If in doubt whether this duration’s worth sitting through,
watch 10:45-12:00.
How Governments Have Tried to Block Tor
December 31st, 2011Mitchell and Webb – Best Man
November 20th, 2011Some inspiration from David Mitchell to get you through the holidays…
RancidMeat: The Dude
November 11th, 2011
The Dude network monitor is like a combination of nmap, visio, and nagios to discover / identify network devices, make a graphical image to depict topology, and monitor open ports for service health. It runs under Windows, Linux Wine, and OSX Darwine.
* It doesn’t by itself plot geographical locations, but you can use a background image of a map and arrange things yourself.
RancidMeat: FreeRapid
October 31st, 2011Freshmeat.net has changed its name, so this title’s gonna make less sense. *shrug*
Y’know those websites that host files but make you wait and fill out a captcha? FreeRapid is a download manager that knows how to interact with 230+ of em, so you can do more interesting things than stare at a countdown.
It’s mainly for when you’ve got several urls to queue up, but apparently it can save Hulu and YouTube videos too.*
It’s updated relentlessly to keep up with those sites and fetches new plugins each time you start it.
If you start it with the ” --portable” arg, it’ll keep its config files in its own directory.
* To set a preferred YouTube video quality, dig through some menus… Options/Preferences/Plugins/youtube.com/options.
Tab-Delimited vs Line-Delimited
September 16th, 2011Say you’ve got some text: tab-separated fields with newlines for records… (It’s what you get when you highlight/copy a block of spreadsheet cells, then paste into notepad.)
tabbed.txt:
A b c d E f g h
… and you’d like to make it a vertical wall of text instead.
cat tabbed.txt | sed "G" | tr "\t" "\n" > lined.txt
The sed bit adds an extra blank line between records.
lined.txt:
A b c d E f g h
That was easy enough. Now what about the reverse?
Read the rest of this entry »
Drag and Drop SSH Uploading in Windows
August 20th, 2011I routinely upload stuff to an ssh server, and I wanted to do away with the clicks needed to start a gui client or keystrokes for commandline. So below the fold is a batch script that you can drop one or more files onto, and it’ll quietly call PSCP for each with no further interaction.
If course, it’s trivial to tweak the script to call any command you want against dropped files.
Edit (2011-08-26): Added dir recursion, added an exit code, and removed the -batch arg complication.
Read the rest of this entry »
Can We Turn Texas into an Asylum?
July 14th, 2011It’s already got a big fence on the south side. Just run it all the way around and make it like “Escape from New York”.
This is why voting matters. Crazies are motivated, eager to collaborate overlooking galling details, and have no shortage of confidence. Even if you don’t particularly like a candidate (one that’d make a detailed convincing promise to do something you support), there’s still damage control to be done weeding out the worst ones.
Put another way: Crazies will vote reliably; if you don’t, they win.
Perry may well be one of the clever republican candidates, doing this stuff deliberately to court nutters rather than out of idiocy.
Of course this means primaries and local elections. They’ve gotta run their home state into the ground as a start.
* Bonus: Wikipedia says “[Amaterasu] is also said to be directly linked in lineage to the Imperial Household of Japan and the Emperor.”
RancidMeat: The Regex Coach
June 28th, 2011
If you haven’t dealt much with regular expressions, The Regex Coach is an invaluable learning tool.
Give it a pattern at the top, and in a demo string at the bottom, it highlights the matching segments.
You’ll get waaay more benefit from sed, grep, and string replacement in programming languages once you’ve trained a bit with this.
When you put this knowledge to use, there will be some variation from environment to environment when it comes to the fancy tricks: basic regex < extended regex < perl regex. Some commands have args to choose which syntax. And depending on quoting, you may need to backslash-escape stuff.
This general regex reference is excellent (nav on the left of that page links to more reference pages, as does the heading of each table).
RancidMeat: GUI diff with WinMerge
June 28th, 2011
When you’ve got a couple similar text files and you only want to make a few lines match, the diff command’s not so helpful.
WinMerge is a two-pane GUI that lets you scroll from difference to difference, deciding which blocks one pane should copy from the other. Like the command, WinMerge can also compare directories: altered files among the results can be double-clicked to see what’s inside.
Linux equivalents include Meld, KDiff, and tkdiff. Or running WinMerge Portable under Wine.
Sigh, Ancient Aliens
May 27th, 2011Here’s a skeptical linkdump in case you meet anyone who’s into Ancient Alien Theory (aka Ancient Astronauts), as in, “I don’t understand how Egyptians could’ve built the pyramids without bulldozers… therefore aliensdidit.” Nevermind the architect, Imhotep, or the unfinished and botched pyramids that litter the sands (see that link about building).
The articles below are unimportant unless you need to see how embarrasingly incoherent the History channel has become, but this vid of a guy moving multi-ton stones by himself is impressive. Technology seems to have regressed a bit in Flint, Michigan. *grin*
(via The Dumbasses Guide to Knowledge)
More from that blog:
Article: Conversations with Alien Believers
Article: Ancient Flight
Article: Golden Flyer, Alt View
Article: Ancient Communications
Article: Advanced Construction
Article: Ancient Stone Cutting
Might be worth your time:
Kenneth Feder mentions this among lots of other memes in his textbook, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. (“Paperback” and “Other Binding” are choices of different editions)
I just read it, and it’s pretty good; an easy read for a lay audience. I hadn’t previously heard about the Indian Moundbuilders‘ pyramids peppering North America. Each chapter covers hoaxes and discoveries, explanations that made sense of them at the time, and why they were eventually pared away to arrive at the current consensus.
Feder also did an interview on the MonsterTalk podcast: crazy tales + snark.