Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • draw that picture

    could you look at me
    and not see
    all the scars I've shown
    but what is beneath 
    what is lost even to me
    could you draw that picture
    for me to see
    and maybe believe
    

  • Zemblanity is the word, is the word that your heard, it's got groove it's got meaning

    I received an email from Christopher Williams about a word for an unplanned unfortunate discovery [1], and he stated that the word I was looking for was “zemblanity.” I have never heard this word before, so I decided to try looking it up in the The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [2]. I did not find it, but then again, the copy I have is from 1971. It may be a new word. I did, however, find the word “Zemblan,” which describes things relating to Nova Zembla, an island in the Artic Ocean north of Russia.

• Science

  • Slide Rule Triple Multiplication

    This technique required three actions for three numbers, i.e., one action per number, rather than two actions per number with the previous technique. Also, our cursor is set up so that the product on the D scale is set up to be the first number on another three factor problem, meaning we can multiply another two factors into the problem with only one more slide movement and one more cursor movement, maintaining our average of one action per number. This works cleanly for any problem involving an odd number of factors: 3, 5, 7... In the case of an even number of factors, like 4, we could use C index instead of our usual last number, which is to say the final factor is 1. Since the C index is touching the D index, a final cursor movement is not necessary, so that we don't have to do that final wasted action.

• Technology and Free Software

  • No more pictures sans context

    For the past year, I've been enjoying the Picture Pages [1], a site on Gemini [2] that presents five random pictures. It was always enjoyable and sometimes surprising when it linked to some picture from my blog without context. And today, it's no more [3].

  • learn2hack.today and a new CTF platform

    Hola! Happy Hacking to all hackers, DIY, creators and tinkers out there.

    So this is a post I have been wanting to write for a while now. Those of you that have been following me for some time know that I have been vocal about the state of hacking education. You know the deal - tons of "academies" and bootcamps promising kids they will become hackers in 3 months, skipping all the fundamentals, networking, systems, programming... and then people wonder why so many "junior pentesters" can't explain what a TCP handshake is. It has been frustrating me for years.