This checkin to GC6AH8Y A Cryptic Cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
1st to solve… but I doubt that I can get there, first: probably won’t have time to visit until later this week, maybe even the weekend, unless I can rejigger my travel plans a little bit. Love the puzzle, though!
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I’ve loved many computers in my life, but the HTPC has always had a special place in my heart. It’s the only always-on workhorse computer in our house, it is utterly silent, totally reliable, sips power, and it’s at the center of our home entertainment, networking, storage, and gaming. This handy box does it all,…
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In 2007 I wrote about using PNGout to produce amazingly small PNG images. I still refer to this topic frequently, as seven years later, the average PNG I encounter on the Internet is very unlikely to be optimized.
For example, consider this recent Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon…
This is the first in a three-part blog post about telling stories using virtual reality. Read all of the parts here.
As part of my work at the Bodleian… but to a greater extent “just for fun”… I’ve spent the last few weeks playing with virtual reality. But first, a history lesson.
This isn’t the first time I’ve used virtual reality. The first time, for me, was in the early 1990s, at the Future Entertainment Show, where I queued for a shot at Grid Busters on a Virtuality 1000-CS. The Virtuality 1000 was powered by an “Expality”: functionally an Amiga 3000 with specially-written software for reading the (electromagnetically-sensed) facing of the headset and the accompanying “space joystick”… and providing output via a pair of graphics cards (one for each eye) to LCD screens. The screens were embedded in chunky bits on the sides of the helmet and projected towards mirrors and lenses at the far end – this apparently being an effort to reduce how “front-heavy” it felt, but I can tell you that in practice a Virtuality headset felt weighty on your neck, even for its era!
Nonetheless, the experience stuck with me: I returned to school and became the envy of my friends (the nerdy ones, at least) when I told them about my VR adventure, and – not least thanks to programs like Tomorrow’s World and, of course, the episode of Bad Influence that reminded me quite how badly I wanted to get myself down to Nottingham for a go at Legend Quest – I was genuinely filled with optimism that within the decade, playing a VR game would have gone from the fringes of science fiction to being something where everybody-knew-somebody who did it routinely.
I never managed to get to play Legend Quest, and that first “VR revolution” swiftly fell flat. My generation was promised all of the hi-tech science, immersion, and magical experience of The Lawnmower Man, but all we were left with was the overblown promises, expensive effects, and ill-considered user experience of, well… The Lawnmower Man. I discovered Virtuality machines in arcades once or twice, but they seemed to be out-of-order more often than not, and they quickly disappeared. You can’t really blame the owners of arcades: if a machine costs you in the region of £40,000 to buy and you can charge, say, £1 for a 3-minute go on it (bear in mind that even the most-expensive digital arcade machines tended to charge only around 30p, at this time, and most were 10p or 20p), and it needs supervision, and it can’t be maintained by your regular guy… well, that swiftly begins to feel like a bad investment.
Plus, the fifth generation of games consoles came along: the (original) Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo N64, and – if you really wanted the highest-technology system (with the absolute least imaginative developers) – the Sega Saturn. These consoles came at price points that made them suitable Christmas gifts for the good boys and girls of middle-class parents and sported 3D polygon graphics of the type that had previously only been seen in arcades, and the slow decline of the video arcade accelerated dramatically. But home buyers couldn’t afford five-figure (still moderately-experimental) VR systems, and the market for VR dried up in a matter of years. Nowadays, if you want to play on a Virtuality machine like the one I did, you need to find a collector (you might start with this guy from Leicester, whose website was so useful in jogging my memory while I wrote this blog post).
2016 is the year in which this might change. The need for ubiquitous cheap computing has made RAM and even processors so economical that we throw them away when we’re done with them. The demands of modern gaming computers and consoles has given us fast but affordable graphics rendering hardware. And the battle for the hottest new smartphones each year has helped to produce light, bright, high-resolution screens no bigger than the palm of your hand.
In fact, smartphones are now the simplest and cheapest way to play with VR. Under the assumption that you’ve already got a smartphone, you’re only a couple of cheap plastic lenses and a bit of cardboard away from doing it for yourself. So that’s how my team and I started out playing: with the wonderfully-named Google Cardboard. I know that Google Cardboard is old-hat now and all the early adopters have even got their grandmothers using it now, but it’s still a beautiful example of how economical VR threatens to become if this second “VR revolution” takes hold. Even if you didn’t already own a compatible smartphone, you could buy a second-hand one on eBay for as little as £30: that’s an enormous difference from the £40K Virtuality machines of my youth, which had only a fraction of the power.
I’m going somewhere with this, I promise: but I wanted to have a jumping-off point from which to talk about virtual reality more-broadly first and it felt like I’d be overstretching if I jumped right in at the middle. Y’know, like the second act of The Lawnmower Man. In the next part of this series, I’d like to talk about the storytelling opportunities that modern VR offers us, and some of the challenges that come with it, and share my experience of playing with some “proper” modern hardware – an Oculus Rift.
