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Paella Without Pain

During this hot summer, we often opted for dishes that could be cooked outside on the grill. But how much meat and fish can be grilled before “food paralysis” sets in? You might know the feeling, it’s when a cheese plate and wine begin to feel like two of the major food groups. So I began to expand the grilling menu to a variety of grilled vegetables, squashes, and eventually to a dish that most people do not associate with grilling, Spanish Paella.

Leaving Wordpress after 10 years and almost 400 posts

Back in 2010, Wordpress was widely hailed as a breakthrough for creating modern websites and ElephantTech jumped on the bandwagon with Wordpress “Thelonious” (all their versions are named after Jazz greats). The default theme was so beautiful, a long tree lined road leading off into the distance. It was easy to get started with their famously advertised “five minute install” and they even had a handy list of hosting companies. We chose one called ICDSoft that got great reviews. They were based in Bulgaria but who cared, it was the global internet right? And the price was right, only $5 a month.

Privacy: Doing 'Enough' Is Probably Enough

Coronavirus, climate change, contradictory diet advice, politics, social media, fake news, etc. There are so many “crisis” vying for attention these days that on-line privacy falls into the category as those “extra credit” books that nobody ever got around to reading in school. However with so much of our lives involving on-line activities, it pays to at least be aware of the issues involved especially in an election year. One of the biggest tech publications, The Verge, has even created a central place to learn about the main tech policy issues focusing on free-speech, data usage and privacy, corporate behavior, and climate change.

And One More Thing...

(Or maybe five…) To follow up on my recent post “Have I Got A Story To Tell You!” about Tim Urban’s massive series “The Story of Us,” here are a couple more fascinating articles that, while a bit older, are still great reads if you missed them (and/or if you’re tired of politics).

Google Achieves 'Quantum Supremacy?!'

We were just getting over the fear of AI (or were we?) and now headlines are full of Google’s claims of Quantum Supremacy. The Googlians must be so pleased with themselves and as a bonus, many articles include this photo of a device that even looks like something supremely sinister.

Supercomputer?! Nah, You Can Mine Bitcoin with a Pencil and Paper

It’s hard to believe that it has been almost two years since I wrote the post, “A Tiny Bit of Bitcoin.” It was in response to the bubble that saw Bitcoin reach a peak of $20,000 US dollars per Bitcoin. Today, it’s hovering around $10K with a low of $3K in early 2019. Maybe Bitcoin is not the most stable investment but the rewards outweigh the risks for people who love being outside the system. For example people using “alternative currencies,” are “Crypto-anarchists,” or live in countries where 70% fluctuation in value is stable compared to their own currencies. One of the biggest issues with Bitcoin, in my opinion, is that it is appears to be very complicated: complicated to buy, complicated to store, complicated to use, and very complicated to understand. But at its core the calculations are simple enough that they can be done by a non-technical person with only a pencil and a piece of paper. In the spirit of this basic simplicity, here are eight common questions with answers that I hope will provide a way to get one’s “head around” Bitcoin.

Five Quick and Easy Suggestions for Protecting Your Online Privacy

I get it, most people don’t care that much about online privacy. Besides, there are so many bigger things to be concerned about: the climate, immigration, politics, health, money, relationships, Netflix raising prices… The most common responses when the topic of privacy comes up are: “I’ve got nothing of value online,” “I don’t visit dodgy websites so I’ve got nothing to hide,” “I don’t care if somebody sees my 3,000 cat photos,” or maybe just a shrug of the shoulders in response. However, like free speech, online privacy is one of those things that doesn’t seem valuable until you don’t have it. In any case, even if there is no immediate threat posed by not taking steps to protect one’s online privacy, here are five quick, simple things that can be done to at least make it a little harder for companies to collect and sell your valuable personal information. (As a side note, here’s a good article about why the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument is flawed.)

Five Amazing Facts About Modern Computers

1. Almost every personal computer is fast enough to run another whole computer as a program. It’s called virtualization and programs like VirtualBox, VMWare, or Parallels can run Windows 10 as a program on your Mac, run Linux as a program on Windows, etc. Despite this power most people only use their computer for Email, Facebook, and cat videos.
2. How fast are computers in human terms? Well, when a computer retrieves a number from memory, it takes about 14 nanoseconds or 0.000000014 seconds. There are as many nanoseconds in a second as seconds in over 30 years!
3. Hosting a simple website is child’s play for even the most basic computer. Web hosting data centers look like big scary places full of racks of computers and blinking lights, but commercial web hosting companies like GoDaddy make a lot of money for good reasons, a simple one CPU computer with only 1 gigabyte of ram can easily handle it. Companies like Digital Ocean specialize in renting servers that cost less than $5 / month which can support four simple websites without breaking a virtual sweat.
4. Many televisions, internet routers, security cameras, smart watches, printers, smart thermostats, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices contain a full computer running an “embedded” version of an operating system. Embedded in this case means special purpose. For example, since they are buried inside the device, they don’t use a keyboard, mouse, or have a display. Many run Linux and because they are hidden from the user, they sometimes don’t get regular software updates so they can be vulnerable to hackers in unexpected ways. In 2016, the Mirai Botnet took advantage of a security bug in a version of Linux for a specific device called the “ARC processor,” the CPU for billions of these types of devices. Mirai hacked these devices (mostly security cameras and routers) and used them to attack websites by overwhelming them with fake internet traffic. Interestingly, since Linux is open source software, devices that use Linux (GNU / Linux to be specific) have to disclose their open source license information. Here is the screen from our TCL TV.
5. Finally, modern cars contain dozens of stand-alone, special purpose computers that communicate over a network called the CAN-bus. Many people have heard about their car’s ECU, Engine Control Unit computer, but don’t realize, for example, that the speedometer is not connected physically to the wheels anymore. There are sensors for speed, RPM, fuel quantity, engine temperature, etc. that transmit data over the car’s network to a computer in the instrument panel. The instrument panel contains small devices that move the physical needles to their proper position in response to the digital numbers sent from these sensors. Wow!

Demystifying the Digital World - Part 8 - Why Oh, Why WiFi?

I debated writing this article for quite a while before finally diving in because WiFi problems are some of the most frustrating in the digital world. Sometimes it can work for months flawlessly then for no apparent reason stop, become “flakey,” or otherwise misbehave in a wide variety of bizarre ways.

Demystifying the Digital World - Part 7 - TV

In the beginning, there were TV antennas. Big ones on the roof, rabbit ears on top of TVs, small round ones on the back of TVs, and many other shapes and sizes. Then Cable TV became popular in the 1980s which made it possible to get rid of that ugly antenna and pay a monthly fee for dozens of local and special interest channels, back then 50 channels cost around $20 / month. Over the next few decades cable and satellite TV options exploded into the market. Soon there were hundreds of channels and costs skyrocketed. By last year, it cost over $100 / month for basic service which consisted of local channels plus hundreds of “special interest” channels that were anything but interesting.