Category Archives: Web Finds

Geek Excursion: Cryptocurrencies

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I’ve been thinking on and off about Bitcoin ever since it was written years ago. Right around the end of last month, in December I thought I would look into it again. Turns out the environment has grown considerably since the last time I looked at it, by leaps and bounds! I figured now would be a great time to dip my big toe into the stream, so I found an online exchange and pursued Bitcoin with them. This exchange was ExpressCoin and the purchase deal was mailing them a US Postal Money order, they’d cash it and then send me the Bitcoin equivalent. Since this was a conversion from Fiat money (in this case United States Dollars) to Bitcoin, the exchange rate was around $330 per Bitcoin. The $10 investment gave me 0.03120712 Bitcoin.

Right after that I started lurking on the Bitcoin subreddit on Reddit and discovered two other currencies, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Then just after that I discovered the Cryptocurrency Faucet websites, places where they hand out free money for proving that you’re human with a captcha, and the off chance that exposing you to advertising will pay for the money flowing out of the faucet.

I still think a great part of all these cryptocurrencies is still quite firmly fixed in the hobbyist framework, the enthusiasts are on the “bright” side of the currency and the speculators are on the “dark” side of the currency. All of these currencies that I’ve engaged with display pretty wild volatility in comparison with any linked Fiat. My buy-in rate was around $330 per Bitcoin, and now weeks later, that’s at $218.87 per Bitcoin. There seems to be two camps developing, the first camp is quite keen on ignoring the Fiat exchange rate and trying to ignite their currencies inside themselves. One of the most positive and tightly knit communities surrounds the Dogecoin. Seeing how the Dogecoin enthusiasts communicate and cope with their currencies volatility is a lesson in lighthearted, altruistic generosity. People who hold Doge appear to be very ready to donate it to other people as encouragement, sympathy, or even on a lark. As you go from Doge to Litecoin to Bitcoin you see a lot less of the pleasantries and a lot more of the cold hard business of currency work and trading.

I think one of the most fascinating parts of these new currencies is how everything is starting from the very beginning – including questions of trust and honor. Because all of these coins are decentralized and unregulated there is no capacity for a “chargeback” mechanism, and when this runs up against mechanisms in other currencies, like the Fiat, where there are “chargeback” mechanisms in place, you run the risk of being seriously defrauded. I completely understand the fear and the very careful progress that these cryptocurrency traders make, but it does speak volumes about just how awful and corrupt some people are. We don’t assume people are trustworthy and honorable, so we need many complicated structures in place to cope with the unknowns. This gap in honor is, I feel, a huge part of what these currencies should work on next. How do you measure honor? How do you establish trustworthiness? I got to thinking about it, and every time I think I have a solution I run into an edge case that blows my concept out of the waters. The only thing that I think might work is arranging honor and trustworthiness in a way similar to the “Web of Trust” that PGP and GPG cryptographic systems rely on to establish trust. PGP/GPG never really took off for mass adoption and that’s always been a very sad thing for me, but I really like the “Web of Trust” idea that they pioneered. That people can trust others when there is reputation on the line, backed by money perhaps, there would need to be some sort of contingency addressing on the line as well. So if Bob wants to establish his trustworthiness and his honor he puts his money on the line for it. But the problem with this is that someone who is not honorable could just come along and lie about Bob and take his money, sending you right back to the start again. It’s fascinating, that Bitcoin decentralized money, but we need to figure out how to decentralize trust as well.

The US Government has done its due diligence in preventing egregious misuse of the Bitcoin currency to be used for illegal purposes by attempting to regulate how centralized exchanges transfer Fiat into the cryptocurrencies. It seems that Bitcoin and all the others are very elegantly designed in so far that despite all these regulations there is a community of individuals willing to operate as nano-exchanges that help bring everything back to its decentralized and unregulated roots. Half of the fun of playing with cryptocurrencies is being at ground zero for all these fascinating developments and arguments and seeing how something so new develops and unfolds.

