Apparently, AOL Instant Messenger is changing their authentication method, which will break support for some existing clients. Adium is among them
Continue reading post "Farewell Adium?"Computers & Tech posts page 11
Once again had to recover some of my Firefox tabs after an update (this happened before). I haven’t reduced my tab count since last time as planned (currently at 570). Gonna have to work on that. I think having so many makes Firefox more unstable and slow.
Mac Update: Snow Leopard to El Capitan
A few weeks ago, I finally made the jump from Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) to 10.11 (El Capitan) on my primary computer. I had been using 10.11 at work for months, but not at home. I was probably one of the last holdouts on hardware that could be updated.
Continue reading post "Mac Update: Snow Leopard to El Capitan"After a recent OS and Firefox update, I found myself with a window with 120+ empty tabs in place of several hundred non-empty tabs that I’ve built up over the years. I thought they were gone. Luckily, the Tab Groups plugin that I use (formerly built into the browser) automatically backs up the tabs when it is updated, which had happened 6 days before. I was able to recover 465 tabs. Yes, I have a tab problem. I find articles daily, and often don’t have the time to read through them right away, so I save them. I leave open pages I find in searching for solutions to problems I’m not yet ready to solve. I’m trying to read through or bookmark tabs over time, but I think I’m adding faster than subtracting. I must say, Firefox was super fast with 465 less tabs, and I would feel less scattered if I got them under control, so I will try to put more effort into reduction. I think a better bookmarking system would help a lot with that.
Almost lost some work with git. I was using git reset --hard to rewrite some history, but I forgot that I had some unstaged changes. Luckily, I had stashed it previously and still had the call in my terminal buffer, so I was able to get the object ID and apply it after verifying it was the right one with git stash -p show $ID.
Wow, the highest cost (31) bcrypt hashing of a password with PHP’s password_hash() function is quite safe from brute force attacks from my laptop: It ran for almost 282 CPU minutes trying to compute one hash before I stopped it.
Apparently, setting a running Apple laptop on top of a closed one can cause the running one to sleep at random times. Must be magnets aligning.
Algorithmically derived passwords
I’ve been considering a new password storage method for a while now. Currently, I have a system where I compose passwords of pieces of several different values that I have memorized. Each value has a key that I have associated in my head to the value, and I have a file with the keys for each site. Lately, I’ve also been doing part of the password as something derived from the name of the site. This has helped somewhat with making the passwords memorable, but I still frequently have to look at my password file. If someone got a hold of this file, it would take some dedication and knowledge of me, or at least access to the plain texts of some of the passwords, to crack the system. Nevertheless, I’ve been looking for something easier to use and preferably more secure at the same time.
I’ve been looking at options like YubiKeys and 1password, but they have their issues. Today, I came across a cool option wherein passwords are algorithmically derived from a single password and the site name. This is sort of like what I’m doing in my head for some of my newer passwords, but much more advanced, able to produce hash passwords of a desired length and even with character constraints. I read about the idea from a post by Tab Atkins, who has his own solution freely available to use. The comments on his post also led me to SuperGenPass, a similar idea.
Both are of these options built purely using web technologies, making them easy to use anywhere. Both are open source, so I can check their code, verify they are doing what I want, and modify them so they can be slightly different. Neither need to store anything (unless you change the config for SuperGenPass) or require accounts. They have an option to work as a single-page file that can work even offline, wherein you type your master password and the name of the site, and they will give you the password in plain-text to copy elsewhere. SuperGenPass also has a bookmarklet option that can be run from the page you are entering the password on (obviously web only) by using an iframe (requires a third-party server) that can put the password directly into the password field, bypassing the need to copy the password at all.
So these are definitely interesting options to make working with passwords much easier, and the passwords I have for each site can be more complicated and theoretically secure than what I use currently. The biggest danger would be, if someone figures out my master password and what settings I’ve used for the generators, they will have access to any passwords I’ve created. I would probably do multiple master passwords, at least a normal one and an extra-secure one, just to limit the number of accounts they could access. I could even throw in a simple modification to the master password derived from the site name to make it even less of a problem.
Moving folder symlink and trailing slash
It caught me by surprise that if you use mv on a symlink to a folder and have a trailing slash on the path, it will move the entire original folder rather than the symlink. As a simple example, if you have a symlink ‘symlink’ pointing to the folder ‘original’ and run mv symlink/ new-symlink, you will end up with ‘original’ now being named ‘new-symlink’ and a symlink ‘symlink’ still pointing to the now non-existant ‘original’. Luckily, merely reversing the arguments will move the folder back to its original location: mv new-symlink symlink/. The symlink becomes like a magic portal. I probably wouldn’t have run into this if it weren’t for the ‘fish’ shell adding trailing slashes when doing tab completions on folder paths or symlinks to them.
Command-line weather with wttr.in
Cool, lightweight, and simple ASCII weather forecast site that can be curled: wttr.in. It does user-agent sniffing to show plain, colored text for curl, wget, and the like so that it looks nice on the command line, while browsers get HTML with a similar appearance. The “home page” does IP lookup to guess your location. Results of curl wttr.in/cleveland:
