A Hyper Key on Any USB Keyboard

Posted on 2016-04-18 by jcs

Grant Rettke over at Wisdom and Wonder has a useful post on how to get a 【Hyper】 key on any USB keyboard. As Rettke says, the 【Hyper】 key is the last modifier that’s available almost exclusively for users.

My Emacs life has been much better since I implemented a binding for 【Hyper】 on my Macs. To do that, I use the 【fn】 key that’s on all (the modern, at least) Mac keyboards. I learned how to do that from Magnar Sveen and wrote about it a few years ago. Rettke is also using a Mac but his solution is more general because it doesn’t depend on having a 【fn】 key. In particular, if you’re on a Linux or Windows machine, Rettke’s solution will work for you although you’ll need to change the binding for hyper to whatever is appropriate for your architecture.

If you’re an Emacs user and don’t already have some key mapped to【Hyper】 you should head on over to Rettke’s site and learn how to do it. Believe me, it will make your life better. And, you’ll get to see Wisdom and Wonder’s nifty new theme.

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The Demise of Midrange Computers

Posted on 2016-04-17 by jcs

Eric Raymond (ESR) has an interesting post on the death of midrange computers. Some time ago he predicted that in the future we would all carry around smartphone-derived computers in our pockets and plug them into stationary keyboard/screen/pointer devices that can’t be miniaturized because their size is scaled to their human users. Now, he says, we have reached a midpoint in that journey.

Specifically, stationary computers—basically computers that aren’t laptops—are evolving into two subspecies: large, powerful systems for specialized work such as big data manipulation or animation or video processing and small, fanless, low powered systems that perform duties such as mail servers, firewalls, and DNS servers.

The small systems are a win because they’re quiet and don’t draw much power. They’re perfect for the types of small networks that many of us maintain at home. I used to hand build tower PCs to handle the mail/firewall/DNS chores but sometimes it felt like I was in the middle of a wind storm when I sat in my office. Having small quiet machines do these chores mean you can work in relative silence. I’ll definitely be looking into following ESR’s lead in moving to these small, quiet systems.

If you have a story to share about using such systems or if you have some recommendations on particular systems, leave a comment. I’m sure all of us would be interested.

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Fingerprint Sensors Really Do Improve Security

Posted on 2016-04-16 by jcs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a ProgrammableWeb article positing that biometric sensors decrease security. I made the case that unless you were a criminal with incriminating information on your phone, that was incorrect. I went on to speculate that it was most likely that the fingerprint sensors actually increased security because people who couldn’t be bothered to enter a 4-digit code to unlock their phones might find the the fingerprint sensor convenient enough to secure their phones.

That turns out to be true, at least for iPhones. The The Verge reports that Apple says that before TouchID about 50% of iPhone users locked their devices. After TouchID, that rose to nearly 90%. Actually, the whole article is interesting and worth a read if you have any interest in iPhone security.

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Why You Should Never Listen to the Media About Security

Posted on 2016-04-15 by jcs

Irreal, as you probably know, how a dim view of the effectiveness, among other things, of the media. This is particularly true of the technical press, of course, but also holds for the more main stream traditional press.

Case in point: you would think that if one were going to write about security they would actually know something about it. Yet here’s the The New York Post decrying the sale of NYC “1620” keys by some rogue locksmiths and the implications this has for security and terrorism and God knows what else. The problem is that along with the article they published a large picture of the key. Now everyone can have one even without paying the $15.50 the locksmiths were asking.

None of this is news. Remember when the TSA allowed The Washington Post to publish pictures of their luggage master keys and the widespread ridicule of many in the press? You’d think that someone at the Post—a large and sophisticated paper—would have heard about that. Apparently not. And why didn’t the reporter who was, after all, writing about security know this? No one expects reporters to be able to explain, say, the intricacies of RSA encryption but they should know by now that if you publish a picture of a key it’s trivial to make a copy.

