Ryan Collins

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Category: Geek

The Coronavirus Edition – This Geek in Review for March 20, 2020

What an absolutely bonkers week. We sent students home at the end of the day last Friday for 3 weeks. I put together an online learning program in 4 days. Going out is grinding to a halt while the stock market tanks. One bright spot was the sign language interpreter with Governor Dewine’s press conferences.

Unfortunately, she hasn’t been at the last few press conferences.

Another crazy aspect of this pandemic is the scarcity of toilet paper. But where humanity taken, the internet giveths. Howmuchtoiletpaper.com will help you calculate how many days your TP supply will last.

One of the greatest fears of the novel coronavirus is the exponential growth of the afflicted. These coronavirus simulations show how to flatten the growth curve. The simulations help explain why quarantines aren’t the best solution.

A lot of celebrities are doing their shows where they can, and Conan is no exception.

Handshakes are out, so why not put the Vulcan salute in.

A ton of movies are now delayed including the next Bond movie. Almost all of the theaters in the nation are closed, which is causing most movies to be delayed. You know it’s gotten bad when a few Hollywood studies are actually putting their new releases online early for $20 rentals.

March 20, 2020
Taco Bell and more – This Geek in Review for 13 Mar 2020

When I was at Miami University, the up town Taco Bell closed, and we were stuck living life without having access to a Taco Bell. Even as it left, I never was as dedicated at these Penn State students holding vigil for closed Taco Bell. Maybe a literary magazine dedicated to Taco Bell would help?

Before Sony brought the Playstation to fruition, they were working with Nintendo for the next gen console. Nothing ever came from this joint venture although one Nintendo Play Station has been found and it recently sold for $360,000 at auction.

Do you think indoor smoking bans really protect you from 2nd hand smoker?Maybe not.

What do you do when you don’t have CGI? You film everything live action:

And finally, the Verge has put together a visual history of the Xbox Dashboard.

March 13, 2020
Amazon Prime members get free unlimited full-size photo storage with Amazon Photos

It was Saturday morning and I was going through my RSS feeds when I read an article talking about photo backups. That’s when I learned that Amazon Photos offers unlimited photo storage with an Amazon Prime membership.

Full resolution images

Google Photos offers unlimited photo storage too, albeit at a lower resolution of 2048×2048. While this is a pretty good resolution, my iPhone 11 can take images in the 4000×3000 range. You can purchase storage to save the full resolution images, but why do that when you can save them all to Amazon Photos.

Family vault

Another nice feature is the family vault. Currently we share a Flickr Pro account to backup and share our pictures in the family. Now we can do that at no extra cost over our Amazon Prime membership.

Family Vault offers the option of adding all pictures automatically or selecting the pictures to share. I’m going to recommend that Grace does not upload all of her pictures.

Videos aren’t free

Amazon Photos offers 5GB of storage for videos, of which I went over when I uploaded my phone. Amazon offers reasonable pricing, and for $19.99/year I purchased 100GB of space. That should do me for awhile.

Printing

Printing pictures starts at $0.12 a print with your choice of glossy or matte. I haven’t done this yet, so I don’t know the quality. The app makes it easy to order.

On the web

When you visit Amazon Drive on the web, all of your pictures show up in the Pictures folder, with a folder for each device backed up.

From there you can download or upload additional pictures.

Kicking myself

Amazon started this offer back in 2016. For the last 4 years I’ve been trying to make due with Flickr Pro. It’s a nice service, but doesn’t offer enough over Amazon Photos.

March 9, 2020
Social Media Politics and more – This Geek in Review for 6 Mar 2020

Facebook has lost its luster with me awhile ago, and part of the reason was the issues with politics. Apparently, I can’t blame social media for all of our polarized politics. It’s still not enough to get me back to FB. And yes, it is ironic if you are reading this article because I shared it to my Facebook page.

A couple of years ago I looked at Vivaldi as an alternative browser. I liked it a lot, but then Brave came along. Brave has all sorts of privacy features, and now it is found that Brave is the most private browser.

Seventeen years ago, the Etch-a-Sketch became a very popular toy by being in a movie with Will Ferrell. It’s still a frustrating toy due to its reliance on right angles. Now, you can finally draw curves on the Etch-a-Sketch!

