Category: Blog

Categories
Blog Cybersecurity

It’s always something, isn’t it?

It’s always something. Now it’s the tire pressure sensors spying on you. In a new paper being submitted to IEEE, researchers found that automobile tire sensors are broadcasting unencrypted identifying data that can be easily sensed on a roadway with a $100 radio receiver and used to track vehicles. The data packet contains a unique identifier for the vehicle, and includes the tire pressure readings themselves, which could be used to determine if the vehicle was carrying passengers or cargo.

Just another example of the security risks involved with the over-instrumentation in today’s cars. My experience with these tire pressure sensors has been that they are prone to failure and often inaccurate. But at least someone can get use out of them, I guess.

Categories
Blog Esoterica Music Uncategorized

A poetry Blast from the past

Ran across this tonight on YouTube while chasing an old ’80s song. This is one of a few spoken-word records that Harvey Kubernick produced in the early ’80s, and each one is a goldmine of LA punk artists and poets — John Doe, Henry Rollins, Wanda Coleman, and more. It’s one of those records that I don’t think ever made it to CD.

In case the embed doesn’t work , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu42tMcu93g. It’s a pretty good digitization with detailed liner notes about the 70 or so cuts. It was a double-record.

I have this on vinyl and I think two other 2 record sets from the series. One was called ‘Voices of the Angels,’ and the other ‘Freeway Sounds,’ if I recall correctly. I’ll have to dig deeper.

Categories
Blog Esoterica Music

TIL: the dark side of the Hokey Pokey

Sorry for the click bait-y headline, but couldn’t resist. It’s not all that dark.

How did I even get here? Well, today on bsky, someone posted the following quote:


My response was the following:


Of course, I had to look up who wrote the song, and what I found was that Larry LaPrise held the copyright, but that two other songwriters claimed authorship. This is just from the Wikipedia article, for all I know there is a whole rabbit hole of investigative reporting on the true origins of The Hokey Pokey, and indeed, even, what it is all about.

It reminds me of the similar controversy about the song ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’, copyrighted by Bobby Troop, but apparently also taken from other sources.

Update: I was right, there is a Rabbit Hole. Here’s some links to start, if you dare:

https://theoutline.com/post/565/the-writer-of-the-hokey-pokey-has-died-three-times

https://phonographia.com/Factola/Hokey%20Pokey.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokey_Pokey

Categories
Blog social media

Today’s shadowban is tomorrow’s trend.

Today, ran across this article, which talks about how the future of culture is going to be built around things that algorithmic platforms reject. The article focuses mostly on copyright infringement, but I think the argument could be made for anything that is un-monetizable on social media platforms.

When you think about it, it’s a normal trajectory for subcultures. They start out as outsiders, then someone finds a way to present or expose it on traditional media. Case in point: the book that brought Hunter S. Thompson to the masses, “Hells Angels.” While I think there was already exploitation media made around bikers by then, it’s hard to imagine shows like “Sons of Anarchy” existing without there having been a ‘serious book’ about the subject. Now, there’s Harley-Davidson merch stores in tourist traps.

Online culture just accelerates this and drives things underground faster, plus provides the opportunity for the subculture to build its own platforms.

There may well be a template for this. Subculture first hides in plain sight, then gets exposed, then gets exploited, then gets filtered and sanitized, causing the less advertiser-friendly bits to hide somewhere else in plain sight.

This is a vast oversimplification, of course, and new types of media create new variations. I’ll explore this further someday.

This dance has long existed online, I remember that Usenet in the ’80s had a newsgroup called ‘net.culture.gay,’ and it was an eyeopener for anyone who wasn’t already in-the-know. It was both a gay safe space and a fairly open bridge for outsiders. Usenet, however, was a free service — the Internet hadn’t opened up beyond industry and academia, and there was no advertising, so no advertisers to offend. There was discussion there that couldn’t happen anywhere else at the time – not on TV, not in the letters page of a newspaper.

It’s harder and harder to imagine a truly free platform like those today. This was all paid for by taxpayers, in a corner of the defense budget (ARPAnet). Today’s content and scale costs real money, and with that comes gatekeepers.

But there will always be someone slipping under or jumping over the gate.

Categories
Blog Uncategorized

Boot.dev is a fun way to learn Python

For forever, I had been wanting to learn Python. I haven’t been doing much with scripting languages in recent years, just the occasional shell script fix here and there. Last substantial thing I did was in Perl, back in the late ’90s. I built a Perl script for autogenerating static web pages about Los Angeles radio stations from a simple text file.

A few months ago, I learned of Boot.dev, which is a gamified platform for learning back end development technologies. It’s not particularly expensive to subscribe, and you can try it out for free before you commit. You are awarded XP for lessons you complete, are rewarded for keeping up streaks of daily learning, etc.

So far I’ve managed to maintain a 183 day streak of daily coding, which has been encouraging. The curriculum currently has tracks for backend development with python/go and python/typescript. I just finished a unit on memory management in C, which was a nice refresher course. The curriculum also covers things like basic Linux commands, use of git, and provides some guided projects and opportunities to build personal projects. The platform also has an active discord community, and is somewhat oriented towards people getting skills for their first programming jobs.

I’m basically using it to get some daily mental exercise coding, and to expand my reach on the backend of the stack, as mostly I work on mobile client apps. It is definitely a professional advantage , if not a necessity, when working with devops and backend engineers to be able to read and understand Python, Go, and Javascript.

Enjoying the journey so far, and about to start a personal project, which I’ll talk about in later posts.

Categories
Blog

(Meta) Talking to oneself online

There’s a certain liberation to having a blog nobody really reads. I’m mostly documenting things I’m setting up just to understand it better as I go and maybe help others, but I’m not really thinking about an audience per se.

I’m in that age range where I’m old enough to remember Jerry Pournelle’s columns in BYTE magazine, though too young to have read his books, which seem to me to be more a thing of their time. I ended up reading more Robert Silverberg, who was a mainstay for short stories in magazines like Omni and Playboy. The one thing I remember about him was he co-wrote the infamous “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay. His work, as I say, was of a certain time.

Pournelle’s columns were basically him documenting how he was using computers and software as writing tools. He’d go on about updating graphics cards, new versions of WordPerfect, or whatever he was using at the time, building out new machines, etc. He’d talk about handing down hardware to his son, setting up a work machine for his wife, and other mundane tasks involved with keeping home computers running. He’d give all of the computers names. I think they were mostly custom-built from off-the-shelf hardware running CP/M, much of this was before the IBM PC came out, let alone luggables and compatibles.

It was interesting to read, you wouldn’t know that he wasn’t a software professional, but this was a fair amount of activity just to support his day job of writing. Overall there was this philosophy of not letting the tools get in the way of the work, to keep your eye on the end product.

So, that’s kind of what I’m going for. It’s a side-quest, though Jerry Pournelle probably got paid pretty well for his columns, which no doubt helped pay the bills between books.