prosaic-hacker

Freedom.net was the platform. Zeroknowledge.net was the company. The first big "purge" happened in spring 2001 , not long after the Freedom.net 2.0 release. One morning logins did not work. Big all hands meeting with the message: should you stay or should you go letter at your desk. I have no inside stories of why it happened just my experiences. One of the Hills said to me on hiring "Next year I am going to be a billionaire and you will be a millionaire". 9 months later 100 people were let go in one day. I don't what happen after that but the ownership group and insiders (about 25 people) did pivot to another internetish company. I was at another company during 9/11.

Over twenty years ago I worked for a company who tried to sell Pseudonymity. http://www.zeroknowledge.com (https://web.archive.org/web/20010203195700/http://www.zerokn...)

You got 5 "Nyms" that could be used on a TOR type network. The network was made up of companies that set up exit nodes in exchange service fee. ISPs were a target but anyone who had a public server could sign up.

Some features were free with sign up. Firewall,form filler(early password manager) You could use a credit card to pay for the premium service.(Web Browsing,Secure Email, chat) There was a process to pay for the "nyms" anonymously for the justifiable paranoid. Sort of human to human crypto authentication and digital payment pre-blockchain.

Lasted a few years until venture capital ran out because nobody wanted Pseudonymity. They wanted free services and eventually got anti-Pseudonymity on facebook

One mans suggestion. Get back to using your skills (for pay or volunteer) with real people. The first world has lots ills. Work in medical, legal, educational, environmental, or social service organizations as close as you can to where you can see real life difficulties. Inspiration may not be a fast discovery. It may require more that one environment before you find it. You have to move on if after a year or so if nothing come up.

This is a scaled up version of my setup for my adult son, who is legally blind. We setup 2 of these as our "zoom" stations at the beginning of the pandemic. A good chair/sofa up close the TV, 55" UHD TV connected to a Lenovo laptop with a wireless keyboard and trackpad combo. My son's TV is also connected to the cable box, WII, DVD players (Reg & BR)

These are not some sort of high performance workstation just a cheap and dirty solution. Everything was in the house , Laptops from 2016, TVs and keyboards from the last couple of years of Black Friday sales and a few HDMI Cables.

I saw someone else's setup with a dual recliner that had integrated Fold away TV tables that the keyboard and mouse sat on. It was a gaming setup.

Well if anyone can come up with a less toxic cleaner for my toaster oven pan (and similar heavily baked grime on baking pans) it would raise my happiness level. Baking soda, vinegar and other listicle cleaning solution (pun intended) haven't worked. I will try soaking in black tea because of the article.

I quickly looked through the list (1970s and 1980s) and the definition of 1HW must be very a specific chart listing thing because there are musician who have had who had careers independent of the hit. Chris de Burgh filled 2000 seat venues multiple times in my home city as part of multi city tours over 40 years. Philip Bailey, of Earth, Wind & Fire, and Phil Collins of Genesis and his solo career are hardly 1HW.

There may be true 1HW with no other music career success but you cannot tell from this list.

As I mentioned above I teach IT for $, I fix things for fun(not bicycles, yet?) Satisfaction ROI much higher fixing. Tears of joy for a rewired glazed pottery lamp they made themself 50 years before From teaching :tidbits from Admin, occasional complements from students.

Day Job: Training Programming and Sysadmin (between 500 and 1000 workdays till retirement) Hobbies: Repairing thing for others to save money and not throw out stuff too soon (rewired lawnmower battery for $50 instead buy new $500 mower. working for 3 years, untangled badly knotted fine link gold chain,melt value $40 retail $250) Breadboard circuits for amusement not a side hustle. Wado Karate : Stopped formal classes 10 years ago(just life). Just repeating the training positions and katas I know to make sure the joints don't go bad on me. Might try Tia-chi in retirement.

I have the T1000 in my storage closet under the stair. (with SWTP CT-82 and Cat Novation acoustically coupled 300 baud modem. The T1000 had a boot Rom disk with DOS 2.11 on it. I had a memory upgrade to 512 or 640K which I used as ram disk and loaded files from the single floppy. Ran Turbo pascal on it, probably version 3-ish. Got go do some computer archaeology and resurrect it.

Bugs in production software existed in all generations. In the mid 80s I worked on DEC Vax VMS systems. Our code was mostly written in FORTRAN and Assembly Language. Our group dealt with the failures of the dev tools and bugs in the OS. Once we eliminated the fault was in our code (non trivial effort) we brought the proof of the problem to the vendor who responded in a not unreasonable time.( We did buy millions of dollars of equipment from them)

Bugs existed in the early 90's DOS and Windows environments and we worked around them with no vendor support. Bugs existed in the mid 90's web dev and we worked around them.