So far I’ve got some small parts of a Bitcoin, some small parts of a Litecoin, and gobs of Dogecoin. For myself, I am very interested in figuring out ways to secure the relationships between traders, working on terms of honor, trust, and faith. If anyone has ideas that they would like to share, please leave them in the comments below. I would really love a nice conversation about securing honor, trust, and faith between traders.

Mac Mail Scripting: Send Message to Evernote

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I’ve been trying to replicate the “Send to Evernote” button that gets installed with Microsoft Outlook 2013 at my work to also be an option for my Mac Mail app. My first stab was to see if there was some sort of toolbar button I could use, nope. Evernote hasn’t gotten that far yet.

I looked around Automator, hoping, and saw nothing for Evernote in Automator. So then I thought I would turn to AppleScript. I opened up the AppleScript editor, then opened up the AppleScript Dictionaries for Mail.app and Evernote.app. Through a series of web searches I figured out two main things:

1) How to extract the sender, subject, and content of an email in AppleScript
2) How to create a new Evernote Note with the details gained from Step 1

So, here’s how I did it:

Open up AppleScript Editor and copy this code into it:


tell application "Mail"
set theSelection to selection
set theMessage to item 1 of theSelection
set theText to content of theMessage
set theSubject to sender of theMessage & " : " & subject of theMessage
tell application id "com.evernote.Evernote"
activate
create note with text theText title theSubject tags "mail"
end tell
delete theMessage
end tell

Then you need to do some clever things in AppleScript Editor to get this all to work properly:

1) In AppleScript Editor, open Properties.
2) Put a checkmark in “Show Script menu in menu bar”
3) Close the Properties dialog box
4) Save your AppleScript to your Desktop called “Send Email to Evernote.scpt” and save it.

Now you have to install your script:

1) Open a finder window, arrange it so that you can see the finder window comfortably and also see your script on your Desktop.
2) Navigate to your Macintosh HD, then Library, then Scripts, then Mail Scripts.
3) Click and drag the “Send Email to Evernote.scpt” into the Mail Scripts finder window. Your Mac will stop you, ask you to Authenticate, so do that. The file should copy into this folder.

Now when you go back to Mac Mail, you’ll notice a little script icon in the menubar. Click on the Script menu bar item, then click on “Mail Scripts” and then click on Send Email to Evernote. Your Mail message will disappear. The message has gone to the Trash, and the text of it is now in your default folder in Evernote, with the senders name, a space, a colon, a space, and the subject of the message as the title of the note, with the contents of the note set to be the contents of your note itself.

That was enough for me. Please note, this script creates notes and deletes mail. There are no guarantees that this script will work for you. I don’t really support it as I barely understand AppleScript as it is. It works with just one message at a time and it’ll probably butcher attachments and I have no idea what HTML messages will do if subjected to this sort of treatment. An epic-level “Your Mileage May Vary”, so you know, be careful.

Comixology

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Just updated my Comixology app on my iPad and overhauled my password so I could login. I knew I wasn’t going to find the same app I remember, and I had issues with that one as well. So in we go, talk about a chop-job. I found all the comics I bought, 252 of them, yah, and then on a lark I went looking on how to buy a new comic book. No store that I could find, just a search panel. Searched for Marvel and found all of that, went looking for DC and couldn’t find them. Searched for New 52 and found some titles. So, no more shelf-appeal or browsing titles. Okay.

Then there is the lack of in-app purchasing. Yeah, they are. Owned by Amazon now, so no more of that. Have to go on Amazon to buy the comics. Nope. I don’t like Amazon and it’s a matter of monopoly aversion in my consumer psyche. I do not like Amazon any longer. They are too big, too invasive, and too damaging to people in general. How Amazon treats their workforce is a lot like how Walmart treats theirs. Once Costco opens up here in Kalamazoo, we won’t ever be going back to Sams Club. I won’t ever be going back to Amazon or Comixology.