Despite a full workload and a backlog of both work, personal, volunteering and study emails to deal with, 2016 is off to a pretty good start so far. Here’s some highlights:
I hope everybody else’s year is kicking off just as well.
* With one possible exception: the other year, an overenthusiastic bouncer insisted that I join a queue of one in turn to show him my ID before he let me into a nightclub at 9:30pm on a Wednesday night. Like I said, overenthusiastic.
As you’re no-doubt aware, Home Secretary Theresa May is probably going to get her way with her “snooper’s charter” by capitalising on events in Paris (even though that makes no sense), and before long, people working for law enforcement will be able to read your Internet usage history without so much as a warrant (or, to put it as the UN’s privacy chief put it, it’s “worse than scary”).
In a revelation that we should be thankful of as much as we’re terrified by, our government does not understand how the Internet works. And that’s why it’s really easy for somebody with only a modicum of geekery to almost-completely hide their online activities from observation by their government and simultaneously from hackers. Here’s a device that I built the other weekend, and below I’ll tell you how to do it yourself (and how it keeps you safe online from a variety of threats, as well as potentially giving you certain other advantages online):
I call it “Iceland”, for reasons that will become clear later. But a more-descriptive name would be a “Raspberry Pi VPN Hotspot”. Here’s what you’ll need if you want to build one:
From here on, this post gets pretty geeky. Unless you plan on building your own little box to encrypt all of your home’s WiFi traffic until it’s well out of the UK and close-to-impossible to link to you personally (which you should!), then you probably ought to come back to it another time.
Here’s how it’s done:
1. Plug in, boot, and install some prerequisites
Plug the WiFi dongle into a USB port and connect the Ethernet port to your Internet router. Boot your Raspberry Pi into Raspbian (as described in the helpsheet that comes with it), and run:
sudo apt-get install bridge-utils hostapd udhcpd bind9 openvpn
2. Make HostAPD support your Edimax dongle
If, like me, you’re using an Edimax dongle, you need to do an extra couple of steps to make it work as an access point. Skip this bit if you’re using one of the other dongles I listed or if you know better.
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1663660/hostapd/hostapd.zip unzip hostapd.zip sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.original sudo mv hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.edimax sudo ln -sf /usr/sbin/hostapd.edimax /usr/sbin/hostapd sudo chown root.root /usr/sbin/hostapd sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/hostapd
3. Set up OpenVPN
Get OpenVPN configuration files from your VPN provider: often these will be available under the iOS downloads. There’ll probably be one for each available endpoint. I chose the one for Reyjkavik, because Iceland’s got moderately sensible privacy laws and I’m pretty confident that it would take judicial oversight for British law enforcement to collaborate with Icelandic authorities on getting a wiretap in place, which is the kind of level of privacy I’m happy with. Copy your file to /etc/openvpn/openvpn.conf and edit it: you may find that you need to put your VPN username and password into it to make it work.
sudo service openvpn start
You can now test your VPN’s working, if you like. I suggest connecting to the awesome icanhazip.com and asking it where you are (you can use your favourite GeoIP website to tell you what country it thinks you’re in, based on that):
curl -4 icanhazip.com
Another option would be to check with a GeoIP service directly:
curl freegeoip.net/json/
4. Set up your firewall and restart the VPN connection
Unless your VPN provider gives you DNAT (and even if they do, if you’re paranoid), you should set up a firewall to allow only outgoing connections to be established, and then restart your VPN connection:
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -m conntrack --ctstate RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A INPUT -i tun0 -j DROP sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure" sudo sh -c "echo 'up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure' >> /etc/network/interfaces" sudo service openvpn restart
5. Configure your WiFi hotspot
Configure bind as your DNS server, caching responses on behalf of Google’s DNS servers, or another DNS server that you trust. Alternatively, you can just configure your DHCP clients to use Google’s DNS servers directly, but caching will probably improve your performance overall. To do this, add a forwarder to /etc/bind/named.conf.options:
forwarders {
8.8.8.8;
8.8.4.4;
};
Restart bind, and make sure it loads on boot:
sudo service bind9 restart sudo update-rc.d bind9 enable
Edit /etc/udhcpd.conf. As a minimum, you should have a configuration along these lines (you might need to tweak your IP address assignments to fit with your local network – the “router” and “dns” settings should be set to the IP address you’ll give to your Raspberry Pi):
start 192.168.0.2 end 192.168.0.254 interface wlan0 remaining yes opt dns 192.168.0.1 option subnet 255.255.255.0 opt router 192.168.0.1 option lease 864000 # 10 days
Enable DHCP by uncommenting (remove the hash!) the following line in /etc/default/udhcpd:
#DHCPD_ENABLED="yes"
