I scratched an itch of mine this week and wanted to share the results with you, in case you happen to be one of the few dozen other people on Earth who will cry “finally!” to discover
that this is now a thing.
In the top right corner of this email, you can see that it was sent with end-to-end encryption from another ProtonMail user.
I’ve used ProtonMail as my primary personal email provider for about four years, and I love it. Seamless PGP/GPG for proper end-to-end encryption, privacy as standard, etc. At first, I used their web and mobile app interfaces but over time
I’ve come to rediscover my love affair with “proper” email clients, and I’ve been mostly using Thunderbird for my desktop mail. It’s been
great: lightning-fast search, offline capabilities, and thanks to IMAP (provided by ProtonMail Bridge) my mail’s still just as accessible when I fall-back on the web or mobile clients because I’m out and about.
But the one thing this set-up lacked was the ability to easily see which emails had been delivered encrypted versus those which had merely been delivered “in the clear” (like
most emails) and then encrypted for storage on ProtonMail’s servers. So I fixed it.
There are fundamentally four states a Thunderbird+ProtonMail Bridge email can be in, and here’s how I represent them.
I’ve just released my first ever Thunderbird plugin. If you’re using
ProtonMail Bridge, it adds a notification to the corner of every email to say whether it was encrypted in transit or not. That’s all.
And of course it’s open source with a permissive license (and a doddle to compile using your
standard operating system tools, if you want to build it yourself). If you’re using Thunderbird and ProtonMail Bridge you should give it a whirl. And if you’re not then… maybe you
should consider it?
Stupid thing of the day to try on your favourite Slack channel:
1. Make an image of yourself bordered by the edge of a speech bubble. Make the image an exact multiple of 32 pixels in each dimension (this one is 128 × 96):
2. Use ImageMagick to cut the image into 32 × 32 pixel tiles, e.g. like this: magick convert dan-qs-stupid-head.png -crop 32x32
"dan-q-says-%02d.png". Pick a sensible output filename to use as a Slack emoji shortcode.
3. Log into Slack and customise your emoji by adding each of the tiles you’ve created to it. This is where you’ll be glad you named the
file sensibly because it saves you typing the shortcode out each time.
4. Type a message using your custom emoji! Because it sits in-line with text, you can type alongside or around it (unlike normally embedded images or /giphy integration) along with
styling, mentioning, and hyperlink options. You can also copy-paste and edit on-the-fly, so you can keep a copy of the message in your self-channel and adjust whenever you need.
5. Profit!!!
Why not make a whole set of different faces showing your different emotions – perhaps from photos – so you can react appropriately to your colleagues! Slack don’t seem to impose any
limit on the number of custom emoji you can add, so the only limit is your imagination (and the tolerance of your Slack administrator for such high jinks).
Or why not cut up an animated GIF? Slack preloads emoji into the client so they play in-sync, allowing you to run
animations that span multiple emoji?
Hiking vlogger Dave shares his expedition around the Snowdon Horseshoe back in March. It’s a fantastic ridge walk that I’ve taken a few times myself. But on this particular expedition,
hampered by strong winds and thick cloud cover, a serious accident (very similar to the one that killed my father) occurred. Because Dave
was wearing his GoPro we’ve got amazing first-hand footage of the work he and the other climbers on the hill that day did to stabilise the casualty until mountain rescue could come and
assist. The whole thing’s pretty epic.
Speaking of which, did you see the jet-suits that are being tested by the Great North Air Ambulance Service? That’d
have made getting to my dad faster (though possibly not to any benefit)! Still: immensely cool idea to have jet-propelled paramedics zipping up Lake District slopes; I love it.
I’m sure that the graveyard of over-optimism is littered with the corpses of parents who planned to help their children learn self-moderation by showing them the wonders of nature,
but who realized too late that fields of wheat don’t stand a chance against Rocket League. I’m hoping that we can agree that computer games are good, but other things are good too,
cf fields of wheat. I don’t want to have to sneak in my own gaming time after my son has gone to bed. I also don’t want to be a hypocrite; at least, I don’t want Oscar to know that
I’m a hypocrite. Maybe we can play together and use it as father-son bonding time. This might work until he’s ten and after he’s twenty-five.
…
Robert Heaton, of Programming Projects for Advanced Beginners fame and reverse-engineering device drivers that spy on you (which I’ve talked about
before), has also been blogging lately about his experience of Dadding, with the same dry/sarcastic tone you might be used to. This long post is a great example of the meandering
thoughts of a (techie) parent in these (interesting) times, and it’s good enough for that alone. But it’s the raw, genuine “honesty and dark thoughts” section towards the end of the
article that really makes it stand out.
The most important feature of Sublime Text is that it doesn’t change. In the modern world, everything changes at a crazy pace. We get new OSes and new phones every year, Google opens and closes its products monthly, many physical devices get announced, produced, and disappear in an interval
shorter than the Sublime Text release cycle. I have two problems with that.
…
I love Sublime Text. It was the editor for which I finally broke my long, long emacs habit
(another editor that “doesn’t change”). Like emacs, Sublime is simple but powerful. Unlike Atom, it doesn’t eat all the RAM in the
universe. And unlike VS Code, I can rely on it being fundamentally the same today, tomorrow, and next year.
I’ve been watching the output that people machines around the Internet have been producing using GPT-3 (and its cousins), an AI model that can produce long-form “human-like”
text. Here’s some things I’ve enjoyed recently:
I played for a bit with AI Dungeon‘s (premium) Dragon engine, which came up with Dan and the
Spider’s Curse when used as a virtual DM/GM. I pitched an idea to Robin lately that one could run a vlog series based on AI Dungeon-generated adventures: coming up with a “scene”, performing it, publishing it, and taking
suggestions via the comments for the direction in which the adventure might go next (but leaving the AI to do the real
writing).
Today is Spaceship Day starts out making a little sense but this soon gives way to a more thorough absurdism.
Today is Spaceship Day is a Plotagon-powered machinama based on a script written by Botnik‘s AI. So not technically GPT-3 if you’re being picky but still amusing to how and
what the AI‘s creative mind has come up with.
Language contains the map to a better world. Those that are most skilled at removing obstacles, misdirection, and lies from language, that reveal the maps that are hidden within, are
the guides that will lead us to happiness.
Yesterday, The Guardian published the op-ed piece A robot wrote this entire article.
Are you scared yet, human? It’s edited together from half a dozen or so essays produced by the AI from the same
starting prompt, but the editor insists that this took less time than the editing process on most human-authored op-eds. It’s good stuff. I found myself reminded of Nobody Knows You’re A Machine, a short story I wrote about eight years ago and was never entirely happy with but which I’ve put online in
order to allow you to see for yourself what I mean.
If I came across these hills – with or without deer running atop them – I’d certainly be thinking “yeah, there’s something off about this place.”
But my favourite so far must be GPT-3’s attempt to write its own version of Expert judgment on markers to
deter inadvertent human intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which occasionally circulates the Internet retitled with its line This place is not a place of
honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. The original document was a report into how humans might mark a nuclear waste disposal site in order to
discourage deliberate or accidental tampering with the waste stored there: a massive challenge, given that the waste will remain dangerous for many thousands of years! The original
paper’s worth a read, of course, but mostly as a preface to reading a post by Janelle Shane (whose work I’ve mentioned before) about teaching GPT-3 to write nuclear waste site area denial strategies. It’s pretty special.
As effective conversational AI becomes increasingly accessible, I become increasingly convinced what we might eventually see
a sandwichware future, where it’s cheaper for an appliance developer to install an AI
into the device (to allow it to learn how to communicate with your other appliances, in a human language, just like you will) rather than rely on a static and universal underlying
computer protocol as an API. Time will tell.
Meanwhile: I promise that this post was written by a human!
Everything you see when you use “Inspect Element” was already downloaded to your computer, you just hadn’t asked Chrome to show it to you yet. Just like how the cogs were already in
the watch, you just hadn’t opened it up to look.
But let us dispense with frivolous cog talk. Cheap tricks such as “Inspect Element” are used by programmers to try and understand how the website works. This is ultimately futile:
Nobody can understand how websites work. Unfortunately, it kinda looks like hacking the first time you see it.
…while I practice, I have to simultaneously read, listen, think, translate. Every synapse of my brain is so utterly overwhelmed, there is no capacity left to think about the world
out there.
…
When Christoph Niemann published this piece about learning to play the piano during the most-lockdown-y parts of the Coronavirus lockdown, it rang a chord with me (hah!). I, too, have
experimented with learning to play the piano this spring/summer, and found a similar kind of Zen-like focussed calm emerge out of the frustration of staring at a piece of sheet music
and wondering why I couldn’t for the life of me get me fingers to remember to do when they got to that point.
