Mike Meredith

The Climate Change Conspiracy

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 302019
 

There are a bunch of people out there who jump on every single piece of ‘evidence’ they can find or construct that supposedly contradicts the evidence that the climate is changing for the warmer (and that it is mostly human activity driven).

Why?

In the beginning, some of them may have been honestly dumb, and objected to the notion of global warming simply because it challenged some of their favourite activities. After all who could believe that people could influence the climate?

And after all, what do climate scientists know? They’re just book smart and everyone knows that common sense beats book smart every time.

But over time, something else creeps in (and in some cases is there from the beginning) – a tendency to abuse the human liking for controversy to get more “hits” and a higher profile than would otherwise be the case.

And money of course.

So when you find random people on the Internet throwing rocks at the experts, bear in mind that they might just be innocently dumb or they might have an ulterior motive.

But let’s face it: They’re not after the truth no matter how much they claim otherwise.

Rusty Handrail

Silly Tools for The Graphical Terminal: Flag

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Jan 252019
 

If you are using the right kind of terminal that supports graphics inline (such as KiTTY), then you can write simple (or complex) tools that insert images into the terminal.

Being able to display the flag of a country (if you know its two-letter ISO code) is kind of trivial but useful if you need it.

And a shell function to do that is remarkably simple :-

function flag {
    wget -o /dev/null -O /var/tmp/flag.$$ http://flagpedia.net/data/flags/normal/${1}.png
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]
    then
        kitty +kitten icat /var/tmp/flag.$$ && rm /var/tmp/flag.$$
    else
        echo Not found
    fi
}

(that’s a Zsh function which may require adaption to Bash).

Vi Movement Keys Considered Harmful

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Jan 152019
 

Now that the click-bait is out of the way, vi movement keys are perfectly reasonable particularly to those who have been using them for decades (which includes me). But for ages, vi itself has supported the arrow keys for movement as well as the tradition cursor movement keys.

For the benefit of those who have not used vi and are wondering what those traditional cursor movement keys are, they are H (left), J (down), K (up), L (right). A bit like the gamer’s set of movement keys – W, A, S, and D, except that the vi movement keys pre-date arrow keys.

There are those who will claim that the traditional movement keys are more efficient as they require less hand movement. And they are. So it is perfectly understandable that many tiling window managers and other keyboard-centric software uses these movement keys.

But someone who hasn’t spend decades hard-wiring the vi movement keys into their brain, will find vi-style key bindings inscrutable. And the fix? Just use the arrow keys as well.

There is no harm in having two key sequences do the same thing; no harm in emphasising that the arrow keys work too. And indeed no harm encouraging the use of vi-style movement keys by emphasising their efficiency.

Don’t forget that someone learning a new tiling window manager (or most other things) can be put off by the silliest of things – such as inscrutable control keys.

Rusty Handrail

Do RFID-Blocking Wallets Work?

 Computing, Security  No Responses »
Jan 052019
 

Well mine does (which I would recommend, but I’ve no idea what it is), but I don’t know about yours.

Send me it with some cash in it, and I’ll take a gander.

But …

Just how practical is RFID or NFC scanning anyway? The scaremongers would claim that there are people out there, slapping payment terminals to your bum and siphoning off your bank account.

I know from my own attempts at scanning (and you will know similarly from “tap & pay”) that the distance at which you can read RFID or NFC is normally fairly minimal. Sure you can get antennas which can read at distances of up to 700m, but they tend to resemble those old TV antennas.

Which is kind of obvious for someone trying to be at least relatively stealthy.

And if they do grab details they get to make a single limited payment (even a bank isn’t dumb enough to miss multiple payments) and you’ve probably got a good claim against the bank any way.

So it is pretty unlikely, the damage is limited (and may even be none).

So is an RFID/NFS blocking wallet really necessary? Well if you are in need of a new wallet any way, getting one with that feature makes sense. But it probably isn’t worth throwing away a perfectly fine wallet to get one.

But stick your wallet in your front pocket.

Unoccupied
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