Lego bricks and Star Wars – The Total Package

I’d like to see more builds where the choice of Lego bricks is limited, but it’s exciting when you see a master build:

When you are going on a trip, you can estimate your gas costs with a calculator. But, when there is an app for everything, there is also a website for everything else. CostToDrive.com will calculate the costs of a trip for you based on the actual car you’re driving.

Back in 2015, the CEO of Gravity Payments set the minimum wage of every employee to $70,000. While the transition had some rough patches the end result 5 years later is pretty positive.

What happens when you’re 95 years old and your Gameboy breaks? You send it off to Nintendo who apparently still has new Nintendo Gameboys to use as a replacement.

The VHS Vault is a great collection of old videotapes that you can now watch on the Internet Archive.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

I had no idea that the Cyndi Lauper song Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was a cover!

March 6, 2020
Keybase offers encrypted storage, encrypted instant messaging, teams support, and web hosting

More and more of life leaves bits of digital information about us on numerous devices and services. This may include cloud services. Keybase is a service I’ve been checking out as way to securely save and share information, encrypted.

Sell it to me Goz

Keybase provides messaging services, cloud storage, and team messaging services, along with encryption to support everything. Nothing leaves your machine unencrypted. There is no way for anyone at Keybase to look at anything you’ve said or stored in Keybase.

The cloud storage shows up as a drive on your operating system of choice (Windows, macOS, and Linux). Inside of this storage is a private area for your use, or there can be shared folders. Files placed in the drive are encrypted before leaving your machine. No one can read your data, not even anyone at Keybase.

The public folder in your Keybase drive is available over https://. Files placed in the public can be shared with a simple web link. You can even host full websites.

Even if you don’t use Keybase, you can use the website to encrypt data meant for my eyes only. On the Keybase website there is a form that allows you to encrypt data for a Keybase user.

Once the data is encrypted you can safely email it or send it through a messaging service. Only the recipient will be able to decrypt the message. No one else will be able to read it.

I am Spartacus!

A key piece of Keybase is the ability to authenticate people. Well, you’re not guaranteed that the person you are talking to is who you think it is, but it is pretty close. A user of Keybase can prove to Keybase that the user is in control of various accounts and domain names (or websites). If you visit my profile on Keybase, you can see that I verified several different accounts. For an attacker to masquerade as me, they would have to take over several accounts on different services. I secure most of the sites with two factor authentication, which would make the task even harder.

Using

After installing the software, you can immediately start using it for chatting and storage. Be sure to save your pass phrase somewhere safe. If you lose it, you will lose your account and everything in it. Keybase cannot restore any information because all of your data is encrypted. Additional devices can be approved from any device that is already signed in. You can set up the software on your desktop, and then approve your smartphone from the desktop.

Files can be stored securely in the mounted drive. I’ve started to use this storage for sensitive documents such as tax returns and medical forms & bills.

There isn’t a search function to find others, you’ll have to know their name to add them and start chatting.

Teams

Everyone talks about Slack and Discord, but Keybase also lets you set up teams and channels. The teams also can share data.

Git

I haven’t played around with the Git features. Git is a distributed version control system, and with Keybase, you can store your repository in an encrypted form and share it with your team or selected others.

This seems complicated

Security is tough, and encryption adds another layer of complexity. Keybase takes away a lot of the difficulties on staying safe and secure. Also, any security assumes your machine is not infected with any sort of malware or viruses. If someone has control of your machine, then all bets are off.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you sign up. Even if you’re not going to use it for chatting the other encrypted features make Keybase useful.

March 2, 2020
The passing of the creator of copy & paste and more – This Geek in Review for 28 Feb 2020

Technology has become ubiquitous, and it’s hard to imagine some of the foundations of how things work. Copy and paste is one of them. The creator of copy and paste passed away this past week. Xerox Parc had no idea what they had, but I don’t fault them. Back then, personal computers was the wild west. People and companies didn’t know what to think, and problems were all new. Mr. Tesler created something that we take for granted. One of the complaints of the original iPhone was the lack of copy and paste. The iPhone didn’t get copy and paste for two years with iOS 3.0. The New York Times has more information.

Oh my goodness

As a parent, you learn not to give in to cuteness because sometimes kids are playing you. But, the new Baby Yoda from Hasbro has grown my heart 3 sizes in one day

I can’t imagine editing photos on a black & white Macintosh, but version 1 ran on the Macintosh Plus.

