Windows 10 is getting closer and closer to the Linux world every day, and it’s hecking exciting. One thing I needed to do recently was to send some files from an Ubuntu machine over to a Windows 10 machine. In the past, I would either install Cygwin or install an…

I recently started a Django project that used django-allauth to perform authentication based on Google accounts. One problem I encountered was how to limit who can actually log into the site. I didn’t want anyone with a Google account to be able to log in! Google’s API does have provisions…

Microsoft Word has tons of little built-in helper functions that we take for granted every day (other than the obvious spelling auto-correct): smart quotes, em/en dashes, and widow fixes. As much as people like to hate on Microsoft products, life would be much uglier if it weren’t for them. Microsoft…

On May 8, 2018, a new top-level domain (TLD) .app joins the Internet. I put in bids to get 4 of them.. and managed to score one of them! Edit: I had planned to post this on May 8, but GoDaddy was so slow to put my last domain name…

Amazon’s raising the cost of Prime by 20%… am I even getting $120 worth of value from it? (TL;DR — No, I’m not, but I’m keeping Prime anyway.) With the recent news that Amazon is upping their Prime membership fee from $99 to $119, several tech articles have come out…

Unlike English, smartphone keyboards are not well-optimized for Chinese input. “Swiping” was a new invention that made writing English words bearable, but for Chinese, it’s less than ideal. For starters, Chinese “words” are too short and too similar for swiping to accurately decode. …

What happens when a server gets hacked? How do servers store username/password combinations? All too frequently these days, we read a news article or receive an email saying so-and-so has been hacked and X amount of user/passwords have been stolen (among other things like birthdays, security questions, and even social…

Ah, the stressful art of creating a password… something “secure” but “easy to remember”. XKCD did a pretty good job presenting a good, user-friendly method. I more or less follow that pattern now, but with a slight twist. While correcthorsebatterystaple is a very long password, it’s technically only composed of…

This is Part 2 of my “block chain social network” series of posts. Check out the previous post on this topic: Part 1 — An open discussion about a Facebook alternative based on blockchain technology The hardest part of overcoming the behemoth that is Facebook is having enough features to…