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Some Comment-DWIM Tricks

Posted on 2016-04-14 by jcs

Raimon Grau over at puntoblogspot has a really useful quick tip on a couple of comment-dwim features that I didn’t know about. He shows how to

  1. Comment out a blank line.
  2. Remove an inline comment.

If you use comment-dwim (bound to 【Meta+;】), and you should, you should head over to puntoblogspot and take a look. It will take you less than a minute to read it but might save you some time and effort down the line.

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Debugging

Posted on 2016-04-13 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis.

So true. I remember debugging a problem that disappeared as soon as I put a printf in the code to see what was happening.

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An Example of Why Reproducible Research Matters

Posted on 2016-04-12 by jcs

Dennis Ogbe, whom I’ve written about before, has a nice example of why reproducible research matters. If you’ve read those previous posts you know that Ogbe is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering at Purdue. As such he reads papers in his field both for research and for his classes. One such paper had a sign error (possibly a typo) in the derivation of a set of equations used to process the data in the paper.

In a sense, this was small potatoes but Ogbe was trying to learn from the paper and tried to reproduce the simulation described in it. His results were wrong and he couldn’t understand why. It was only after checking the derivation by hand that he discovered the error and was able to reproduce the paper’s numerical results.

You can read Ogbe’s post for the details but none of this would have been necessary if the paper had included the actual code used to produce the results. Furthermore, if the paper had included that code it is more likely that the author would have discovered the error and corrected it before publication.

In a nice coda to the post, Ogbe demonstrates reproducible research in action by showing how the code used to build his table of results was included and executed in the post itself. Emacs and Org mode make that easy, of course, which is why the combination is so useful for publishing research in a reproducible manner.

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Using Org Mode Displays for Presentations

Posted on 2016-04-11 by jcs

If you’ve watched any of Howard Abrams’ excellent videos, you may have wondered, as others have, how he gets the nice effects when he displays Org buffers. Wonder no more. Abrams has posted an explanation of how he gets those effects. At the bottom of the post is an example of what the resulting display looks like.

He covers four improvements:

  • Hiding emphasis markers
    Instead of seeing /this is italics/, for example, you just see this is italics.
  • Better bullets
    In lists like this one, Org usually just uses ASCII characters for bullets. Abrams shows how to replace that with the more appropriate • character.
  • Better header bullets
    This change replaces the series of stars that mark headers with bullets of various sorts. This optimization requires the org-bullets package.
  • Better headers
    In this tip, Abrams shows how to have different sizes for the various levels of headers.

Of course, when you export an Org buffer most of these changes happen automatically so they’re mostly useful if you are using screen captures in a video or just want to have nicer looking Org buffers.

UPDATE [2016-04-12 Tue 13:08]: Karl Voit points to another excellent resource along the same lines.

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A Reminder from Kontra

Posted on 2016-04-10 by jcs

Enough is enough, California.

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75 Free Privacy Tools

Posted on 2016-04-10 by jcs

Richard Patterson wrote to me about my article on privacy tools and suggested I take a look at his offering, 75+ free tools to protect your privacy online. As Patterson says, you won’t need all these tools but you should probably have one from each category. All of the offerings are free (as in beer) so there’s little cost in trying them out. I use several of the tools and have been very happen with them.

If you want people to stay out of your business and leave your data alone, it’s worth taking a look at the list to see if there’s anything there that can help. Each application has a short description and a link to help you decide which ones will work for you.

The application categories on the page are

  • VPNs and Proxies
  • Antivirus
  • Backup and Storage
  • File Encryption
  • Disk Encryption
  • Secure Messaging
  • Password Managers
  • Mail Encryption
  • Ad Blockers
  • Anonymizers
  • Search Engines
  • Disk Wiping
  • Intrusion Detection
  • Windows 10 anti-spying
  • Fake/burner Email
  • Social Media Privacy
  • Mobile Apps
  • Other Browser Extensions
  • DNS
  • Other Desktop Tools

As you can see, the categories cover most privacy/security areas that concern those of us trying to keep the nosy parkers at bay. Definitely worth taking a look at.

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