Category Archives: Random Nonsense

Sometimes I just feel compelled to share nonsense, random thoughts, and sometimes just stuff I want to save

Back on the wagon

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Back on the wagon

Back on the wagon

FitDay.com is essentially a food diary site that lets you look up or enter the nutritional content for the food you eat, set goals, and track your progress.1 A very long time ago I lost probably about 25 pounds by using the site.  A friend lost about 80 using the same site!

Well, I started using FitDay.com again, at the time I’m writing this post2 it’s been 37 days.  To put this in perspective, in January of 2012 I was able to consistently use the site for three whole days.  Prior to that, I used the site for 35 mostly consecutive days.  In any case, 37 consecutive days is a pretty good record for me.

As before, my diet consists of trying to not eat like a pig and keep my caloric intake to no more than 2000.  While most days I stay below that number, there was a day in there where I just CRUSHED it.  In the past I’ve basically completely abandoned the site after having fallen off the wagon.  This time, I gave myself permission to go ahead and kick the crap out of my daily limit – as long as I still documented what I ate and kept at it the following day.  Several weeks after the fact, even with a mini-vacation in the interim, I’m still logging my diet.

In my experience, a food diary not only helps not only with monitoring caloric intake, but also helps me be more mindful of my choices of food.  Since I’m more aware of what and how much I’m eating, I find I choose things that are better for me.

***

I started writing this post back in February.  At the time I’m hitting publish on 4/18/2013, I’ve logged everything I’ve eaten into my Fitday.com account for 100 days in a row.  In this time I’ve lost 20 pounds – but more on this in a little bit.

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  1. Photo courtesy of Dave Wilson [↩]
  2. You never know how long it takes to actually click Publish [↩]

Perpetuating Password Myths

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Brute force cracking

Brute force cracking

Today at work I got an e-mail from the IT department saying everyone needs to set new, stronger, passwords.1 They suggested several things, like:

  • “tomandjerry” is not as strong a password as “$H2mlf”
  • “Fishing123” is not as strong as “Fish123ing”

Assuming a black hat hacker is really determined to crack your password, they’re probably going to attack it like they mean it.  Let’s assume there’s no defect in your system that allows a cracker to get in without actually entering the correct password.  They might try a dictionary attack first, followed by a database of common passwords, but after that they’re left with brute force.

Here’s the most amusing part.  Assuming none of the four “passwords” above are in any dictionary or a database of common passwords.  Let’s rank the passwords, 1 being the strongest and 4 being the weakest.

  1. “tomandjerry” is strongest, with 11 characters
  2. Fishing123″ is tied exactly with “Fish123ing”, with 10 characters each
  3. “$H2mlf” is weakest, with only 6 characters

The only things that really matter in passwords are that you’re not using (a) a dictionary word or a common password and (b) the length of  your password.2

In any case, it’s concerning when information technology professionals don’t understand fundamentals of password security or how a malicious attacker would attempt to compromise a system.

  1. Photo courtesy of akashgoyal [↩]
  2. If you’re using a multi-word password, it is possible an attacker knowing this could use a system that combines words – but this doesn’t really save them a lot of time – we’re talking about numbers with 20-30 zeros in them [↩]

That’s not junk!!!

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... it's ART!

… it’s ART!

A few days ago I found a DYMO LabelWriter 400 Turbo had been tossed into a cardboard box with used toner cartridges and broken printer parts.1 After making sure this really was a box of lost things, I swiped the label printer along with its power cord.

Tiny little printers such as this kind of label writer never use inkjet cartridges or require laser cartridges.  They print using heat – like receipt printers.  The catch, since they can’t get you with inkjet/toner cartridges, is that the labels are stickers with specially treated heat sensitive non-sticky sides.

Ideally, I would love to feed this little printer some cheap receipt paper and run it as a small, cheap, USB tethered printer.  I already have an Adafruit IoT printer, which I love dearly – but it would be awesome to have one that my daughter could use.  Apparently this has already been done more than once.

After loading up the newest drivers for the printer and trying out the newest software for it, I couldn’t get my laptop running Win 7 to recognize the printer.  I’m looking forward to tinkering with this.  :)

  1. Photo courtesy of Tinkerbots [↩]

Dogs and cats living together!

