Geek

I’m sitting at my computer, writing code like a good little geek on a Monday morning at work and the oddest memory flashed across my brain.

Some time in 1982 or 1983 I must have been home from school due to being sick or something and I remembered a game show called “Sale of the Century” and the contestant that day won everything she could possibly win on the show. It was a big deal and all I remembered was that she looked like an older version of Lynda Carter’s Diana Prince (from “Wonder Woman”). I remember her winning everything the game show had to offer and she became a daytime record holder or something.

Not to be deterred by this completely random memory, a quick search via Google revealed that yes, this did happen, it happened in 1983, and the record holder was Barbara Phillips.

The magic of the Internet and other folks like me that remember the craziest things. Hat tip to Hell Yeah! $ale of the Century.

I type for a living. A lot of people type for a living, and in this day and age in the 21st century one should know how to type. A few years ago I saw a fellow co-worker typing out code on their laptop and they did it with two fingers. I don’t know how they typed for a living. I often think of how lucky I am that my mother taught me how to type when I was in fifth grade. “If you’re going to use this typewriter, you should use the right fingers”. So my mother taught me how to type and 40+ years later I can still type between 90 and 110 words per minute, depending on my stamina and the keyboard.

Because I’m what I’ll call a “legacy geek”, I like keyboards with a lot of hefty and a confident response. I’m not a fan of the mushy membrane keyboards that tend to come with PC setups or laptop docking stations these days. And I’m really not a fan of many keyboards found on PC laptops. Interestingly, I never had an issue with the very flawed-by-design Apple “butterfly” keyboards they abandoned a year or two ago; I can fly right along on my husband’s MacBook Pro from that era and he’s never had a hardware failure from a speck of dust falling into the keyboard or something.

A requirement of a keyboard that shall be graced with my fingers is that it has to have a full sized function key row, or at the very least, a decently sized Escape key. As mentioned, I’m a “legacy geek”. In my day to day workflow I still use an editor called vim, which uses what are now considered archaic keystrokes to navigate and otherwise do things in a text editor. It’s not rare to see a document I’ve typed with wwwwww or jjjjjjjj accidentally typed in the code. The “w” in vi or vim is used to move the cursor by word, the j key moves down a line.

Here’s an eight minute tutorial of how vim or vi works

Back to the keyboard.

In addition to having a confident feel and response, I prefer a keyboard that does not have a numeric keypad. I don’t type numbers that much but more importantly, I don’t like reaching over the extra couple of inches to get to my mouse. I like my mouse to be close at hand so I’m not reaching around on my desk. Plus, I just don’t like giving up the desk real estate for the bigger keyboard. So I go with “tenkeyless” keyboards. Except once in a while I want a small keyboard where I can use a numeric keypad.

Enter the Havit Mechanical Wired keyboard. (Link to Amazon). This keyboard features red switches, has a fantastic response feel to it, but more importantly, incorporates a numeric keypad where the usual other navigation keys are located. The keypad layout uses the original IBM PC layout of home-end-insert-del, so it hearkens back to my teenage years and using an IBM PC in the high school business office. I have it on one of my Linux computers and I am thoroughly enjoying the typing experience. It’s still a little loud (the switches are mechanical, after all), but it’s not as loud as my Velocifire keyboards with Brown Switches. Yet, people still know when I’m typing. I don’t know if the neighbors can hear me or not, but the rest of the family definitely knows when I’m typing and sounding productive.

I recommend this keyboard for enthusiasts who like a smaller footprint, but still need a numeric keypad. It’s clicky, but I find it a delight to use.

Today, four civilians plan to launch into orbit aboard a SpaceX capsule. This will be the first all civilian space flight in history. They will orbit Mother Earth for three days before returning home.

This is awesome.

Here’s a link to their website.

Inspiration4 is the world’s first all-civilian mission to orbit. The mission will be commanded by Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old founder and Chief Executive Officer of Shift4 Payments and an accomplished pilot and adventurer. Named in recognition of the four-person crew that will raise awareness and funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, this milestone represents a new era for human spaceflight and exploration.

