I bought a new hairbrush recently. Whoop-de-doo, you might say. But it was kind of a big deal for me because I’ve been using a metal comb for years … and years … and years. It’s a comb I got in late high school or early college. In examining it closely for this blog post, I see that it’s a Swedish Crown brand rat-tail comb, made in Sweden, and has the number 2252 stamped on…
Feelin’ cranky about tech tonight. Well, moreso about the way criminals use tech to take advantage of us. I attended a cybersecurity training today and the presenters explained how hackers are using ChatGPT to create phishing emails that can mimic the way a specific person writes if you train it on the previous writing of that person. From a hacker’s perspective, this is a great way to trap someone in a phishing scheme because the…
Please forgive me. This is going to be one of those blog posts that reproduces a bunch of screenshots from a Mastodon conversation, kinda like the articles that are a reproduction of Twitter screenshots, but I hope to use them as context for additional thoughts based on the conversation. It started with an article about Milton Friedman called “Ideas Lying Around,” written and posted by Cory Doctorow. [https://doctorow.medium.com/ideas-lying-around-33a28901a7ae] From which I quoted a paragraph about…
It has been a tough haul reading books this year. It took me a couple of months to read one book, The World Without Us, so it was a pleasure to find a book that I could read quickly. The book I found was Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. What attracted me to the book was that it was billed as a thriller about a forensic accountant. That might not seem like the most…
I’ve been struggling with a bad eczema flare recently – months of vesicles and itchy patches encircling most of my neck. At one point, the rash was so solid it looked like a sunburn. I also developed eczema in my ears on and off over the past year and a patch in my scalp in December. Most of the time, I tough it out with my various moisturizers, calamine lotion, witch hazel, Vitamin E oil,…