial diagnosis. There's an old guy who's a semi-retired home inspector down the block from me and it makes me think I should hire him for consultation when thinking about big projects.
Definitely do it. I got easily 20X the value out of my home inspector than what I paid him. Not just here on the drainage problem but on other stuff as well. I paid him $800 in total to inspect two homes, he gave me detailed reports for each one plus all sorts of useful insights during the several hours each inspection took, and then he answered a bunch of questions via email for free after I ended up closing on the second house and discovering the various problems with it. And for consultation on just a single issue I'd expect you'd pay a bit less than $400.
The original goal of PDF was to create documents that could "view and print anywhere" (literally the original tagline of the Acrobat project), substantially the same as how the document creator intended them. What Adobe was trying to solve was the problem of sending someone a document that looked a particular way and when they rendered it on their printer or display, it looked different, e.g. having a different number of pages because subtle font differences caused word-wrapping to change the number of lines and thus the page flow. It wasn't about it being "pretty," it was about having functional differences due to local rendering and font availability. In this regard, the format is an emphatic success.
I do wish they had focused a bit more on non-visual aspects such as screen-reader data, but to say the whole point is "because it's pretty" is a bit uncharitable. The format doesn't solve the problem you wish it solved, but it does solve a problem other than making things "pretty."
> I do trust the team of 1Password to be competent and not evil, but there are many things that can go wrong anyway.
Very much this. I don't benefit in any way from having a copy of my sensitive data in their cloud, so as a very basic security principle, I don't want them to have it.
And that's just for my personal use. If they drop support for local vaults, I have to stop using it for work, too, because my employer prohibits password managers that store passwords in the cloud. My understanding is that these policies are specifically designed to keep us in compliance for government contracts, so I don't think they're changing.
I agree; and unfortunately I found self-hosted vaults to always be a bit challenging to get right, if I wanted to use my vault on multiple devices. The local-network only sync engine never worked for me, so I ended up using another third-party's servers to sync anyway. I signed up for 1password.com a couple months ago and it's been painless. To each their own!
Please tell me local support is coming. I'm a longtime 1Password user who only uses local vaults and I feel like 1Password is increasingly showing me they aren't interested in me as a customer.
