Category Archives: General

The Other Side

Posted on 2013-07-15 by jcs

In my The Good Guys and Bad post, I had harsh words for Microsoft’s collaboration with the NSA and FBI. I still find their actions over the top and inexcusable but there is another side to the story. Declan McCullagh … Continue reading →

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Last Chance

Posted on 2013-07-14 by jcs

By way of a public service announcement, Google will be deleting all Google Reader information tomorrow. This is your last chance to get your subscription (and other) data out of the system. It’s easy to do so. Just go to … Continue reading →

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GPG Tutorial

Posted on 2013-07-14 by jcs

If you aren’t already using GPG (or one of its OpenPGP brethren) you should start. Happily, Alan Eliasen has a nice tutorial on how to set up and use GPG. The tutorial covers everything you need to use GPG in … Continue reading →

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A Beginning Emacs Tutorial

Posted on 2013-07-13 by jcs

Jekor (aka Chris Forno) has an excellent beginning Emacs video up on YouTube. It’s the first in a planned series so it just covers the very basics. The video has great production values. Jekor highlights items he’s discussing so it’s … Continue reading →

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The Good Guys and Bad

Posted on 2013-07-12 by jcs

There’s a tiny ISP in Utah, USA. It has a sole proprietor and very limited resources. Still, it does what few others are willing or able to do. For the last 15 years, Xmission has refused to honor any request … Continue reading →

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AT&T: All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Posted on 2013-07-11 by jcs

Editorial Note: In the aftermath of the NSA revelations, I’ve been writing more and more posts on privacy and ways to help secure it. From this post on I will use the tag “Privacy” to mark these. AT&T, my wireless … Continue reading →

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Reproducible Research Redux

Posted on 2013-07-09 by jcs

Longtime readers know that I’m a big fan of reproducible research and, specifically, the way that Emacs and Org mode help make it possible. Here’s a very nice video presentation from SciPy2013 by John Kitchin. He describes how he writes … Continue reading →

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Locate and Emacs

Posted on 2013-07-08 by jcs

Bozhidar Batsov over at the excellent Emacs Redux tells us something that I didn’t know: It’s possible to call locate from Emacs. For those of you without a Unix background, locate is a utility that will return a list of … Continue reading →

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Perfect Forward Secrecy

Posted on 2013-07-07 by jcs

If, like me, you’re unsettled by the recent government(s) snooping you are probably looking for ways to secure your on-line activities. One obvious way is to use SSL/TLS whenever possible. If you use Firefox or Chrome, HTTPS Everywhere can help. … Continue reading →

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Take Your Lockdown and …

Posted on 2013-07-06 by jcs

For those of you still mourning the demise of Google Reader there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that, as usual, Netizens have stepped in and provided alternatives. I’m using Feedly and am happy with it but … Continue reading →

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