Author's posts
Aug 07
Switching my Mastodon account
As we discussed previously, the idea of Federated media is that there is no central server with all accounts. Instead, there are various instances, and you choose one. In my case, I get sent an invite from my late lamented friend Craig Maloney to join on the server he was on. But I got a …
Mar 04
The New Audacity and Batch Processing Macros
Audacity is the wonderful open-source audio-processing program that I use every day. I use it for a couple of reasons. First, I use Audacity to record and prepare my own podcast shows, which are mostly for Hacker Public Radio. I seem to have done over 200 shows for them, and I am still actively recording …
Nov 01
Why I Gave Away a 3-D Printer
Ken Fallon posted a request on the Hacker Public Radio mailing list for shows about 3-D printers, and I innocently replied that I couldn’t help since I gave mine away. This of course led to Ken saying he would love to have a show about why a hacker-type person would give away a perfectly good …
Sep 29
Android Malware Alert
A report was just released regarding malware that targets Android, called Joker. This malware has been around since 2016, but it continues to be one of the major threats to Android devices. It can steal SMS messages, Contact lists, and device information. It can also sign up users for pricey subscription services such as Wireless …
Sep 26
Hacked?
On Thursday evening, as I was having my dinner, my wife came in to tell me that my Facebook account was hacked and I should change my password. The evidence for this was that some other people that I was already friends with were getting friend requests that appeared to come from me. Now I …
Aug 09
The LastPass Security Dashboard
I just got an e-mail from LastPass regarding a new feature that I wanted to share. It is called the Security Dashboard, and it offers a couple of useful features. As I have mentioned previously, I am a big believer in using a password manager, whether that be 1Password, Dashlane, LastPass, Keepass, or whatever. I …
Jun 14
Penguicon 2019 Report
This is the latest in my annual recollection of my experience of Penguicon. As always, I have to emphasize that this represents just my own experience of a massive event. We have 1,466 people attending, and over 400 different sessions, each of which lasted at least one hour. I only could attend a handful of …
May 28
Penguicon 2018 Report
Friday, May 4, 2018 As I usually do, I went to work on Friday, then grabbed dinner before heading over to Penguicon. This year was going to be different because I was not responsible for running anything other than my two talks. Last year, after 4 years of running the Tech Track, I stepped down …
Oct 06
Ohio LinuxFest 2017
I made the trek to Columbus yet again for my annual visit to Ohio LinuxFest, and once again I was impressed by a good event. I took the afternoon off from work to drive down from Michigan (about a 3 hour drive) and made sure to get there on time for the opening Keynote, which …
May 12
Penguicon 2017 Report
As always, this is my report on the things I did at Penguicon over the weekend of April 28-30, 2017. Penguicon is a huge event, with probably 500 hours of programming over all of the tracks, so joining in even a fraction of the possible activities is about the best you can do. This was …