In fall 1975 in my senior year of High school, I toured the local Junior College (Vanier CEGEP) and saw a lab with a HP 9830A driving a HP flatbed plotter producing Biorhythm plots. I applied to that college and a year later the lab become my second home. I learned the 9830A Rocky Mountain Basic, wrote and shared many program on cassette tapes. The most fun was shared game we called Cosmic Pinball. Shells fired at static planets with the ballistic plots drawn out on the flatbed plotter. Longest run took 18 minutes before it finally hit 1 of the 7 planets. I should rewrite it in python.

Not the OP. In my case the client want many all-in-ones.I proposed a small CPU to fit into the notches on the back of a Specific monitor. I used an Intel Compute stick which only needs power, an HDMI cable and a powered USB hub. This gave me an All in One Computer functionally for less than half the price. It also had the benefit of being up-gradable by swapping out the Compute stick for a newer model. When the client saw it he thought it was an all in one and thankfully appreciated the cleverness. (Financially, I got the contract)

Very elegant and very unimplementable at the time. The make They seem to avoid the under sized address ranges which time and again plague computing. eg. -IBM mainframe OSs with below/above the line addressing. -The 1MB 8086 & Dos Limit and the hacks that followed (EMS,XMS) etc.) for more than a decade. The Disk access size limitations in the same era. - IPV4 address depletion. The authors in 1980 seem to be aware the issue would be there but I don't see how the thrashing could have been avoided even if 1980's developers/designers had read the paper when it was published.

I hope this gets read by more that the cadre of people who already program in Perl. As I am writing this there are no other comments. I hope someone beats me for first comment. (Just checked I am first and alone)

I first used Perl in 1991ish to Parse a Command and Control Language for Military Naval ships,based I what I learned out of the Programming Perl 1st Ed.

Documentation matters. Really good training materiel can elevate a language.

In spite of Perl's loss of attention to Python et al. it remains in my tool box and used when appropriate.

TOC and Index method

If I have to test on a topic I know sort of intuitively but look thing up each time I do it because I do it infrequently I do the follow to have all the details current.

I take a trusted source of information on the topic and paste the text into a word processor that can build table of contents and Indexes. Step 1 I use the Multilevel TOC heading feature and create a heading for each paragraph of the document. Splitting long paragraph into pieces. The act of having to write headings per paragraph means you have pay attention to the core meaning of it. (I use a 5 or 6 level deep Toc)

Step 2. Create an Index at the end of the document and use the semi automated Key word tagger to mark all occurrence of an expression. It should given you a 1 level index entry with many page numbers. Go to each entry and add a 2 level index tag descriptor until all the page numbers have 2 level entries.

By the time you are done you will have visited this document from many angles and repeatably read the information and have a well integrated understanding of it. If the document has procedural steps to follow when you tag one of those sections decide if you know how to do that or repeat the process for practice.

I was a new programmer in the late 70's. I remember hanging in local computer stores and trying out the programming capabilities of the system they had on display. Mostly basic, one had FORTRAN. Inadvertently helped to sell a 10k-ish (CDN $) Unix system (Fortune 32:16 https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=767) because of the programs I wrote and ran while a potential client was there. The owner never bothered me for loitering in his store again.

The cheaper ones included the TRS80, Timex-Sinclair, the TI 99/4A. Turn them on and code. Yes I RTFMed first.

The best set of videos explain how hardware can display video is in Ben eater site. It assumes VGA. https://eater.net/vga

I don't what monitor type was assumed in this design but a similar approach could create a classic NTSC signal into a TV. Here is a solution with a micro controller http://eyetap.org/ece385/lab5.htm

Part Time Lecturer in Vocational Computer Support Program in a Community College. Three digits worth of work days to retirement. Post work hobbies already prepared. Family of 3. Seven year old paid off car that's getting 20% 1st 5 year usage due to Covid induced remote teaching.

Same Issue for me. Using Firefox beta.

"Most companies do not keep their books in spreadsheets." Iceberg issue (only n% visible). Most companies do not have the self awareness to know that their ERP systems and server class database apps are shadowed by an enormous volume of spreadsheets created by their own employees. Audits and Auditors will never see them because they are not part of the official work flow.

I have seen a case where entry happened in the spreadsheet and "locally processed/validated" in some way that satisfied the clerical person. Then the now "correct" mass of data was cut and pasted from Excel into the ERP system which used a development control that worked like a crippled Excel sheet.

They did this to avoid the cryptic and most unhelpful errors from the ERP system, if the data was not ERP rules "perfect".

I have an handicapped adult son and have been debating what to do in the long run. For those who can understand support them to the max. Just from the people I know with adult children who CANNOT understand legal and financial issues there has to be some tunable form of guardianship that does not cost too much , does not require enormous paper work, and can last after the parent death.

Right now its self managed , Complex and expensive private trustees, or an unrevocable guardianship by an uncaring incompetent bureaucracy.