I decided one of my art deco school clocks would look better in my office, so I cleaned it up, hooked it up, and hung it up. The other clock was quite nice but I like the art deco look of this clock much more. It feels more “me”.

After a week of testing my little Raspberry Pi standing in for a grandfather clock sized master clock, I pulled wire through my office wall and properly installed this 1939 Standard Electric Time Company school clock. The clock never missed one click the entire week. This makes me happy.

We have insulation in every wall of the house. I will not be pulling wire through many more walls and instead will come up with a different plan for the placement of each clock.

A small accomplishment. I am pleased.

When we moved from Upstate New York to Chicago in 2017 I donated much of my school clock collection to family and the local Historical Society. The Historical Society is located in one of the old elementary schools in my home school district and they’ve installed the clocks but they’re not running yet. The next time I’m back east I’ll get them running. Apparently several visitors to the building have commented about the old clocks.

I had a few clocks that made the move from storage in Chicago to our home here in Tucson. Running wire throughout this house is not an option, as we have no attic or basement. However, there are a couple of places when I can pull wire without too much destruction so maybe I’ll get one or two going.

When the clocks were in the old house they were initially run by a master clock (the type of which would be found in an office of a school or commercial building) from 1957. That clock gave up the ghost and parts were hard to come by, so I ended up writing some software to run on a 1996 era IBM PC (Pentium III) that ran the clocks for about eight years. A terrible energy hog, I was determined that if I ever had the opportunity to get the clocks running again, I’d do it with 21st century technology.

Today I started up one clock with a Raspberry Pi 3 and relay board. Less than 100 lines of code and this 1939 Standard Electric Time slave clock is running flawlessly and synced to the Atomic Clock in Boulder, Colorado courtesy of a WiFi Internet Connection.

To give you a sense of the size of the computer running this clock, here it is, in a temporary box, next to a standard pair of scissors.

By the way, the clock in question is originally from Cassadaga Valley Central School in Sinclairville, New York. They were doing some major renovations in the school in the early 2000s and replaced the clock system. I had been in the school a couple of times in the 1980s and knew they had the same type of clock system I collected. They were happy to let me have one or two clocks for my collection, as they were just getting thrown away.

Perhaps they needed a little Raspberry Pi that fits inside a small box to get things going again.

Yesterday Apple announced they would be delaying the release of their new “CSAM scanning” software originally slated for upcoming iOS15. For those unfamiliar, CSAM is short for Child Sexual Abuse Material, and the majority of the cloud providers (Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, and Apple) scan photos uploaded to their servers for this type of thing. This is a good thing. Getting the trafficking of CSAM under control is very important and actually a no-brainer. No one wants to see children abused in any way, including this way.

Apple’s intended release was to scan devices BEFORE the image made it to their servers. So, if you used iCloud to store your photos, Apple’s new software would scan the image before it made its way to the cloud, using the horsepower of your device, and on your actual device. The scanning is done based on hashes and these hashes are compared to a third party list of offending hashes. A hash is basically a binary/numeric representation of an image, not the actual image. So, if Apple found a photo’s hash that matched a listed hash, there could be trouble. The system is not 100%, but Apple assured folks there was a one in a million chance of a false positive.

Many security professionals much smarter than me, and security minded folks like me, obviously want to end the exchange of CSAM. CSAM is bad. But essentially building software that is a back door into anyone’s device to scan all cloud-bound images for this material is really bad. Apple promised this scanning would be used for this purpose and this purpose only, but once a back door is created, it can be exploited. It can be abused. Not to mention bad actors putting non-CSAM images on the hit list, for example LGBTQ+ themed images identified in a country that doesn’t like that sort of thing.

Apple has ramped back the release to re-evaluate based on customer feedback, consumer group concerns, etc.

It’s still not a good idea. If the images are on a cloud server, have at it. But scanning images directly on a device, which is essentially the same as inviting Apple to come into your house every night and rifle through your cabinets, wallets, etc., is a very bad idea. No one would allow this in the real world. We shouldn’t give up our digital privacy so easily.