A PDF zine readable in any plain text editor, and it's also an MP3 [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

A PDF zine readable in any plain text editor, and it's also an MP3 [pdf]

lab6.com

151 pointsmarttt24 comments

For the "why PDF?", Vol 0 of the zine was discussed on HN earlier this year (413 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27880905

There's also Vol 2, which is a PDF/A document that also parses as text/gemini: http://lab6.com/2

The last one has interesting discussion on the future of information archiving.

You could probably embed a video stream the same way --- as the name implies, streaming formats are specifically designed so that it's not necessary to find the "start" or "end" of the stream, but instead sync markers with a distinctive pattern are present at regular intervals so readers can just look for those and begin decoding.

im fondly recalling multipart uuencoded emails, and canned chat responses of uuencoded materials.

i was in a FaceTime call when i opened this in Chrome on iOS.

The speakerphone became max volume and the volume slider became unresponsive.

i had to open up another media player and play music to get the volume slider to work again

My Chrome also locked up for a good 10 seconds while trying to render the in-browser PDF reader on desktop. Never seen something like that before.

I guess the other side got a good idea of the level of importance you had assigned the ongoing FaceTime call.

That's a pretty uncharitable thing to say!

FaceTime is routinely used to just hang out with your family or buds, your presumption that doing other stuff is automatically rude just doesn't hold up.

jgalt212 didn't say that it was rude, only that doing other things during a call shows the level of importance one assigns to the call. There's not necessarily anything rude about assigning a call low importance.

That sort of observation isn't neutral, merely couched so.

The amount of attention given to a FaceTime call is not a measure of importance, thus the observation is unsupported.

Is it rude that you suggested that FaceTime calls are so unimportant it's expected you'll be distracting yourself with other activities while they're going on? If not, why not?

> 250e3f7d581acff115537ba38e89ad31 is a handy random 128-bit integer that will appear in every issue of Lab 6 and can be used to search for copies.

I really like this idea for uniquely identifying emails. Our shop had been messing with something similar, but had trouble bridge the gap between the lay people and the technical minded people.

Doesn’t the MessageID work?

Can you search on that via a Gmail or Outlook client? I did not think you could, and we were looking for shorter strings. e.g. 10 character Base58 string gets you approx 10^17 uniques.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/31926/how-can-i-...

I don’t know, but you certainly can in real email clients such as mutt.

When I want to store a reference to an email in a note, I use the MessageID. It’s already there in every message, and it’s supposed to be unique.

as above

> bridge the gap between the lay people and the technical minded people

I feel like poc||gtfo already has done the pdf polygot thing to perfection...

It’s true that Simpsons Did It Already, but one difference is that the PoC||GTFO files are essentially exploits of PDF readers, whereas these files are valid PDFs that comply with the spec.

If that's true, I don't even consider a Simpsons Did It. Polyglot files exploiting common tools are far less interesting ones than those that are actually within spec. Especially if the spec wasn't designed as polyglot spec.

PoC||GTFO files render correctly in all major PDF readers, so if it isn't following the letter of the spec, it's at least adhering to a common interpretation of it.

I don't think it's a bad thing at all to have another similar zine.

For example, I miss the days when it wasn't just 2600, but we also had Blacklisted 411, THUD, etc.

29a was glorious

It’s been ~18 months and nobody’s made much progress on the CTF hidden in the first issue as far as I can tell!

this is so cool

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