I have played this game for months at a time and then abandon it. I have a backup file of a Level 66 character on one of my backup keys from 2014 . Maybe time to continue the game.

Being an ordinary success is fine too. Been there, done that, more than once. Being fierce worked sometime and not others. Found the sweet spot in some companies, fired in others. Moderate success as a consultant (made a living for 7 years), failed at other business(lost a years salary). Learned how to write resumes out of that pastiche so I am still working on nerd stuff 3/4 time, enough to save money, leaving me time to play with other fun nerd stuff.

Heard a "rockstar" lamenting he would never win Grammy because of his niche but was not unsatisfied with the 60 year arc of his career.

Retrospectively, I see I could have been a contender several time but me then (brash) nor me now (wiser, possibly) could have been capable of elevating myself from a working nerd to a famous rich nerd.

I have a First Gen iPad with a dozen or so contemporary applications the still work because they do not touch the net at all. I also have hundreds of books that were legally downloaded. (humble bundles and creative common). It is my Replacement for an alarm clock beside my bed. I do have a list of sites that are lean enough to be read on it. Text mostly. I serves its purpose.

I really do not want this machine to fail because use it often. It would be lots of work recreate the convenience and familiarity of use if all the failed was a 50 cent button.

(PS it is on the net on my IOT "don't trust the IP stack" "vlan" of my home network [3 dumb router style DD-wrt units] in case it does get hit by a site attacking 10 year old iPads. I have my TVs, DVD players with apps and Guest access on it. May I will get another dumb router for the guests)

Note my screen name. I have been doing, learning, and teaching system admin and programming for a very long time. It has always been by Hacking. It does have another description in my mind : Learning by trying things out. This has nothing to do with malicious actions. It has to do with the tactile feel of doing something to consolidate learning.

I have a hobby of playing with breadboard electronics. Hacking at it has given me much more practical understand than any EE equation. Math is not the Limiting issue. Doing it made it real.

A blogger suggested picking a skill that has nothing to do with your core interests. I learned crocheting in a week by hacking and getting expert advise from my 86 year old Mom. Yes I created 4 of the most ugly swatches imaginable but the last one looked almost acceptable for newbie.

Hacking can be applied to any learning process.

Viral expansion of any tool depends on (pardon the pandemic reference) a super spreader event or 10. Success needs: 1 A killer app. Pascal/Turbo Pascal, Email/nascent Internet, VisiCalc/Apple II, 123/IBM PC. 2 decade long over night success like Python

I acquired my "10K hour" badge with Pascal in the late 70s (CDC Cyber 6600) and Mid 80s (PC) and then again with Perl (late 80s to early 2Ks) when each of these peaked. Coming back to the 2015+ versions (Lazarus / Perl 5.24+) of both was nostalgic but the communities were in the backwaters of programming due to viral success of some many others.

A compelling event would have to happen to elevate them again. It could happen: Something pushed Ada to almost triple its "popularity" ( to < 1%.) According to PYPL (https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html) in the last year.

Box line Text sort of does what I want. https://github.com/jncraton/box-line-text

The blank or edit file can be saved locally as URL or .HTM file and can be reloaded and continue to be edited.

The UI is missing help, its only on the github page. Since its just a html file I embedded the help in a comment in the page. I just view source to look it up. It only adds a few hundred byte to each file.

Some functions don't work for me. When I get a round tuit I will will try to figure out how it works.

In spite of this it is enough to create impromptu drawings to support a lecture. I save them and give it to the students as part of the notes.

I don't know where you live but companies have been leasing computer equipment for decades. Usually for 3 to 5 years or monthly for special projects.

Over 20 years ago I joined a company as Director of IT. In the first 10 days I cancelled several thousands of dollar of monthly leases of equipment that siting unused from projects that were over but not returned. Nobody looked at the leases while the Directors position was being filled.

Random IT leasing article from google. https://www.costowl.com/rental/equipment-leasing-it-cost.htm...

A couple of month Pre-pan our Computer Support vocational training department intercepted 2 dozen Dell E5420 with i5-2520M CPUs on the way to electronic recycling. We upgraded them to 1TB SSD and 16GB memory, half Win 10 half Debian 10.5.

Post-Pan, they became our workhorse remote training platform even running both Hyper-V or Virtual Box to teach virtual installations.

Admin had budgets for new laptops for remote teaching. Nothing offered had the specs to replace these upgraded 2012 vintage machines. (Budget was repurposed).

It may not directly pay but his reputation as Security Expert is enhanced.

I don't know if "Big Internet" (ICANN, IANA, IETF, RIRs) does not have its own security group like the Commercial companies do (Project Zero, various EH companies). RFC3013???

We have to depend on people who can take time to look for exploits in exchange for reputation.