Strypey (was at Quitter.se) @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

Canada is now the first Commonwealth country to fully legalise and tax recreational cannabis. Are you paying attention #NZLabour and #NZFirst? Think of all that money wasted on prosecuting people for #ganja, and how that could be transformed into tax revenue from a regulated industry. Come on, it's a no-brainer!
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/world/359464/canada-legalises-recreational-marijuana

Need to recover tracks from #SoundCloud? This site can download stuff directly from their CDN, even with all JS turned off using #NoScript
https://scdownloader.net/

An interview with Denver Gingerich of #JMP, #WOM, and #Sopranica, a project to create a privacy-repecting replacement for the cell phone network:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/595zg5/sopranica-jmp-wom-cell-network-diy-anonymous

#NewWord "cofused", the opposite of confused, denoting greater understanding that results from integrating new information. Usage example: "I'm cofused. You said that fungi are more like animals than plants, and I looked that up, now I understand that life is divided into more than two major kingdoms".

It really annoys me that the password quality checkers now built into a lot of websites and applications haven't taken #KXCD #936 into account, and keep telling me my passwords are low quality, when I'm pretty sure they are not :<
https://www.xkcd.com/936/

I've started using really long passphrases that are easy for me to remember, because they are made up of a meaningful series of words. To a computer though, it looks like a *very * long string of totally random characters. A standard dictionary attack will fail because the words are in a non-English language, so the dictionary attack would have to test every possible combination of every word in every known language. Good luck with that.

The more ambitious features I envisioned for PiNZ aren't specific to people doing permaculture, but are shared by any community organization whose members inhabit a geographical area too large for regular #F2F meetings to be practical. Particularly those operating at a country-scale, or internationally. These features need to be developed as part of an out-of-the-box installation of a global project, like #Drutopia.

When I started this work, as a member of the PiNZ Council, what I envisioned was ambitious, a complete set of online collaboration tools using only free code software, with a #UX design that makes the tools accessible even to an elderly permie just learning to use computers for the first time. It occurs to me now that achieving this is beyond the capacity of a one relatively small, volunteer-run, national body.

I spent a few years doing (mostly) voluntary community management of #PermacultureInNZ (#PiNZ) website development. I had to drop out a couple of years ago, due to some serious mental health challenges affecting me at the time, but now I'm reflecting on the project with greater objectivity, and the benefit of hindsight.
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/permaculture/permaculture-in-nz

#ShowerThought it would be awesome if, when a user set up a #fediverse account, it was not tied to the instance where they set it up, but distributed across the whole fediverse in some way, and they could log into their account on any instance of any fediverse connected software?

This is both laugh out loud funny, and a really practical piece of software:
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

My feelings about how Ep 8 let its characters down, especially the legacy characters, is summed up nicely in the comment by Chris Wachal (Dec 19, 2017, can't seem to get the permalink right now). Best quote:
"[#THL] was saying that Luke’s achievements, in fact, ALL of the achievements that were accomplished in the original trilogy weren’t important. They were all undone and they weren’t heroes any longer."

The broom scene is the sort of open-ended, feel-good movement that might make sense as the end of a trilogy. But it's a completely tone deaf way to end part two, especially a part two as dark as #TheLastJedi, a film with a body count among the core cast rivalled only by #GameOfThrones. Wait ... did #RianJohnston think us nerds would like his total disregard for characters arcs because #GoT made unanticipated executions of lead characters cool? If so, he's failed to understand how that works

Here's a blog piece that's typical of the "subverting expectations is good" defence of #TheLastJedi:
http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2017/12/18/the-last-jedi-a-mirror-slowly-cracking/

TL;DR he liked it because his son liked the broom trick at the end. But that ending is an excellent example of the many ways Ep 8 suffered from #prequelitis. The problem is not that scene being in the film at all, a variation of it could have made a nice coda to the Canto Bight sequence, giving us some breathing room to absorb everything took place there. But as the end?

The most secure way to store other people's private personal data is not to store it
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic_asse.html

"In the cryptography world, we consider open source necessary for good security; we have for decades. Public security is always more secure than proprietary security. For us, open source isn’t just a business model, it’s smart engineering practice."
Bruce Schneier, 1999
https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0915.html#OpenSourceandSecurity