Blog – Page 34

Lock All The Computers

I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:

There’s optional audio in this video, if you want it.

One button. And everything locks. Nice!

Here’s how it works:

The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through CTRL+ALT+F22¹ when one of its keys are pressed.
The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines².
That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
- The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml to set a <keybind> that executes xscreensaver-command -lock.
- For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs pmset displaysleepnow as a shell script³, and then connected that via Keyboard Shortcuts > Services.
- On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run { DllCall("LockWorkStation") } when it hears the keypress.

That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.

Footnotes

¹ F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments, of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!

² Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.

³ These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you might need a more-sophisticated script.

Dan Q wrote note for GCB8W6H In Memory

This checkin to GCB8W6H In Memory reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Checked-in on this cache as it’s had surprisingly-few visits yet. Reassured to find that it’s all still in place and findable. Second-to-find’s still up for grabs.

DOGWALK

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Well this was adorable.

Blender Studio’s official game project is a short casual interactive story. Play a big, adorable dog traversing through winter woods and help out a little kid decorate a snowman with colorful items hidden in the environment.

…

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Blender Studio

DOGWALK is a free, open-source Godot game for Windows, MacOS and Linux, produced and given to the world by Blender Studio as a way of showcasing some of their video lessons. The beautiful, playful “papercraft” models were made by making actual hand-painted paper models of the assets, unfolding them, scanning them, and then re-folding the maps back into in-game assets, which is an amazing and imaginative approach.

It was released a little over a week ago, and it’s a short but adorable little game.

It’s also free on Steam, if that’s your preference.

Buldak

We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur It, of course.

Framegrab from Jet Lag: The Game, showing Adam Chase, a young white man, sitting in a South Korean urban centre, blindfolded, holding chopsticks and preparing to eat from three bowls of instant noodles, captioned Buldak, Buldak Stew, and Carbonara. — The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.

In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go¹.

In a kitchen, a hand holds a purple foil packet of Samyang Buldak noodles, "Habenero Lime" flavour. — Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens (닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of *the noise a chicken makes*?²

So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn³, and a soft-boiled egg.

It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.

So now I’m keen to try some of the other flavours (some of which we’ve got). But perhaps not the one that was so spicy it got banned in Denmark last year.

Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.

Footnotes

¹ I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of noodle-centric pop culture .

² Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?

³ I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…

Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed around with ChatGPT myself and got this:

Turns out ChatGPT is telling people to go to Soundslice, create an account and import ASCII tab in order to hear the audio playback. So that explains it!

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Adrian Holovaty

With ChatGPT’s inclination to lie about the features of a piece of technology, it was only a matter of time before a frustrated developer actually added a feature that ChatGPT had imagined, just to stop users from becoming dissatisfied when they tried to use nonexistent tools that ChatGPT told them existed.

And this might be it! This could be the very first time that somebody’s added functionality based on an LLM telling people the feature existed already.

Adrian Holovaty runs a tool that can “read” scanned sheet music and provide a digital representation to help you learn how to play it. But after ChatGPT started telling people that his tool could also read ASCII-formatted guitar tablature, he went and implemented it!

His blog post’s got more details, and it’s worth a read. This could be a historic moment that we’ll look back on!

Please Fix This Site? Okay!

This week, digital agency Humidity Studios launched PleaseFixThisSite.com, a website with a deliberately awful design aesthetic.

Screenshot of PleaseFixThisSite.com, featuring all of the design sins described below. — Honestly, I’ve seen worse.

Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.

Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.

