If you are often in a cafe or library with shared internet, it’s best to go through a VPN so any unencrypted traffic isn’t detected by any local hackers – while there are many vpn packages, it is easy enough to make your own and connect to it with shadowsocks. This can give you good performance even on a $5/mo digitalocean server!*
Continue reading “Easy VPN with DigitalOcean and ShadowSocks”Hacktoberfest is coming up!
Hacktoberfest is coming up, online this time (well, the core of hacktoberfest always has been online collaboration…), and there are several projects I’ve worked on that welcome contributions:
- Repeater-START – a useful tool for any ham radio enthusiast looking for repeaters.
- Hearham Listener – also connects to hearham.com, this is an experimental listener to listen for audible callsigns on the ham radio.
- Anti-Auto-correct, very useful for students in these remote times!
- Tunesviewer
- iosTransferGUI – I had used this for transferring files to iDevices, on Ubuntu.
- Pylympus – for certain Olympus cameras with wifi-remote, a pure Python remote program.
There are many others and probably plugins or software you use every day that may need contributions or bug fixes, so with less than a month before the start, be thinking about what projects you might contribute to! Check out the full details at https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/events
Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!
This may be a back-to-school like no other in recent history. Kyle Rankin, chief security officer of Purism, has an interesting article about privacy as schools start online this year. While many schools use Google docs or Chromebooks, it is important to use your school account which is legally not allowed to be tracking as much.
(If you do use Google docs for education please also check out Autocorrect remover which makes writing much better for English learners!)
Continue reading “Back to School and watch out for security and your preinstalled sofware!”Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features
Once in awhile a package hangs out at an old version even after a system upgrade or two. This can cause odd things like that software portion not working like it should. In my case, an old salbabix ios PPA that was long defunct as Ubuntu 18.04 and later have no problem just plugging in updated iOS devices.
Continue reading “Removing old PPA from Ubuntu for stability and latest features”MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround
For this weekend’s hackathon I worked on a hackathon project I had thought about for awhile… an anti auto correct that should be more like natural paper and pencil, and not automatically show the answer when you click on a misspelled word (not great for learning, Google Docs!) This should be useful for learners especially during a pandemic.
Continue reading “MutationObserver as a clever javascript workaround”What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app
What3words is an interesting alternative to sharing around long latitude/longitude numbers, instead share just a few words!
The first step to integrating the api is signing up for a free API key. Then require the library using composer – in the main project folder run:
Continue reading “What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app”Google sued over Android’s tracking, revises options.
Last month we heard Google was getting sued again for collecting location data tied to user accounts. This is yet another reason it’s good to keep your Google account separate, away from your Google device if you have one. But last week Google announced that they will be changing this, auto deleting data after 18 months… but only for new Google accounts.
Continue reading “Google sued over Android’s tracking, revises options.”One more way to fight COVID-19… with your computer!
There’s a lot of computing power into finding a solution for COVID-19, and Digital Ocean just featured a new way to get involved – make your own droplet (virtual computer) to run distributed computations.
Continue reading “One more way to fight COVID-19… with your computer!”Energy of the future
Just last weekend a record high of 100 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded… within the arctic circle! While some would say this is something to panic about, that might point to the same confusion of long term climate vs short term weather confusion and pretending a cold day disproves global warming.
Continue reading “Energy of the future”Possible ABC Proof Conjecture brings Primes into Prime time news again!
Recently a possible proof of the ABC Conjecture has been in the news. Although the proof of this is hundreds of pages long and not really a fun read for most people, this reminded me of the prime spiral, “Ulam spiral” which we explored years ago at a meetup.
The interesting thing about ABC Conjecture is that no matter what examples or counterexamples you find to the inequality, it does not prove or disprove the theory as to where there are only finitely many specific triples to solve the inequality.
Ulam’s spiral is also a look into prime numbers, but from a visual perspective. Nothing to “prove” here but to see an interesting pattern within numbers. It was supposedly thought of by Stanislaw Ulam during a meeting, doodling numbers, and it was later popularized by Martin Gardner’s writings. It is a great way to have some fun learning how to use Matplotlib to draw up some interesting charts, too:
Continue reading “Possible ABC Proof Conjecture brings Primes into Prime time news again!”