So, online comics are back to the Stone Age. I’m glad that there are long boxes downstairs with copies of all the comics now lost to me on Comixology. When I have money again, it’s back to the Comic Book Store with me. Comixology’s sell-out was the kiss of death. Amazon won’t be and can’t be controlled. They need to be shunned. If not by everyone, at least this household. There are more considerations on where you buy something beyond the “low price leader”, especially if that leader is a morally and ethically bankrupt monopolistic ravening monster.

Alternatives to Clouds

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I’ve been toying around with a wonderful free utility from BitTorrent Labs called BTSync. You can find it here: http://www.bittorrent.com/sync.

What really drew my attention was the lack of centralized service that stands at the core of BitTorrent technology. It’s distributed, without any company or cloud provider dwelling in the background. All the hardware is owned by you, the “secret” code you use to share that identifies your sync experience also forms the encryption key so that the data that is flowing across the network is secure from prying eyes. Because you own all the hardware and encryption covers the data exchange, you can store whatever you like in your BTSync’ed folder and not have to worry about anyone else peeping over your shoulder or removing material from your storage without your knowledge or permission.

This free system has clients for workstations and mobile devices, so it really can be a drop-in replacement for services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. You can share the secret with anyone you like and anything you place on the folder set up with BTSync will synchronize across all the connected devices. You can also send “Read Only” secrets to sync your folders to people who you want to have your files but don’t want them deleting or changing your files and since this uses BitTorrent technology you won’t have to pay hosting fees and the more people share the data, the faster the system sends updates and changes and new data to all the subscribers.

I’ve created a Work folder, a Sync folder and have them set up on my work machine, my work laptop, my Mac Mini at home, and my iPhone and iPad. Since I own all the hardware, the maximum storage that I can store on this system is only limited by the smallest storage unit amongst all the shared machines. The folder lives on a 1TB USB HD at home, at work I have hundreds of GB’s available and the same as on the laptop. The storage in Mobile isn’t the same as a full workstation as the BTSync app doesn’t actually download data to store on the mobile devices directly but rather downloads a file list making it possible for you to pick and choose what you need on mobile when you need it. If you need security in the storage components you could leverage Encrypted Disk Images in Mac systems and TrueCrypt Encrypted Volumes on Windows machines. For Linux clients, you could likely use loop filesystems set with EncFS or something like that.

The applications for BTSync are amazing. Freed from middlemen companies I can store anything I like without having to worry about some company evaluating what I’m storing or even being able to respond to warrants to reveal what I’m storing on the service. Something like this could be a great benefit to companies that need to share files without having to worry about “buying into the Cloud” since everything is free. You can run a BTSync on a server, host a folder and share the secret out to all your employees and have a very handy share drive and even if your central server fails, copies of your data are stored on all the connected workstations so to recover the data all you would need to do is download the small BTSync client again, re-establish the shared secret code, identify a folder and watch as all your connected clients swarm and return all your data back to the “central depot” server.

Another wonderful option is to host a family shared folder, where you can store anything you like, securely and backed up amongst all the connected workstations. Alternatively, if you were an aspiring artist you could place a folder with all your work and establish a read-only secret and publish it on your social networks. Not only would all your fans be able to have your work, but you’d also be able to cleverly transform them into a swarm of willing backup sources for your work. If an artist has their secret code and a copy of BTSync client and they lose their primary system and all their data, they can just get a new system, re-establish the client and secret and smile as all their work comes back home as it was stored on all your fans computers. That’s amazing to me!

Getting started using this utility is a snap. Download the client and install it on your system. Then on whatever storage medium you like create a new folder. In the BTSync application itself you can create a new shared folder with a single click, there is a “Generate” button which creates the shared secret for you, you can then determine if you want it to be full-sync or read-only sync and then point the app to the folder you want to share, then minimize the app and you’re all set. Send the shared secret code to anyone you want to share with and your data will immediately be sent to their systems according to your preferences.

BTSync is the best of all worlds. You have a secure cloud infrastructure without anyone in your way, judging you or risking any intrusions from companies or governments.