XKCD comic. Transcript: [A single panel containing a large, elevated sign with Ponytail standing in front of it.] [Title, slightly off horizontal, more to the right than central and the character spacing is not entirely consistent/aesthetic:] Doanate[sic] to fix this sign! [To the left of the lower part of the sign there is an 'QR code', tilted slightly with a plaintext link beneath it:] https://[illegible].com [To the right are several dollar values, in one column, and 'fixes', in a second, some of which have their own self-demonstrating quirks.] [The letters "R" and "N" may be too close together:] $10 fix kerning [Both dollar value and fix text are shifted left of their respective columns:] $20 align columns [This line is in a smaller font:] $20 fix text size $50 fix typo $50 fix centering $100 fix rotation [Ponytail stands looking at the sign, apparently in the process of using a smartphone:] Grrr... [Caption below panel:] My new company's business model is based on extorting graphic designers. — I can’t criticise Humidity Studios for taking a stupid idea from XKCD and taking it way too far, because, well, there’s *this* site that I run…

That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!

A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration, I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to install my (open source) script.

I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.

Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.

Zip It – Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Computerphile

This was an enjoyable video. Nothing cutting-edge, but a description of an imaginative use of an everyday algorithm – DEFLATE, which is what powers most of the things you consider “ZIP files” – to do pattern-matching and comparison between two files. The tl;dr is pretty simple:

Lossless compression works by looking for repetition, and replacing the longest/most-repeated content with references to a lookup table.
Therefore, the reduction-in-size from compressing a file is an indicator of the amount of repetition within it.
Therefore, the difference in reduction-in-size of compressing a single file to the reduction-in-size of compressing a pair of files is indicative of their similarity, because the greatest compression gains come from repetition of data that is shared across both files.
This can be used, for example, to compare the same document written in two languages as an indication of the similarity of the languages to one another, or to compare the genomes of two organisms as an indication of their genetic similarity (and therefore how closely-related they are).

I love it when somebody finds a clever and novel use for an everyday tool.

Dan Has Too Many Monitors

My new employer sent me a laptop and a monitor, which I immediately added to my already pretty-heavily-loaded desk. Wanna see?

It’s a video. Click it to play it, of course.

Firstup Day 1

Off to my first day at Firstup. Gotta have an induction: get my ID badge, learn where the toilets are, how to refill the coffee machine, and all that jazz.

Except, of course, none of those steps will be part of my induction. Because, yet again, I’ve taken a remote-first position. I’m 100% sold that, for me, remote/distributed work helps me bring my most-productive self. It might not be for everybody, but it’s great for me.

And now: I’m going to find out where the water cooler is. No, wait… some other thing!

Hotdog Among the Trees

As the UK’s heatwave continues, the dog and I were delighted that this morning was sufficiently overcast that we could manage a proper walk without completely melting.

Her breed copes badly with the heat and we’ve lately had to keep her indoors or in the shade more than she’d like, so a chance to run around among the trees was very welcome!

Waves Hand Car Wash

I know how I’m SUPPOSED to read it, but when I see this I can’t help but imagine a conversation like…

“What shall we call our car wash?”

/waves hand/ “I dunno.”

Person Rowing Boat

On our family Slack, Ruth and I have a tradition of reacting to one another’s messages, where no other emoji seems appropriate, with a “person rowing boat” emoji.

🚣

I can’t remember exactly how it started. Possibly one of us was using the text search to find the “robot” emoji (probably in reference to our robot vacuum cleaner, which used to be more-frequently found hiding under the sofa than anywhere else in the world).

🤖

But whatever the reason, the game stuck. And because you can leave multiple emoji responses to a Slack message – and because Unicode permits a diversity of gender and skin tone options for this particular emoji – sometimes this results in a whole flotilla of rowboats parading beneath our messages.

🚣‍♂️🚣🏻‍♀️🚣🏻🚣🏼🚣🏻‍♂️🚣🏾🚣🏿🚣🏼‍♂️🚣🏽‍♂️🚣🏾‍♂️🚣🏽🚣🏽‍♀️🚣🏾‍♀️🚣🏼‍♀️🚣‍♀️🚣🏿‍♂️🚣🚣🏿‍♀️

And if an emoji armada isn’t an excuse to demonstrate the fact that the <marquee> tag still works in most browsers, for some reason, I don’t know what is.