Steve Jobs practiced mindfulness, and researchers estimate that when Steve Jobs died at 56, his brain was only 27. I’m hoping playing violent video games will do the same for me.

One of the reasons I haven’t gotten a Nintendo Switch is how Nintendo handles app purchases. Their treatment of saved games isn’t but better. This past week they’ve shown even more contempt for their users with the handling of saved games with Animal Crossing.

Google is putting up quick little games in in HTML 5. Head on over to Gamesnacks for a quick play.

Huey Lewis and the C64

In the 80s, Jma Mitch had a Commodore 64 and Electronics Arts Music Construction Kit. Although I don’t approve of the C64, I can’t not share this. Jma Mitch only did Huey Lewis songs recently found his disks. Enjoy!

Here’s the entire playlist

February 28, 2020
The ILM magic behind The Mandalorian – this is amazing!

I was going to write about the Industrial Light & Magic’s technology for The Mandalorian in this week’s This Geek in Review, but I was too excited to wait. It all starts with this behind the scene look at the production of Disney’s The Mandalorian. As you watch the videos and look at the pictures, it’s hard to see the tech. The backgrounds are created from the screens, not out on location.

Unfortunately, the behind the scenes look isn’t as indepth as I would like, but The Mandalorian: This Is the Way and Forging new paths for filmmakers on ‘The Mandalorian’ has more information behind the technology. In a nutshell, over half of The Mandalorian is recorded on a stage. And not just any stage. This stage has LED panels 20′ tall that circle the stage 270 degrees. That’s all well and good, productions have been using projection behind the actors since the beginning of movies. The difference now is computers and videogames.

Powered by Unreal

Using Epic’s Unreal game engine, the production is able to create realistic looking backgrounds for the actors. The difference between this and using the older projection technology is the ability to change the perspective relative to the camera.

In real life, as a camera moves through a room, the background perspective also changes. This is why you notice pretty quickly if the background is a static image, like a matte painting, or a projected moving image. For The Mandalorian, the Unreal game engine knows where the camera is, and what it is looking at, in 3D space, and can modify the background to match.

Advantages

The sets also used practical effects, adding tables, chairs, etc. to the stage, which helped make the different locations feel real. Using LED panels and Unreal also offer other advantages. The actors didn’t have to imagine where the horizon was or where they should be looking. Since the panels emit light, adjusting lighting on the set used an iPad app. This was a process that was pretty time intensive in the past.

Getting sunrise or sunset shots are tough. Go watch Aquaman if you want to see a lot of CGI generated sunrises. The technology used here allowed the director to take as long as they wanted to record a scene during a sunset.

The director could also change the components of a scene on the fly, adding or removing items from the background easily.

Game changing

As I watched the first season of The Mandalorian, I was impressed by the varied locations and set work. Both gave the impression of a very expensive production. I assumed this was because it was Disney and Star Wars, which one would assume would get as much money as they need. How wrong could I be, it was this new technology.

I can’t wait to see what they can do with this.

I have spoken.

February 24, 2020
Are video games art and more – This Geek in Review for 21 Feb 2020

What happens when your 75 year old mother plays through Red Dead Redemption 2? You get an incredible essay on videogames and the concept of art. There are spoilers in the article, so beware if you don’t want to be spoiled about RDR2.

I guess one way of taking revenge against a former employer is to try to sabotage their self-driving cars. Not the smartest way, but one way.

This original arcade game looks frustrating as all get out, but also, very fun. Both features of great games.

Apparently, there is an internet service call Chaturbate. No comment on the service, but I find it interesting that real life models are being threatened by a computer generated girl. Interesting times, especially once the computer generated girls can be driven by AI. Instead of one model broadcasting to many, one model would be able to carry on one-to-one conversations with as many people as possible. Remember the movie Her? The computer with the voice of Scarlett Johansen was carrying on a relationship with hundreds of guys.

Once the romanticism of the first city on Mars wears out, reality will set in.

Did you ever wonder how the motions of groups of zebrafish larvae affected each individual animal’s brain development and behavior but didn’t want to read a Ph.D. thesis on the matter? Well, wait no more because you can watch an interpretive dance on the subject instead!

Sometimes, you’re Dwight, other times you’re Jim. Here’s for the times you’re Jim. Be sure to put the browser window into full screen before clicking on the site.