Engagement

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I just read this article and it reminded me of so much of what I was doing back in November of 2013.

The key to engagement is to be active and honest and produce the content that will get your message across. As the article states, what people want is not really what most organizations really want to share, they want honesty, heart, and (self-referentially) engagement.

A case in point, Jeri Ryan, an actress who has starred in many TV Series in her career. I bring her up as a great example of someone who gets engagement. The platform that she used was Google Plus, but it was only tangential to this topic. The important distinction was how she chose to use the service. She actually engaged individually with her fans, which is something more than a lot of other celebrities are comfortable with doing. I’ve written about this particular thing before on this blog. I have noticed that many people seeking or maintaining a certain level of fame think that they can create a social networking persona and simply use it to dump links and material to their work and leave right after that. It turns them from living people into two-dimensional billboards. When you elect to engage, you really have to pursue the entire endeavor otherwise people will notice your two dimensionality and while the initial surge will be impressive, there won’t be anything on the tail end to maintain your initial levels of engagement. Jeri Ryan proves that if you actually do engage, the rewards continue to build. In the case of a television celebrity, engaging with your fans brings them closer to you and perhaps they are more loyal, more attentive to what you have to say, quite possibly even more accepting of any causes you may want to share with them. Only Mrs. Ryan can answer the question of whether engagement with the fans was a good thing or not, as a fan, it was nice to see from my vantage point.

Which brings me back to November. Much of it is water under the bridge but there is still was a lot of work that could have been done. The level of engagement is key, and much like the linked article above, I still strongly maintain that if you have a cause or mission and you want to promote it, it has more to do with understanding your audience than it does trying to carefully construct some framework from which to launch some blind campaign. The difference is that people respond to an authentic message, one with heart, more readily than they do something that was pre-processed, sterilized, vetted and canned. To quote Chef Gordon Ramsay, if you want a successful restaurant you need to provide simple honest fare using fresh local ingredients. This wisdom can be applied to anything else, not just running a restaurant. It can also apply to engagement, with the core lesson being that you’ll get your best bang for your buck if you provide simple, honest engagement using fresh local talent. People want to engage with other people, not with a monolithic edifice. To draw back to the cooking metaphor, would people be more interested in eating a dish that was sourced locally or would they rather eat something sourced from Sysco or GFS?

Another thing that I was working on, was the notion of engaging the crowd. In the previous arrangement, it was a lead-in to the notion of crowd-funding a goal. At least from the company hosting the talk, that was their bleeding-edge analysis of where all this social networking and engagement is actually going in the future. The organizations that engage with the most honesty (heart) will have a better chance at meeting their goals.

Alas, all that is over now, but the article did move me to want to comment on it.

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

RSVP – A Saving Grace

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There is a fantastic class of applications that are available for the iOS, Android, and Apple/IBM Computing platforms that really assist with speed reading. These applications are based on the same reading technique called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

RSVP defeats subvocalization while reading. Many people subvocalize while they read and it becomes a habit. What most people don’t understand is that you do not need this subvocalization to actually comprehend what you read. The way to defeat this slow-reading habit is to fix the eyes in place and present the words too fast for you to vocalize them. Many of these applications start you off at around 300 words per minute, with sliders that let you adjust the speed up as you get used to the feeling of reading without subvocalization.

Recently I had a business need to consume a lot of written work, and I would have been hopelessly slow if I had continued my habit of subvocalization while I read. With RSVP I’ve been able to increase my reading speed to about 520 words per minute. Instead of taking half a year to polish off a 250 page paperback book I can now liesurely read it on-and-off over a weekend and be done with it. The nice part about RSVP is the faster you read the better your comprehension is, which seems to defy common sense. I’ve found that sometimes 520 words per minute is too annoyingly slow, and I’ve been known to push it to almost 600 words per minute, and it’s a pleasure to read at that speed.