The Local Historian

Back in 2021, as part of a course I was doing at work, I made a video talking about The Devil’s Quoits, a henge and stone circle near where I live.

Video screengrab of Dan standing in front of some standing stones. — It started with a fascination after discovering a little-known stone circle near my new house. It grew into an obsession with the history of the place.

Two years later, our eldest was at school and her class was studying the stone age. Each of three groups were tasked with researching a particular neolithic monument, and our eldest was surprised when she heard my voice coming from a laptop elsewhere in the class. One of her classmates had, in their research into the Quoits, come across my video.

And so when their teacher arranged for a school trip to the Devil’s Quoits, she asked if I could go along as a “local expert”. And so I did.

On a sunny day, Dan sits with his back to a stone, more of the circle visible in the background. — It turns out “local expert” just means “I read the only book ever written about the archaeology of the stones, and a handful of ancillary things.”

And so this year, when another class – this time featuring our youngest – went on a similar school trip, the school asked me to go along again.

I’d tweaked my intro a bit – to pivot from talking about the archaeology to talking about the human stories in the history of the place – and it went down well: the children raised excellent observations and intelligent questions¹, and clearly took a lot away from their visit. As a bonus, our visit falling shortly after the summer solstice meant that local neopagans had left a variety of curious offerings – mostly pebbles painted with runes – that the kids enjoyed finding (though of course I asked them to put each back where they were found afterwards).

But the most heartwarming moment came when I later received an amazing handmade card, to which several members of the class had contributed:

A hand-coloured card, saying 'Thank you so much', with a child's drawing of somebody talking about Bell Beaker people and a photo of Dan showing pictures of pots to a class of schoolchildren. — I particularly enjoy the pencil drawing of me talking about the breadth of Bell Beaker culture, with a child interrupting to say “cool!”.

I don’t know if I’ll be free to help out again in another two years, if they do it again²: perhaps I should record a longer video, with a classroom focus, that shares everything I know about The Devil’s Quoits.

But I’ll certainly keep a fond memory of this (and the previous) time I got to go on such a fun school trip, and to be an (alleged) expert about a place whose history I find so interesting!

Footnotes

¹ Not every question the children asked was the smartest, but every one was gold. One asked “is it possible aliens did it?” Another asked, “how old are you?”, which I can only assume was an effort to check if I remembered when this 5,000-year-old hengiform monument was being constructed…

² By lucky coincidence, this year’s trip fell during a period that I was between jobs, and so I was very available, but that might not be the case in future!

Doxxing an Imaginary Person?

This morning, Google pulled a video from YouTube belonging to my nonprofit Three Rings. This was a bit of a surprise.

Apparently the video – which is a demo of some Three Rings features – apparently fell foul of Google’s anti-doxxing rules. I’m glad that they have anti-doxxing rules, of course.

Let’s see who I doxxed:

Yup… apparently doxxed an imaginary person with two structurally-invalid phone numbers and who’s recently moved house from Some Street to Other Street in the town of Somewhereville. 😂

(Maybe I’m wrong. Do you live on Some Street, Somewhereville?)

Let’s see what YouTube’s appeals process is like, shall we? 🤦

Dan Q found GCA6CCW Purple door

This checkin to GCA6CCW Purple door reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

It’s possible that cycling this path wasn’t the wisest idea, I realised, as I dodged brambles on both sides. So focused was I on riding safely that I forgot which GPSr I’d brought with me and listening for the beep it gives when I get close to my target… only realised 120m after the fact that I was using the GPSr that doesn’t give an audible beep and I’d overshot!

Doubled back and gave an extended hunt for the cache before finding it in pieces. Looks like it’s been wilfully vandalised (see photo). Returned the pieces to approximately where I figure they’re meant to live.

Love the idea, hope it can be fully repaired soon!