Things That Delight Me – 3: Photography Apps

I’ve been a fairly serious photographer since about 1993, and even invested the requisite decade in perfecting black and white darkroom printing – just in time for the technology to vanish from commercial use.

Now, you can do amazing photographic things with a smart phone, and there are apps like Snapchat, Hipstamatic, and Prisma to do it. It used to be the thing to sneer at people who’d just grab an image in Photoshop and run some filters on it, but the filters are getting cool! And interesting! But most of all: fun. They’re taking advantage of the massive amount of computing we can carry around in our hand, to do face analysis and then apply the results.

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Email Security 101

At MISTI in 2013 I was on the closing panel with Alex Hutton (at the time CSO of Zions Bank) and Chris Nickerson (a “red teamer”) – the topic was the distressing state of internet security. Hint: it’s distressing. Somewhere in the course of the panel I decided to do a “show of hands poll” and asked everyone in the room:
How many of you use the google 2 factor authentication on your gmail account?

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Soap!

Hot weather is a good time for soap-making. It makes it easy to mix the oils: leave your shea butter and coconut oil on the porch in the sun and they are liquid in 10 minutes. Molds dry quickly in the heat, and the soap doesn’t have any problem gelling – in the winter I have to leave it in the oven overnight (risking a soap volcano!)  Summer soap just sits on the counter overnight and it’s ready to go in the morning.

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No Tekken 7 Swimsuits in West Thanks to “SJWs”!!!!!

From:

Tekken 7 is already out in Japan, and with this game’s release includes swimsuit costumes for all of the fighters, men, women, and beast alike. As expected from a Tekken game, the costumes are over-the-top all around, regardless of gender or…animal. The game will release in the West in 2017, and a Tekken fan reached out to the series’ producer, Katsuhiro Harada, via Twitter and point blank asked if the US release would indeed have these swimsuits. Harada responded with, “Ask your country’s SJWs. HAHAHAHAHA.”

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Sunday Sermon

For the present I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who

Étienne de La Boétie

Étienne de La Boétie

has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!

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Turkey Coup Attempt

The media in the US are uncertain as to whether the US oligarchy is going to back Erdogan, or not. So their language is carefully pared-back, like their language regarding torture, or the imperial wars that the US has waged since 1990. They accept terms like “collateral damage”* and “enhanced interrogation” or “ethnic cleansing” instead of actionable terms like “area bombing” “torture” and “genocide” – the US is signatory to various treaties that criminalize “area bombing” so let’s just call it “unfortunate mis-identification” and the problem’s solved. [Read more…]