Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

Living the future in quarantine and more – This Geek in Review for 24 Apr 2020

Back in the 80s, everyone talked about how cool it would be to be able to have video calls and work from home, and how did that work out for us? Apple added Facetime in 2010, and I can count the number of Facetime calls I’ve ever done on two hands. Now the coronavirus has been driving us to the online world we were promised.

Need something beside Netflix to watch online? How about checking out
the free shows being offered by HBO. Maybe you prefer YouTube over HBO? Here’s a way to watch YouTube videos in 3D with others, including text and video chat.

No, 5G is not the cause of the coronavirus, but some people are believing the conspiracy and shooting at cell towers. I’ve heard the telecommunication workers are also getting death threats.

Here’s a little blooper with the special effects of Star Trek Voyager when they left a cursor on the screen.

In the 90s, point and click adventures were a big deal. Here is the concept of a Seinfeld point and click adventure. I’m hoping George will be a non-playing character because, really, who would want to be him in the game.

Along with point and click adventures, BBS games (called door games) were big. They made such an impact on the developers at Slack that those developers used BBS dor games names in the documentation for the API.

Don’t you hate organizing your MIDI files?

April 24, 2020
This Geek in Review for 17 Apr 2020

I’m all for the if it ain’t broke then don’t touch it mentality, but with technology 10 years is an eternity. Yet governments are having problems because they are still using COBOL, a language from 60 years ago. Now I wish I would have paid better attention to my COBOL classes in college. Along the same line, because Boeing didn’t want to upgrade the computers in the 737 Max, the same hardware is now holding up a fix.

We’re all stuck at home, so how about checking out
Wizards of the Coast’s page of free D&D materials and resources. I also stumbled across this list of games to play online.

Did you ever wonder what the sheet music for various video games would looke like? Wonder no more!

Halt and Catch Fire was not the most popular show on AMC, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. Here’s a retrospective on what made it great. The secret to enjoying the show is to not nitpick how the technology is depicted. It took me a few showings until I got over the problems with the technology and to sit back and enjoy the story. If you haven’t seen it, then go watch it!

I sometimes wonder what I would put on my gravestone. He died out of spite sounds pretty good, and that is why I totally understand building a Nintendo Switch out of spite because of scalpers.

Finally, if you want a new game to play during quarantine, how about a version of Space Invaders where the invaders are replaced with the letters that spell virus? Requires an Atari 2600 and an SD cart if you want to play it on real hardware, which any self-respective geek would have in their basement or lair.

April 17, 2020
April in Ohio – and yes, I hear birds singing

April 17, 2020
I think I need to run app updates

April 14, 2020
🎶 Hello soda my old friend 🎶

April 12, 2020
Free streaming shows & movies and more – This Geek in Review for 10 Apr 2020

Everyone is stuck inside for the foreseeable future, and luckily, there is a ton of streaming content that is available for free. There is
Voleflix with public domain movies. Next up is all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica streaming on SYFY. Adultswim is offering all five seasons of Samurai Jack. And, by the end of May, you’ll be able to watch the first 19 seasons (and part of Season 20) in the correct aspect ratio. The last one surprises me after reading about all the flack FXX received when they first put every episode of The Simpsons online.

Just one of the many sight gags lost when The Simpsons is cropped.

Zoom‘s greatest feature is the ability to have virtual backgrounds. If you are a DC fan, then here is a collection of DC Comics backgrounds straight from the publisher.

Are you missing the sounds of Nina from corporate accounts, the soothing tones of the copier, or the gurgle of the water cooler? Then Reichenbergerstr 121 will bring the sounds of the office to you.

Sure, we can’t go out or congregate, but the worst part of COVID-19 is that it might mean no new emoji in 2021!

A metaphor for social distance to flatten the curve.

April 10, 2020
Some Good News with John Krasinski

You may know him as Jake Ryan, but more likely you know him as Jim Halpert.

I’ve already subscribed!

And it is so good I will not rant about vertical video.

April 4, 2020
Is your boss spying on you? and more – This Geek in Review for 3 Apr 2020

I know what you are doing.