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Real wrath of God type stuff

Real wrath of God type stuff

I’m basically through with CD’s.  I don’t even want the ones I have.  I would much rather just have the MP3’s since they’re just so much easier to organize and play.  This has been the case for a while now – the last time I bought a physical CD was four years ago.  The CD before that was eight years ago.

I was looking at buying an album off of Amazon the other day only to discover it was $3 cheaper for me to buy the physical CD, which comes with an MP3 “autorip” copy in my Amazon account, than to just buy the MP3 album in the first place.  Three dollars isn’t enough to make a tremendous difference in my lifestyle, but at the same time, that’s 1/3 the cost of the CD + MP3 album.  I can’t imagine why I would want to pay $3 more for the MP3 album when I could save $3, get the CD and MP3 album, and give or throw away the CD.

Interestingly, now that the United States Supreme Court has upheld the “First Sale Doctrine,” at least in relation to international textbook sales, I wonder if I’m perfectly justified in buying the CD+MP3 for $9 and selling off the CD for a modest amount.  (Are there still used CD buying places?!?)  After all, it’s not as if I’m making unauthorized digital copies, I’m just selling the physical CD and keeping the digital copies I purchased… right?

Random Gripes of The Day

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Feeling stuffed?

Feeling stuffed?

I was annoyed by two things today and I have decided to share them with you. ((Photo courtesy of Göran Arvidson)) It’s more about the sharing than actually imparting information, but these are two things I feel kinda strongly about.  The day is young yet, so I reserve the right to add more things to this list.  :)

  1. I was going through my PayPal transactions for the last year and I discovered that providing a full and immediate refund costs me $0.30.  That’s pretty lame.  When they perform the refund, they get their money back.  All they’re out is a few zeros and ones.  And, frankly, it’s enough that I think my next few projects will be Stripe based rather than PayPal based.  PayPal’s API is a pain, I’m convinced requiring PayPal over a credit card (via Stripe) for transaction probably costs me conversions ((Oh, I could go on and on about PayPal versus Stripe and the posts about the relative benefits and conversions)) , and their policies are worse. 
  2. Online forms that require multiple steps across multiple submission pages.  The first thing this kind of UI tells me is that the people who wrote the page wanted something done quickly and easily (for them) and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about usability.  Because I have a tendency to overthink things, I sometimes go back and revise an earlier step depending upon what I see in a later step.  When I see an online form that requires multiple steps I will typically feed it bogus information first so I can see the rest of the steps.

Um.  That’s all I’ve got to grumble about today.

Actually, in hindsight, if those are my biggest problems of the day, I’m doing pretty well!

SaaS: the good, the bad, the ugly

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Which one was Blondie, anyhow?

Which one was Blondie, anyhow?

I’ve extolled the virtues and pitfalls of running a software as a service business. ((Photo courtesy of Rufus Gefangenen)) This morning I discovered a glitch in my SaaS website that, while it doesn’t cause anything to actually malfunction, creates a very obnoxious problem on a lot of the pages.  The site is written in WordPress1 and the entire SaaS component of the site is built out of plugins.23 Basically, one of the plugins creates a form that is used in one of the pages.  The malfunction is that the form is now included on every page.  Ugh.  This is going to be a really fun bughunt because even when I disabled every single plugin, the problem persisted.  Apparently the glitch started appearing about  a month ago – when I last updated WordPress.

Now, I’ve been meaning to just rewrite the plugin from scratch – but I’m also keenly aware of the pitfalls.  My biggest incentive to rewrite the code is so that it is more future-proof.  Another reason to do it is that the original code was written in such a cludgy manner I’m literally ashamed to tell you how it is implemented.  Let’s just say that I originally wrote the core of the plugin after having learned the basics of PHP programming only a few months prior.45 About nine months later, I shoehorned the same code into a WordPress plugin – when I had only been using WordPress for about two months and knew almost nothing about plugins.  Now, more than five-and-a-half years from the day  I launched the site, I do feel I’m a much more capable PHP programmer and WordPress plugin writer.  Confident in my abilities to do a better job and facing the task of having to go through a potentially big bughunt anyhow, some part of me wonders if it wouldn’t be best to just rewrite the damn thing anyhow.

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  1. My first open source love [↩]
  2. Such as the awesome Simple Series plugin, OCD plugin stats plugin, and EZ Creative Commons license plugin! [↩]
  3. How’s that for a plug about plugins? [↩]
  4. Look… it works, okay. [↩]
  5. Mostly works. [↩]

Best Super BoWl Day Ever

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Capslock is NOT persuasive

Capslock is NOT persuasive

ToDAY i’ve tinkerED with my DigiSpark From dIGIsTUMP and run it throUGH A few little programs.1 My experienCE with arDuinos is acTUALLY quite limited.  SincE i’M faMILIar with c-style proGRAMMIng languages, I can teLl what an ARDUINO sketch is Doing if i spend enough time staring at the COde.  I staRted off with “Blink,” then cHAnged it tO blink fASTEr, then FOUnd some COde for FLIppING CapsloCK on and off.2

WhAT i like about the dIGIspARK IS that IT IS so small I can keep IT IN THE coffee Table drawer nearesT MY Laptop to tiNKER with WHenever I THINK OF something to TRY.  TherE ARE SOMe interesting littLE FEATURes to the DiGISpark from the arduino i’LL cover IN another posT THAT doesn’t look liKE it was typeD BY A chimp.

The MOST FUnctional pARTS of TODAY have BEEN devoted to PLAYing, MAKING tangram dESIGNS, bloggiNG ABOUt robot pART design, fiddling with a tiny miCROcontROLLER, and, of course, A NAP.  HOW Did you spenD Your super bowl sunday?

  1. Photo courtesy of Adam Fagen [↩]
  2. SEE! [↩]

A watched DigiSpark never boils

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Itty bitty microcontroller

Itty bitty microcontroller

I’ve been refreshing my DigiSpark Kickstarter backer/order page for days now watching my spot in the queue go from #3800 to just now under #200. ((Photo courtesy of Clarence Risher))

Since I have such limited experience with Arduinos, I am hoping that this project is a good place to start.  To date my experience with Arduinos had to do with the minor modifications/updates with the Arduino powered motherboard and extruder board for the Cupcake CNC and my DrawBot.

One of the benefits of the DigiSpark that interested me the most was it’s extremely small form factor.  It’s so tiny that I can pop it into a USB port and try out a small Arduino sketch1 without tangling with a USB cable.  And, when not in use I can drop the whole thing into the coffee table drawer.  An Arduino plus USB cable, while still small, are just a little too bulky to toss into the same drawer.  ((Mostly because of all of the other little projects I already have tossed in the same drawer!))

  1. Blink, you say? [↩]

Oh the places you’ll go!

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Something like six months ago I checked in on the Piccolo by Diatom and watched the cute little video that goes along with it.  That video led me to the video for their Antler lasercut chair featured above which, in turn, lead me to the album for Wet Wings and their song Keep It Together.

I mention this only because a new tiny CNC on Thingiverse reminded me of the Piccolo, which lead me back to the video for their Antler lasercut chair and to the song all over again, and it is a song I happen to like a lot.

Maze Code + Polargraph?

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My RSS feed for Slashdot brought my attention to an article on Slate.  The Slashdot summary stated:

This Slate article talks about a single line of code — 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 — and how it manages to create a complicated maze without the use of a loop, variables and without very complicated syntax.

Even though that “one line” of code really is two lines and it really does use a loop, that short string of code is still very interesting.  While the way the code generates a maze isn’t immediately intuitive, it becomes obvious once you watch a bit of the video above.  All that code does is randomly kick out a forward slash or backward slash.  Once they wrap around to the next line, they start to form what looks like a maze.

As a little exercise I created something similar using PHP.  To make that work I had to use a fair bit of CSS to make it look decent.  In any case, it occurred to me that this would be a wonderful project for a Polargraph! Draw a random forward slash or backslash, get to the end of the line and make a bunch more on the return line.  How awesome would a huge paper roll of nothing but a giant maze look?

I think I may have found a project cool enough to show off at Maker Faire.  :)

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