Set a static IP address on your Raspberry Pi in the same subnet as you configured above (but not between the start and end of the DHCP list):
sudo ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1
And edit your /etc/network/interfaces file to configure it to retain this on reboot (you’ll need to use tabs, not spaces, for indentation):
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
And comment out the lines relating to hot-plugging of WiFi adapters/network hopping:
#allow-hotplug wlan0 #wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf #iface default inet manual
Right – onto hostapd, the fiddliest of the tools you’ll have to configure. Create or edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf as follows, but substitute in your own SSID, hotspot password, and channel (to minimise interference, which can slow your network down, I recommend using WiFi scanner tool on your mobile to find which channels your neighbours aren’t using, and use one of those – you should probably avoid the channel your normal WiFi uses, too, so you don’t slow your own connection down with crosstalk):
interface=wlan0 driver=nl80211 ssid=your network name hw_mode=g channel=6 macaddr_acl=0 auth_algs=1 ignore_broadcast_ssid=0 wpa=2 wpa_passphrase=your network password wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=TKIP rsn_pairwise=CCMP
Hook up this configuration by editing /etc/default/hostapd:
DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf"
Fire up the hotspot, and make sure it runs on reboot:
sudo service hostapd start sudo service udhcpd start sudo update-rc.d hostapd enable sudo update-rc.d udhcpd enable
Finally, set up NAT so that people connecting to your new hotspot are fowarded through the IP tunnel of your VPN connection:
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward" sudo sh -c "echo net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 >> /etc/sysctl.conf" sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o tun0 -j MASQUERADE sudo sh -c "iptables-save > /etc/iptables.nat.vpn.secure"
6. Give it a go!
Connect to your new WiFi hotspot, and go to your favourite GeoIP service. Or, if your VPN endpoint gives you access to geographically-limited services, give those a go (you’d be amazed how different the Netflix catalogues are in different parts of the world). And give me a shout if you need any help or if you have any clever ideas about how this magic little box can be improved.
Further reading:
This checkin to GLKAACPV Requiem Aeternam reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Greetings from Oxford, England! We stayed in a nearby houseboat while in Leiden for a wedding. I enjoyed the chance for a walk through these lovely grounds. TFTC!
@DataGenetics did a nice piece on Lychrel Numbers – https://t.co/4MCoRFXogC. I wonder how they differ in non-decimal bases?
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This review originally appeared on Steam. See more reviews by Dan.
I’ve been a huge fan of the “hacker game” ever since I first played 1985’s Hacker on my Amstrad CPC: I’m pretty hardened to the genre, and I can confidently say that not since Uplink has anything broken through my firewall like Hacknet did. If you’re looking for an easy-to-pick up and compelling puzzle game in a cyberpunk theme, it’s a clear winner: I got 6 hours of thoroughly enjoyable playtime out of it, and I’m sure I’ll go back and get the same again when I find the chance to go and explore deeper.
There’s a wonderful tool for making web-based “choose your own adventure”-type games, called Twine. One of the best things about it is that it’s so accessible: if you wanted to, you could be underway writing your first ever story with it in about 5 minutes from now, without installing anything at all, and when it was done you could publish it on the web and it would just work.
But the problem with Twine is that, in its latest and best versions, you’re trapped into using the Twine IDE. The Twine IDE is an easy-to-use, highly visual, ‘drag-and-drop’ interface for making interactive stories. Which is probably great if you’re into IDEs or if you don’t “know better”… but for those of us who prefer to do our writing in a nice clean, empty text editor like Sublime or TextMate or to script/automate our builds, it’s just frustrating to lose access to the tools we love. Plus, highly-visual IDEs make it notoriously hard to collaborate with other authors on the same work without simply passing it back and forwards between you: unless they’ve been built with this goal in mind, you generally can’t have two people working in the same file at the same time.
Earlier versions of Twine had a command-line tool called Twee that perfectly filled this gap. But the shiny new versions don’t. That’s where I came in.
In that way that people who know me are probably used to by now, I was very-slightly unsatisfied with one aspect of an otherwise fantastic product and decided that the correct course of action was to reimplement it myself. So that’s how, a few weeks ago, I came to release Twee2.
If you’re interested in writing your own “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type interactive fiction, whether for the world or just for friends, but you find user-friendly IDEs like Twine limiting (or you just prefer a good old-fashioned text editor), then give Twee2 a go. I’ve written a simple 2-minute tutorial to get you started, it works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and just-about everything else, and it’s completely open-source if you’d like to expand or change it yourself.
