Cool stuff I found on the web
2025-01-03
More accurately, using a 70s typewriter as a terminal for a remote Linux machine; an impressive modification/upgrade to an electromechanical masterpiece; the intricate mechanisms that make up the typewriter remind me of the fact that any ten-cent chip manufactured today is an order of magnitude more detailed, but we don’t appreciate it because the mechanisms are hidden from our senses
The parable of Sam’s mum
Black Hole’s Evil Twin — Gravastars Explained 📺
Black holes were once the mere predictions of theory, but they turned out to be real; by the time I learned about them, they were already simply a part of nature; gravastars now occupy that same “maybe” and are somehow even more wild and mysterious
Complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir 📖
The earliest one-star review in human history
Trends in CO2 — NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory 📚
Uninterpreted historical data; the dark side of “line go up”; notably, it seems obvious from the data that all efforts to slow this trend have failed
Could have used this when I ran my own mail server; I feel sorry for the engineers who need this tool today
Cynthion 🔧
USB MITM with programmable everything; on my list for sure
Ventoy 🔧
Multiple bootable ISOs on one USB drive; simple to set up and “just works”
Not a blog post, but an entire blog containing high-quality photographs of integrated circuits; this is the superhuman intricacy I was talking about above
Nearly-live map of ionosonde data giving a good overview of propagation conditions; I use this almost every time I turn on the radio if I’m planning to use 10 m
Crowd-sourced database of what modes and activity to expect across the HF bands; not perfect but often useful
The idea that there is a set of behaviors that is common to all people everywhere; I like this idea because it makes me feel more connected to the species and gives me hope that there are some things that all people can agree on; there is controversy about the existence of this idea in practice and the exact members of the universal set
A trip through the scales of the universe as they were understood in 1977; later parodied and updated
Archive of old QST issues; the earliest issues are especially fun to look through for the historical context surrounding the invention of practical radio technology
Cow Tools 🖌️
Listen, sometimes artists just make things that don’t make sense
Battleships 🖌️
A game that occupies the bowsprit of my mind, leaving the mid and aft sections free to do more important work, like listening to a podcast
nougat
💻
Converts papers to Markdown; I’ve used this in an ad-hoc pipeline to summarize papers and learn more about them
Hyperlink Hijacking: Exploiting Erroneous URL Links to Phantom Domains 📃
We already know that it’s bad when Eve sends Alice a link that looks real but isn’t; this paper suggests a different scenario, where Bob accidentally publishes an incorrect link in an official place; Eve notices and sets up a phishing domain there, so when Alice clicks on it she gets owned; apparently this is not merely a theoretical concern
Machine-readable encoding of basic identifying characteristics, interests, and opinions that were relevant to geek culture in the 1990s; recently got an email from someone who included their output in the signature; maybe someone should revive this idea, although it would certainly need to be updated and expanded to be viable; maybe language models can have a conversation with someone and spit out a small vector that captures something about them; the time for this idea may simply have passed; you can generate your own here
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 📚
I’ve had some mild amusement just clicking the “random” link and pondering the words that appear; philosophy has troubled me in the past because I often start with “this question is trivial and irrelevant”, followed by “well, the answer is obvious”, and finally “oh shut up”
Make Your Electronics Tamper-Evident 📖
Low-tech methods for detecting when someone has messed with your stuff; the bicolor beans method is my favorite