On writing a book about Snowden and the NSA:
By September the book was going well – 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA’s close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden’s revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text.
We took our time with the latest episode of Technical Difficulties and I think it turned out great. The episode is one of our periodic guest episodes featuring David Sparks. We talked a lot about iBooks and the process of writing the Field Guides. We also spent a good deal of time talking about our SciFi favorites and our mutual love for Star Wars.
As always, our show notes are stupidly detailed and I love them.
From CWZ:
Of all the files created, all password protected, and each containing the exact same malware, only the ZIP file with a password of ‘infected’ was scanned. This suggests that Google likely isn’t using a sizable word list, but it’s known that they are targeting the password of ‘infected’. To compensate, researchers should now move to a new password scheme, or the use of 7zip archives instead of ZIP.
I really identify with this passage by Shara Yurkiewicz:
A good friend of mine espouses the philosophy, “Life is an ocean.” When we’re sailing across its surface, we tend to overlook its depth. Instead, we focus on eddies that propel us in a particular direction. The small surface changes are often what we feel most.
QCraft is a mod of Minecraft that incorporates some interesting quantum physics concepts like entanglement. It’s Minecraft with magical blocks but it looks like a lot of fun.
By way of Graham Lee on Twitter
Katie and David invited me on Mac Power Users to talk about Devonthink and my workflows. It was a lot fun talking to fellow nerds for almost 2hrs. Just check out those show notes.
I’ll also point out that this makes episode 177 of MPU and I’ve listened to every single one every single week. It’s still one of my favorite weekly rituals. It’s awe-inspiring that they continue to have compelling discussions after this many episodes.
From Aleh Cherp:
Moreover, each reference file usually relates to more than one topic and thus cannot be placed in a specific folder.
This is how I use tags and folders. It’s mostly all folders with some short term use of tags. Folders get a bad wrap, but they provide a dense relational information with little fuss. Not to mention, it makes it pretty easy to change a relationship for a lot of files by just changing the folder structure.
My favorite part of this tutorial from PyPix is the context map. That’s how I plan code projects too. I’ve always wondered how competent Python developers planned a complex library. This example walks through creating an FTP library and I found it very useful.
Yesterday, Github announced a special education edition (see announcement).
It looks very compelling. You get private repositories for the students, for free as well as some nice access options for students and graders. Very cool.
The latest episode of Technical Difficulties brings you 30 minutes of file syncing goodness. My geeky project of adding SFTP access to some of my Dropbox files easily expanded into a discussion of Google Drive, Plex Cloud Sync, and universal file access.
If you visit the extensive show notes, you’ll also get a great guest piece from @modernscientist talking in detail about BitTorrent Sync.