Here are some applications that I’ve found that feature RSVP:

iOS –

  • Velocity – This free app on the Apple App Store can connect to Pocket, as well as act as an Open In… target for other applications that handle text. Velocity can also detect web addresses and present the text on the page as RSVP quite well. The interface to Velocity has a lot of polish and is quite a pleasure to use.
  • Fastr Pro – This is another free/low-cost application on the Apple App Store which features RSVP. This application has something special as far as I’m concerned and that is an open data locker where you can upload your ePub files and synchronize your library and last-read bookmarks across your iOS devices. I’ve run into some bugs with the software, but upon later analysis it was purely operator error, not the fault of the software. I was too impatient for Fastr Pro, and because I wasn’t willing to wait, I caused my own headaches. This app is written well and the developers have a fantastic sense of humor and are exceedingly friendly to work with.

Android –

  • Speed Reader – I’ve only been using this app for a little while. It’s free and the software is quite good. I ran into a little bug where the end of my ePub files were being missed in the conversion, as the app converts ePub files to TXT files before processing them in it’s RSVP engine. Something causes the last chunk of data on the ePub to not appear in the TXT file, as far as I can tell.

Windows/Mac Computers –

  • Spreeder – This is a website that works well on browsers on these two platforms. The site, www.spreeder.com has links to the Java applet as well as a Bookmarklet that enables one-click access to their RSVP engine. The nice thing with Spreeder which I appreciate is there are more adjustable settings with its RSVP engine. You can elect to chunk words, so it speeds up around small words and slows down around large words, keeping your average reading speed set to your preferred speed as well as a host of other thoughtful adjustments. I encourage everyone to visit the site and investigate for a full view of this product.

Generally these programs can help you increase your reading speed, allowing you to chew through written works much faster, and with much less eye-strain than with other speed-reading techniques that I have tried. I find it works better than skimming, which sometimes leads you to miss small salient details, and after a while using my fingers to release eye-strain just pushes the strain into my hands. I encourage everyone to look into this technique. RSVP revolutionized my professional career and quickly enabled me to consume a lot of written text much faster than I ever thought possible. I’m sure if I really invested serious concentration I could increase my rate to ever higher numbers as RSVP becomes easier as you get used to it, almost like exercising a muscle.

If you liked this column, please comment. Now that I am an independent IT specialist I thrive on feedback!

Many Thanks!

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

Encrypt Everything

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Lavabit and Silent Circle have given up when it comes to providing encrypted email communications. Mega plans on providing something to cover the gap and in general the only real way to deal with privacy-in-email is end-to-end encryption. There was talk that at some point email might give way to writing letters and using the US Postal Service but there as well you’ve got Postmasters writing commands taped to mail about how everything has to be photocopied and stored – so even the US Postal Service is full of spies, the only thing the US Postal Service can be trusted to carry is junk mail.

What is the answer? Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, or rather, the non-Symantec version of it which is the GNU one, the GPG. If you really want to keep what you write private when you send it to someone else, the only way to do that is for everyone to have GPG installed on their email system so you can write email using their public key, which converts your email to cyphertext, secure from even the NSA’s prying eyes, and requires your recipient to unlock the message using their secret key, which they have.

I’ve been playing with PGP and GPG now for a very long time and I decided I would at least make a route available if anyone wanted to contact me with privacy intact – my public keys are on my blog, they are also on all the keyservers including the one hosted and run by MIT and the GPG Keyserver as well. To send me a private message via email all you need to do is get GPG, set it up, create your secret and public key, get my public key, use it to write me an email and only I’ll be able to read it. The NSA will just flag the encrypted contents for later analysis and thanks to AES–256, they’ll be hard pressed to get to the plaintext in your message.

That’s the way around all of this. GPG for everything. GPG public keys for email, for chat, for VPN, for files, and HTTP-in-GPG. Everything pumped through GPG. Since the government won’t stop spying on us, it’s our duty as citizens to secure our own effects against illegal search and siezure, and technology exists to do so.

Encrypt everything.