Category: Tech

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I’ve been making more of an effort to post here this year, though it’s been a long time since the site had many regular readers. I’d like to do more long-form writing, but that’s just not in the cards these days.

Some highlights:

Century Blvd - railroad bridge remainsLos Angeles/California: I’ve been following the demolition of a bridge near LAX to make way for a future Metro station, wrote a series of thoughts on the California drought, and looked at a slowly emptying mall in Anaheim.

Lunar eclipse mosaicScience: I caught two eclipses this year: a total lunar eclipse with the family, and a partial solar eclipse near the office. Katie did her own controlled experiment on wireless signals and seeds following up on some of the questions that should have been asked in that school experiment that went viral back in spring.

Katie as Alice (OUATIW) cosplayEntertainment: I’ve been reviewing Les Miserables adaptations, including two movies, a comic book, a live parody and a children’s book. I also finally saw productions of Ragtime and Into the Woods. (Good ones, fortunately.) Comic-Con (San Diego), WonderCon, and Long Beach Comic Con of course, including Katie’s awesome Alice (Once Upon a Time in Wonderland) cosplay at SDCC. And then there was 5 things to do with a smart watch at Comic-Con (#1 is to wear it with a Dick Tracy costume).

Troubleshooting is what brings people in the most. Finding the missing Windows 8.1 update was the most popular post of the year, though it’s 15th on the list behind older posts, most of which are also tech tips. It seems wireless networking on Linux is still more challenging than it ought to be.

22 Egress 1/2 MileMostly I’ve been trying to continue the occasional series that have been here for so long: funny signs, interesting/odd photos & observations, comic conventions (though less of that these days). Admittedly that means there’s a lot of overlap with my Instagram and Flickr streams (even more now that my phone is good enough to be my most often-used camera), but I try to add description and context when I post here. On that note, an old photo of a long-gone freeway “Egress” sign got some surprise attention from Reddit at one point.

Rainbow over El Segundo Giant's Chess Set Restroom for ME 9 Cent Only Stores Exploring the Creek Sunset Palm Tree Female Magneto at WonderCon Use Vertical Transportation

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Here’s a fascinating look back at the spam wars by former Gmail spamfighter Mike Hearn.

I was involved for most of the previous decade as (among other things) the email admin for a small ISP. We used a mix of public blacklists, a private blacklist, virus filtering, SpamAssassin with both shared rules and local custom rules, and various other tools all tied together, some at the Sendmail level and the rest through MIMEDefang. It worked tolerably well, though of course it wasn’t perfect. I find it amusing that Gmail declared victory on spam in 2010, the same year that I changed jobs to a position that was more software developer and less sysadmin.

Privacy is a growing concern these days, so he also talks about the impact that widespread end-to-end email encryption would have on spam fighting. If you’re the mail handler, you can’t filter on, say, links found in the message, or characteristics of the writing or formatting, or anything else in the content. You can’t even run statistical analysis on all known spam and non-spam to see which the new message fits better. All you can do is look at where it came from and where it’s going.

Moving the spam filter to the client lets you do content filtering on your own mail, but you can’t take advantage of the larger volume of data that an ISP can, which means your filtering isn’t going to be as effective. And if your main email client is your phone, that’s really going to slow it down — and chew up battery.

Encrypting more of our communication is probably the way to go, but we’ll have to come up with new approaches to some previously-solved problems like this.

It got me thinking: Most of us not only accept that our email providers will look inside our mail to filter spam and viruses, we expect it. That’s weird. The idea of the post office looking inside our letters is so abhorrent that even tracking programs raise concerns. The idea of an actual person reading our email in transit creeps us out. Many people have problems with the idea of automated systems (like Gmail) reading our email for purposes of targeted advertising. But spam filtering? We get upset if it’s not happening!

That says something interesting about our priorities, and about how big an impact unfiltered spam has on our email.

Via ma.tt.

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In cleaning up dead links, I stumbled on an old post about linkrot in which I wondered “how much of what exists today will still be around – in any form – ten years from now.”

Well, it’s been ten years. That post had seven external links. Four of those are no longer active, though I was able to find three of them on archive.org. (The fourth was a link to a search result set on AltaVista. Yes, AltaVista.)

That’s right: More than half of the links on an article about linkrot have rotted away. Appropriate, that. And a reminder to always provide some context when linking out to something that you can’t personally ensure will stay online.

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I literally found out yesterday about today’s partial solar eclipse. Unlike the last one visible from Southern California in 2012, which was conveniently on a weekend, this ended up being right in the middle of the work day. Add in a lot of other stuff going on, and I didn’t have time to do anything like go out to a prime viewing spot or make a giant pinhole camera.

My original plan was to take a late lunch, see what I could see, then try to head back outside at the point of greatest eclipse. I sat on a bench in the courtyard, surrounded by trees, checking a tiny pinhole camera I’d made from a tea box at the last minute and also looking for a good spot with images projected through the tree leaves.

After about half an hour I started to wonder why I wasn’t seeing any signs of eclipse, and looked up the times again. Apparently the calculator I used didn’t account for daylight saving time. The good thing about that: I was early, not late. The bad thing: Greatest eclipse was actually going to be during/shortly after a production switchover at work that I needed to be on hand for.

So I headed back outside around 2:50 to look at the clusters of eclipsed suns projected by the leaves in the shady courtyard.

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Fifth generation iPodAs I moved our iTunes library last week, I worried that the new system might not be able to sync with the old iPod, but relaxed when I saw that Apple still sold the click-wheel iPod Classic. They discontinued it a few days later, but fortunately we were able to sync the old devices.

Why do I prefer the older iPods with physical buttons and tiny screens?

Because I listen to music in the car, and a touch screen is a terrible interface for quick actions while driving.

While touch screens are better for menus, searches, finding albums, playlists, artists, and just about anything else, they’re actually dangerous for driving. A physical control of some sort is best for any action you might have to take while behind the wheel of a moving car.

Pause/Play, Skip and Volume. Those are the key things you want to be able to do with music without thinking too much about where you’re reaching, or taking your eyes off the road. (Especially if you have a mix of quiet and loud songs.) Volume’s on the dashboard, but it’s so much easier — and safer — to hit an actual button for pause/play or skip than to jab at the touch screen until you get it right.