No arm, no problem

February 21, 2020
How to use Facebook without using Facebook

It was a cold, dark day, November 24, 2006, when I joined Facebook and posted this gem:

I’m assuming it was cold and dark since it was November. The date is the day after Thanksgiving, so I’m blaming the turkey.

For several years, it was all fun and good, but I’ve become disenchanted with FB over the years. I’ve moved to my personal site for sharing and only push links out to social media. The final straw was Facebook’s decision to let anything go in political ads. These can be total fabrications and Facebook will let them run. I will not promote such terrible behavior.

If you are on Facebook, know that ads you see and posts that are shared are not what they seem. These posts are designed to enrage you for maximum engagement. They are not for information. You are being treated like a trained dog, being offered treats for likes. Facebook wants you to keep scrolling.

Unfortunately, I still need to have my account and I also have others that send me messages through Facebook. Over the last year I’ve been working on ways to use Facebook without being on Facebook.

For starters, this will not allow you to see any friends posts. Since Facebook has changed their algorithm to keep you scrolling, the only winning move is not to play. I rarely go on FB anymore, and I’m happier for it. If you want me to see what you write, create a blog and let me know. I’ll subscribe to it!

Messenger notifications are also hit and miss. I don’t like Facebook giving me ads based on what I say in a chat anyway, so I don’t use it and I don’t recommend you use it either. There are better options.

Filtering Facebook notifications

The first step is to set up a filter for emails from Facebook. I use Gmail, so I created a filter that will take emails from Facebook, skip the inbox, and label them.

For bonus points, you can set the label for your FB notifications to only show if there are new emails. Out of sight, out of mind.

Tame FB notifications

The second step is to get Facebook to only send notifications if someone messages me or if I’m mentioned. Go to your Notifications page and turn off almost all notifications. This is a good time to trim down the notifications from Facebook.

To set notifications, go to Settings (the little triangle in the upper right corner) and click Notifications on the left side.

I turned off everything except for the first two, Comments and Tags. There isn’t an option for Messenger, but as of December I was still receiving notifications for new messages.

FB also doesn’t seem to send out notifications when someone comments on a thread you are in either, which is unfortunate. See that Updates From Friends notification? Wouldn’t it be nice to get those in your email? Yes, it would be, but FB will only send them to your logged in browser.

Enjoy life!

Go, enjoy your life! The internet is a great resource, and you are in control.

February 17, 2020
Deactivating Facebook and more – This Geek in Review for 14 Feb 2020

There are good discussions going on now about mental health and wellness, but not enough talk about the little things that one can do to help themselves. By deactivating Facebook one can not only increase their happiness but also decrease their political polarization on the issues. Sounds like a win-win. I read so much about how everyone sucks in politics, but not anything on what we can do to fix it. The scariest realization I have on politics is that many voters will vote against their self-interests if it means people they believe are undeserving will get something. We saw this with the rise of the Tea Party. “Too many people are on welfare, but don’t you dare touch my Social Security and Medicare.” Wow, that’s enough of a rant today!

Finally, you can turn off those lousy Netflix previews! I didn’t understand why they were so long in the first place, they are basically a mini-version of the movie, giving away way too much about the movie. Unfortunately, to de-activate the preview you have to do it from the website and not the client.

What happens when you give Chrome 1.5TB of RAM?

Programmers re-use code all of the time for games, and now we benefit. Some very smart people figured out how to put Star Fox 64 Arwings for the Nintendo 64 into Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time. An amazing hack.

If you have bought an Apple device in the last 6 months, you get Apple’s Streaming service, Apple TV+, free for the year. It’s estimated that less the 10% of purchasers have done so. I’ve only watched (and liked) a few episodes of For All Mankind. They base it on an alternative history of the first moon landing.

I’m not a big fan of articles that should be a blog post instead of spread across 11 tweets, but I liked Ally McBeal. One of the first “viral” moments in internet time was the dancing baby. Well, the model has been found and rendered in full 1080p glory.

Dates are hard on the computer, but I would think after all the Y2K shenanigans that storing only the last two digits for the year would be in the past (see what I did there?). That is not the case for a 101 year old man in the UK. The computer would like his parents to confirm his ID.

I’ve read that Tesla’s Cybertruck is a good rendition of what we thought in the 80s cars of the future would look like. And now an SFX company has given us this gem:

A New Time Machine? Cybertruck 2020 in Back to the Future – YouTube

February 14, 2020