I’m sorry, but if you can’t trust your employees when they work at home then your business has some major issues. Middle managers everywhere are scrambling to buy spyware to monitor their employees working at home.

Hopefully you’ll forgive me for posting a link to TikTok, but this hack was too good to share. Here’s how to make it look like your paying attention in your Zoom conferences.

The repercussions from COVID-19 are more than just economical. With the closing of the Las Vegas casinos the food source of 4,000 pigs is now gone. The farmer is scrambling to find food for his hogs.

One of the most influential companies in modern history was founded 44 years ago, Apple. It’s been one heck of a ride. This week I set up my //c+ as a terminal to use for work.

Working like it’s 1989!

Here’s a look at weird internet careers. My current job didn’t exist when I graduated college, so for those out there that don’t know what you want to do, find something to do while you wait.

Luckily, I made sure my library card was active before the stay-at-home orders were released. This allows me to check out books through Overdrive. If you don’t have an active library card, Archive.org has lifted their limits on checking out books. An Adobe account is required to check out books, and the one I tested downloaded as a scanned book. That means I can’t load it on the Kindle, but I can load it on a laptop. I’m not going anywhere, so it’s not that big of deal.

The spread of the spring breakers

I don’t know what’s scarier, how fast the infected spread across the US, or the ability to track so many people solely by their smartphone.

RetroFair2020

Since the vintage computer fests have been canceled throughout the US, some intrepid souls have brought it online under the RetroFair2020 banner. Scroll through and watch delights of computer past. I’m always fascinated by old Unix boxes:

April 3, 2020
I think I was robbed of a Ho Ho!

April 2, 2020
Blocking ads on your home network

You’re home, and you’re thinking of projects to do. What about setting up your home network to block ads?

What is ad blocking?

You may have used an extension in your browser to block ads, but when you block them on your network, you don’t have to configure each device. It’s not without it’s faults, some things will stop working. For example, if you try to click on any search results marked with Ad, the link won’t work. But, your browsing will be faster and I’ve noticed that ads in iPhone games are blocked.

One other con against blocking is that you are depriving the website of revenue, revenue that they may need. It is nice to be able to enable the ads on certain sites, but that’s a real hassle when you’re blocking for the entire network. I don’t have a solution for this.

How it works

When you block ads on an entire network, what you’re actually doing is blocking access to the ad server in the Domain Name Service (DNS). DNS is used as a phone book for the internet, translating names such as ryancollins.org to its IP address so your browser can find the site. People smarter than I collect lists of ad servers, and with that information, the servers can be blocked with DNS. This means the ad blocking will work on any device, without configuration.

Two options

These aren’t the only options, but they are two very good options. The first one is the easiest and the second one is for the geeks among us.

nextdns.io

NextDNS is the easiest to get going. By following their directions for setting up your router, you can be ready to go in a few minutes. The site is currently free, and will remain free for up to 300K queries a month once it gets out of beta. Will 300K queries be enough normal usage? I don’t really know. My home network had over 3M queries last month, so probably not.

They do have the option of apps for your devices, so the blocking can follow you outside of your home network. But, if you’re holed up at home like us, that might not be a big concern right now.

Pi-Hole

Besides having a really cool name, Pi-hole is pretty powerful. It is designed be set up and ran on a separate machine, and Raspberry Pis are pretty inexpensive. Setting up Pi-hole and running Pi-hole does require some work. If that scares you, it may be worth the $1.99/month to stick with NextDNS.

The Pi My Life tutorial is pretty nice how how to set up a Raspberry Pi and your home network.

Other advantages

Regular DNS travels over the internet in plain text, allowing anyone to see the sites you are visiting. Your ISP or wireless carrier could be (probably is) collecting this information to sell to the highest bidder. If you set up pi-hole to use DNS-Over-HTTPS then your DNS queries are encrypted, and snooping eyes can’t see what you’re doing. Well, that’s not entirely true. They can’t know the names of the sites you are visiting, but they can know the IP addresses of those sites. You’d have to use a VPN to hide this information.

Downsides

Every once in awhile I have to turn Pi-hole off because a website won’t work correctly or a link wouldn’t work. It’s not too often though. And the lack of ads during normal browsing is well worth the little pain.

April 1, 2020