I started out with – after following some random links off the back of finishing the last bit of work for my recent masters degree –
a free course in music theory by the OU, because I figured that coming in from a theoretical perspective would help with the way my brain thinks about this kind of thing. I supplemented that with a
book we got for the kids to use to learn to play, and now I’ve now graduated to very gradually hunt-and-pecking my way through Disney’s back catalogue. I can play Go The
Distance, Colors of the Wind and most of Can You Feel The Love Tonight barely well enough that I don’t feel the need to tear my own ears off, so I guess I’m
making progress, though I still fall over my own hands every time I try to play any bloody thing from Moana. 20 minutes at a time, here and there, and I’m getting there. I
don’t expect to ever be good at it, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
But anyway: this piece in the NYT Magazine really spoke to me, and to hear that somebody with far more music experience than me can
struggle with all the same things I do when getting started with the piano was really reassuring.
Oh my god I’m so excited. I’m afraid they might fuck up the story even more than David Lynch did in 1984 (not that I don’t
love that film, too, but in a very different way than the books). I mean: I’d have hoped a modern adaptation would have a bigger part for Chani than it clearly does. And I know nothing at all about the lead,
Timothée Chalamet. If only there was something I could do about these fears?
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it
has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Yeah, that’s the kind of thing.
The supporting cast look excellent. I think Josh Brolin will make an awesome Gurney Halleck, Jason Momoa will rock Duncan Idaho, and I’m looking forward to seeing Stephen
McKinley Henderson play Thufir Hawat. But if there’s just one thing you should watch the trailer for… it’s to listen to fragments of Hans Zimmer’s haunting, simplistic choral
adaptation of Pink Floyd’s Eclipse.
What this now does is instead of saying “add margin to the left”, it says “regardless of direction, put margin on the starting side”. If the language of the document was
right to left, like Arabic, that margin would be on the right hand side.
…
This is clever. If you use e.g. margin-left on every list element after the first to put space “between” them, the spacing isn’t quite right when the order of the elements
is reversed, for example because your page has been automatically translated into a language that reads in the opposite direction (e.g. right-to-left, rather than left-to-right). When
you use margin-left in this way you’re imposing a language-direction-centric bias on your content, and there’s no need: margin-inline-start and its friends
are widely-supported and says what you mean: “place a margin before this element”. I’ll be trying to remember to
use this where it’s appropriate from now on.
We’re discussing the possibility of a Subdivision geohash achievement for people who’ve reached every “X in a
Y”, and Fippe pointed out that I’m only a hash in the Vale of White Horse from being able to claim such an
achievement for Oxfordshire’s regions. And then this hashpoint appears right in the Vale of White Horse: it’s like it’s an omen!
Technically it’s a workday so this might have to be a lunchtime expedition, but I think that might be workable. I’ve got an electric vehicle with a hundred-and-something miles
worth of batteries in the tank and it looks like there might be a lay-by nearby the hashpoint (with a geocache in it!): I can drive down there at lunchtime, walk carefully back up the main road, and try to
get to the hashpoint!
Expedition
I worked hard to clear an hour of my day to take a trip, then jumped in my (new) electric car and set off towards the hashpoint. As I passed Newbridge I briefly considered stopping and
checking up on my geocache there but feeling pressed for time I decided to push on. I parked in the lay-by where
GC5XHJG is apparently hidden but couldn’t find it: I didn’t search for long because the farmer in the adjacent field
was watching me with suspicion and I figured that anyway I could hunt for it on the way back.
Walking along the A338 was treacherous! There are no paths, only a verge covered in thick grass and spiky plants, and a significant number of the larger vehicles (and virtually all of
the motorbikes) didn’t seem to be obeying the 60mph speed limit!
Reaching the gate, I crawled under (reckoning that it’s probably there to stop vehicles and not humans) and wandered along the lane. I saw a red kite and a heron doing their thing
before I reached the bridge, crossed Letcombe Brook, and followed the edge of the field. Stuffing my face with blackberries as I went, it wasn’t long before I reached the hashpoint on
one edge of the field.
I took a short-cut back before realising that this would put me in the wrong place to leave a The Internet Was Here sign, so I doubled-back to place it on the gate I’d crawled under.
Then I returned to the lay-by, where another car had just pulled up (right over the GZ of the geocache I’d hoped to find!) and didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Sadly I couldn’t wait
around all day – I had work to do! – so I went home, following the satnav in the car in a route that resulted in a figure-of-eight tracklog.
Parked my car in this lay-by while on my way to the 2020-09-09 51 -1 geohashpoint. Took a quick look for the cache but the farmer in the adjacent field parked his tractor right
alongside me and was watching with suspicion, so I thought better of it and decided to come back after visiting the hashpoint and try again.
The geohashing expedition was a success, and I returned to the lay-by for another attempt… but somebody else had parked here (pretty much exactly where I’d measured the coordinates to
be… boo!). I waited for a while but they didn’t seem like they were leaving so I abandoned my search: I’ll try again next time I’m in the vicinity.
