Category Archives: Link

On getting very excited about buying cables

17/07
2022

So, there it is, I managed one poorly-written but intriguingly structured post, wherein I covered a number of topics, I had the full and earnest intention of doing another (hopefully somewhat better) post the following Friday, and of course there was no post. None more posts happened. Now, there was a surprisingly good reason for that, which is that I got my fibre broadband, which was great, and then I had to connect it to my own Synology router (I believe in accessing my Internet primarily through my own hardware, and using the supplied modem/router as just a modem), a product that I recommend at this point, it has some fantastic features. This was fine in theory, and it had worked well with the Virgin Media cable modem, but… It didn’t quite work with the fibre broadband modem/router. It was odd and unreliable, and definitely not fast (it looked like a DNS problem). So I spent last Friday trying everything, and eventually reinstalled the Synology router completely, and it worked and everything was wonderful and fast, and it was late and I was tired and I didn’t write anything. It’s not an excuse (even if it looks a lot like […]

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11/08
2020

This is interesting: https://www.dpreview.com/news/5249469104/researchers-release-free-ai-based-fawkes-image-privacy-tool-for-cloaking-faces – a free tool for distorting faces in photos so that they disrupt facial recognition algorithms, while remaining usable for humans. If you’re interested in the notion of the surveillance society or the technology relating to it, then this is definitely one to read.

Using Twitter

21/06
2010

I’ve started using Twitter very recently, and although it probably seems like the sort of thing I would have been all over years ago, I actually didn’t see what I would do with it. But now I do. Twitterhttp://www.twitter.com/Twitter is a rich source of instant information. Stay updated. Keep others updated. It’s a whole thing. I’m a big Facebook user (Maybe too much? Maybe it doesn’t matter?), although if the truth be told, I actually signed up by accident – back in the day, Facebook didn’t make the sign-up process terribly clear. Facebook used to be more about the networking of people, and the connections between them, then about the uploading of media, and more recently about the entering of information (and through comments and ‘liking’, the expression of opinion) by status updates, and now whole information pages on subjects. The more recent moves to encourage people to update their status in Facebook, to use their status to express opinions and broadcast information in real time have been a direct response to Twitter, which is all about broadcasting snippets of information in 140 characters or less. Twitter by comparison is a ‘one trick pony’, but it’s a hell of a […]

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15/06
2010

To steal shamelessly from the A-team: “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can get a knife, a pistol and night-vision goggles and then roam around Pakistan looking to get revenge on a terrorist mastermind in Afghanistan”

RTÉ News: American reportedly hunting bin Laden arrestedhttp://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0615/binladen.htmlPakistan authorities have detained an American armed with a dagger, a pistol and night vision goggles for allegedly trying to sneak into Afghanistan to hunt and kill Osama bin Laden.

Personally, I think he got off very, very lightly.