Tag: geeky
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A small collection of text-only websites
Terence Eden's maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain blog is among them, and is as far as I'm aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.
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HTTP is not simple
After discovering it through a Gemini newsgroup, I very much enjoyed Daniel Stenberg's (of cURL fame) explanation that contrary to what you might think, HTTP (even version 1) is not a 'simple' protocol, and is full of weird and knotty underspecified loose ends.
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SVGs that feel like GIFs
Back in July Vincent D. Warmerdam shared a great tip on screen-recording terminals into small, scalable animated SVG files, and I only just got around to reading it. Amazing stuff!
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Calculating the Ideal "Sex and the City" Polycule
When Juan Pablo Sarmiento thought to himself "couldn't Sex and the City's love triangles be squared-away by polyamory?" he didn't just sit down and write slashfic. No; he came up with a formula for idealised polycules, and open-sourced the algorithm. That's my kind of nerdity!
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Even More 1999!
Regular commenter Spencer wrote an SVG filter to improve my "1999 Mode", and it's excellent. But it got me thinking about how it doesn't exactly replicate the feel of my 90s Web pages, which featured extensive dithering.
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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
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Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters
I've tried a variety of unusual anti-spam solutions. Here's how they worked out for me.
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A completely plaintext WordPress Theme
Terence Eden took my idea for a completely plain text blog, ran with it, and just kept running. Now it's a WordPress theme!
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Does a blog have to be HTML?
Does a blog post need a title? Does a blog have to be delivered in HTML? In launching textplain.blog, I'd like to argue that the answer is... no!
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I think I might be more-prone to nerd sniping when I'm travelling.
Last week, a coworker pointed out an unusually-large chimney on the back of a bus depot and I lost sleep poring over 50s photos of Dutch building sites to try to work out if it was original.
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1950s black and white photo showing a newly-opened "GVB" bus depot in West Amsterdam.
When a boat tour guide told me that the Netherlands used to have a window tax, I fell down a rabbit hole of how it influenced local architecture and why the influence was different in the UK.
Why does travelling make me more-prone to nerd sniping? Maybe I should see if there's any likely psychological effect that might cause that...
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5 Cool Apps for your Unraid NAS
Some suggested starting apps for your Unraid NAS, inspired by a conversation this week with a teammate who's an aspiring Unraider. Selfhosting FTW!
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Oxford's Area Code at OGN 57
At next month's Oxford Geek Nights I'll be talking about why Oxford's telephone area code makes no sense... until it does! But that's not why you should attend: you should attend because of the five far more-talented speakers I'll be sharing the stage with!
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Length Extension Attack Demonstration (Video)
This is a video version of my blog post, Length Extension Attack. In it, I talk through the theory of length extension attacks and demonstrate an SHA-1 length extension attack against an (imaginary) website.
The video can also be found on:
YouTube
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Length Extension Attack Demonstration
Hash length extension attacks aren't necessarily intuitive without a little understanding of how vulnerable hashing algorithms work. Using SHA1 as an example, I've put together a step-by-step demonstration with a focus on teaching the underlying principles behind the vulnerability.
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Gemini Squared
How did I never think of accessing Gemini (the protocol) on my Gemini (portable computer) before today?
Of course, I recently rehomed my Gemini so instead I had to access Gemini on my Cosmo.