(there are further discussions about the concept and my tool on Reddit here, here, here and here, and on the Twinery forums here, here and here)
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@misterjta, @fleeblewidget and I ALL thought it was our turn to order wine. 40 bottles just turned up. #whoopsdrunk http://t.co/5cxomwaEvg
This checkin to GC54F7N Oxford Steganography #4 - Tilt reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
This is definitely now inaccessible and has been muggled. I’m scouting for a new location for this cache, but in the meantime, anybody who wants to complete the series can send me a private message stating the co-ordinates of this cache and I’ll provide them with the secret code from within it: that way – so long as you’ve found #1, #2, and #3 – you can still eventually find #5!
Thanks for your patience, and happy ‘caching!
Warning: this blog post contains pictures of urine, invasive equipment, and the inside of a bladder. It’s probably safe for all audiences, but you might like to put your glass of apple juice down for a minute or two. The short of it all is that I’m probably healthy.
Since my hospitalisation the other month with a renal system infection, I’ve undergone a series of investigations to try to determine if there’s an underlying reason that I fell ill. As my doctor explained to me, it’s quite possible that what I’d experienced was a random opportunistic infection (perhaps aided by a course of unrelated antibiotics I’d been on earlier this year or by certain lifestyle habits), but if that wasn’t the case – if there were some deeper explanation for my health problems – it was important to find out sooner, rather than later.
Early on I had several ultrasound scans of my bladder (at a number of different times and at a variety of levels of fullness) and one of my kidneys, the latter of which revealed some “minor scarring” of one of them which apparently isn’t something I should be worried about… although I wish they’d started the two-page letter I got with that rather than opening with, effectively, “Contrary to what we told you at the hospital, we did later see something wrong with you…” But still, good to be reassured that this is probably not an issue.
More recently, I went to the hospital to have a “flow rate test” and a cystoscopy. The flow rate test involved the most-ghetto looking piece of NHS equipment I’ve ever seen: functionally, it seemed to be little more than a funnel on top of a large measuring beaker, in turn on top of a pressure-sensitive digital scale. The scale was connected up to the only fancy-looking bit of equipment in the room, a graphing printer that output the calculated volume (based on their weight) of the same and, more-importantly, the rate of change: the “flow rate” of the stream of urine.
I suppose one advantage of using equipment like this is that it basically operates itself. Which meant that the nurse was able to give me five seconds worth of instruction and then leave the room, which saved us from our own Britishness forcing us to make small-talk while I urinated in front of her or something. Ultimately, I turned out to be within the range of normalcy here, too, although I was a little disappointed to find that the ward didn’t maintain a daily “score board” of flow rates, as sort-of a science-backed literal pissing contest.
Finally came the cystoscopy, and this was the bit that I’d been most-nervous about. This procedure involves the insertion of a long flexible tube into the urethra at the tip of the penis, under local anasthetic, and pushing it all the way down, through the sphincter, down through the prostate and then back up into the bladder. It’s then used as a channel to pump water into the bladder, filling it to capacity and stretching out the sides, after which the fibreoptic cord (and light) that runs along its length is used to look around inside the bladder to inspect for any of a plethora of different problems.
The doctor invited me to watch with him on the monitor, which I initially assumed was because I was clearly interested in everything and kept asking questions, but in hindsight I wonder if it’s just that he – quite rightly – assumed that I might have panicked if I’d have been looking in the direction of the piece of equipment he brought in and jabbed at my penis with. I only looked at it while it was on its way out, and my god its a scary-looking thing: sort of like a cross between a tyre pressure gauge and a blowtorch. The first few inches were painless – the local anasthetic had made me completely numb right up to and including the external sphincter, which is at the base of the penis. However, what I can only assume was the second sphincter complained of the discomfort, and it stung pretty sharply any time the doctor would twist the cystoscope to change the angle of the picture.
Seeing the inside of your own body is an amazing experience. I mean: it’s not amazing enough to even be worth the experience of a cystoscopy, never mind the illness that in my case preceeded it… but it’s still pretty cool. The ultrasounds were interesting, but there’s nothing quite so immersive as seeing a picture of the inside of your own bladder, gritting your teeth while the doctor points to an indentation and explains that it’s the opening to the ureter that connects to your own left kidney!
Unfortunately I neglected to take my phone into the operating room, having put it into a locker when I changed into a gown, and so I wasn’t able to (as I’d hoped) take photos of the inside of my own bladder. So you’ll have to make do with this video I found, which approximates the experience pretty well. The good news is that there’s probably nothing wrong with me, now that the infection from earlier this year has passed: nothing to suggest that there’s any deeper underlying issue that caused me to get sick, anyway!
The bad news is that while the procedure itself was shorter and more-bearable than I’d expected, the recovery’s been a real drag. A week later, it still hurts a lot to urinate (although I’ve stopped yelping out loud when I do so) and my crotch is still too sore for me to be able to cycle. I’ve also discovered that an errection can be painful enough to wake me up, which is definitely not the most-pleasant way I’ve been roused by a penis. But it’s getting better, day by day, and at least I know for sure that I’m more-or-less “right” in the renal system, now.
