Tomo in Saigon @tomosaigon@fosstodon.org

I wonder if anybody else wishes there was a fun way to browse/read code on your phone.

Trick to viewing ANSi art in a Linux terminal:

iconv -f CP437

Example: https://16colo.rs/pack/mist0721/GJ-DWIMMER.ANS

Build an agent that can play NetHack and win among $15k in prizes: https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2021-the-nethack-challenge

Best hacks with fzf (or other fuzzy finders)?

Kind reminder that SMS is not safe/secure.

Mobile carriers are injecting ads into authentication SMSs sent from Google: an ad for a VPN service.

But it could have been any link in the message you were expecting to receive from a trusted source. A link to enter your password, maybe?

Add "Tiananmen square" to your LinkedIn profile and they will hide you from everyone in China. I assume other interesting subjects of history would also work. Do with this information what you will.

From Kevin Beaumont:

NTFS-3G has been in Linux since 2007 and is included with Debian distros and more. It should be pretty stable.

Which makes ntfs a good cross platform (hello Windows 11!) filesystem for external drives since exfat isn't journaled and deals poorly w/ bad unmounting.

Unfortunately, in 2021 NTFS-3G still doesn't know how to defrag so you might need to boot Windows.

P=NP! I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which can only fit into this toot by representing it in JavaScript:

[object Object]

There is AI software that guesses variable names for you (in Javascript). This is not the killer AI we have been warned about.

In 100 years we'll communicate with Chinese in a smorgasbord of the Latin alphabet, Arabic numerals, and an array of standardized emojis, the language of the internet.

#vim Manually folding z with markers {{{}}} is awesome.
zf: create fold
zd: delete fold markers
zc: close
zo: open
zR: open (Reduce) all folds

Facebook almost makes you give them your phone number & may claim it's needed for 2fa (which is not a secure 2fa as many SIM swap victims have realized). Your number is then used to sell and target ads. #darkpatterns

Remember when Ritchie invented C so we didn't need to totally comprehend each new machine architecture to write code? Solidity and the EVM do not remember.

Dark patterns: TurboTax hiding the "free" option from low income users to get them to buy something they didn't need.

Qubes OS, the only secure way to use a desktop. OpenBSD as a firewall or even basic web server has a great track record but as a desktop you still open yourself up to hackers in a way that Qubes mitigates. Any normal Linux distro is just playing with fire 🔥

And they just began accepting donations via privacy currency Monero at XMR address 46PrVgXBdD4cps3SVkHoCDZvMfFdG5q4ej5DYKpuKpTnjiL7pv6KGv7dPh4DPijCGqTbxLDPqZJkobd9SttMiauoP1CQU4y [verify yourself via Qubes Security Pack]. #qubesos

DNA is tiny. How can we actually detect a piece of code at macroscopic scale? Multiply the DNA by billions!

That's PCR and it's how we can detect viruses/bacteria, disease, know if food is deadly.

OpenPCR is a GPL'd soft/hardware design for low cost (medical) diagnostics everywhere.

https://openpcr.org/

A cool use for KDE Connect (Android app): Read a book on the big screen and page through it with the "presentation tool" on your phone. (Some KDE Connect tools are buggy and crash the daemon though but this wfm)

Teach computer science to kids - without a computer.

CS Unplugged uses cards, string, crayons, and printable activities to teach "computer" science concepts without the PC.

Note: CS != Programming.

https://csunplugged.org/en/

A lot of cool things you can do w/ homomorphic encryption. I tried out Google's new transpiler to build a tiny program which took over an hour to compile but worked in the end. Performance is one area that needs more work. (Image is of partial homo crypto) https://github.com/google/fully-homomorphic-encryption

Remember those modem AT commands? Your Android acts like a modem (it's literally a modem connecting to a cell tower) over the USB port and you can send AT messages to configure/hack a phone. Perhaps a tower could even access your phone remotely as each device implements AT often in some undocumented ways.