As you may know, the our border agents have started to require various travelers (i.e. the shifty-looking ones that try to cross borders) who happen to have tech gadgets with them to turn those gadgets on, login, mount encrypted drives, etc., so that those agents can make copies. I’m not planning to leave the country, but I’m also not interested in taking chances here.

Normally while the gross invasion of privacy of others bothers me, the actual fact of this sort of behavior does not, because I usually don’t travel with my various vitally private files (usually to do with cryptography) with me.

This has changed since I started using a USB key and portable applications to do what of my personal business I do at work. Until this morning, I had GPG, GPGShell and my GPG/PGP keys on my USB key that I use for portable computing. Now I don’t. The alternative was to keep that stuff on my USB key but put them in a hidden cryptography volume. I decided that was probably too fiddly and I didn’t need that stuff with me that badly.

But why would I think about it at all?

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This one’s a bit more advanced than the others. Not only does it merge a couple of feeds (Metafilter and Ask Metafilter), make sure there are no dupes, and filter based on keyword (it’s a permit policy, so you have to add more keywords to let more posts through), but it also does some basic string handling to get the posting domain (i.e. Ask or Main) into the post title on the feed, so you can tell what general feel the feed article will have (hopefully).

I quite enjoy thinking in these ways. They’re not precisely new ways for me as I do it in programming when I get to program, but you have to factor in the entire set of data and then set up your pipe to deal sanely with all possible/probable values. It’s an expansive way of thinking that makes me feel smart.

Via Metafilter (via Mindhacks), originally linked by New Scientist, the onlyone I’ve listened to is the Virtual Barbershop, but the others are, I bet, as cool.

The Virtual Barbershop is YouTube hosted, in stereo, and requires earphones/headphones to work properly.

Find the others in the New Scientist link.

As you all know, I’ve occasionally written comments/feedback to big blogs I read about their overall content, but since I certainly can’t expect them to respond only to my own feedback and change their tunes (esp. with respect to diet/health/exercise topics which I often find noisome), I’ve started filtering their feeds to my Google Reader myself.

How? With Yahoo Pipes, which is a drag/drop type programming utility specifically for aggregating and filtering feeds and other data on the web. It’s pretty neat and usually pretty easy to use, as long as you’re careful and you test as you go.

I already built a pipe for Lifehacker that filters out posts to do with the “diet” category and the “health” category (and may need to change it to add “cooking”). I also built a pipe for BoingBoing that for now only filters out non-unique posts (by title) but may in the future implement a similar filtering mechanism for certain categories.

I’ve been moving files around at work and encrypting the ones that make sense to do so.

From Cryptonomicon, I understand that “radio games” roughly translates to “funkspiel” in German (partly because the radio on German submarines used to be called the “funkmaat”). I’ve been creating sized-just-right crypted logical drives/files with TrueCrypt, putting various big-ass compressed archive files in them and then mothballing them forever on reliable network-based storage in case my laptop goes tits up (note to my gender-balance obsessed friends - I say this in full awareness that I possess moobs, so I figure “tits up” is a gender neutral phrase).

What makes it even sillier is that the reliable storage in question is auto-compressed and TrueCrypt drives do not work in NTFS compressed files land (i.e. if the *.tc file itself is compressed), so when I copy the volumes over to the network storage, they automatically do not work while they’re sitting there but are easily reactivated by copying them back to or setting them back to being non-compressed. But since I plan to revive by copying them over first to non-compressed storage that’s all good too.

Anyway, there must be a funkspiel equivalent for cryptography.

…but I am dead curious.

http://www.loopt.com/

Apparently uses various kinds of location data (cell phone GPS is only one way, not the only way) from your mobile phone/cellular device to let your loopt buddies know where you physically are, in real time.

The reason I can’t sign up for it? Go to the home page, then click Register, then read the disclaimer. It’s frightening!

I am caught up with all the filing and paperwork sorting and prepared to do my taxes.

But I haven’t got the energy to actually do the taxes, by far.

Shooting for next weekend, then.

With Dreamhost’s Goodies page, there were absolutely no problems, and I needn’t have worried about my plugins or themes or theme customizations following me (unlike last time).

I also upgraded my various plugins to current version. Easy peasy (though those took some SFTP and SSH action).

I just left a comment on a BoingBoing post.

The post (about some hugely calorific dish at Outback Steakhouse): http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/11/worst-food-in-americ.html
The comment (not sure if it’ll be approved, so I can’t yet link it directly):

I’m thinking you guys (the creators of BoingBoing) probably don’t care, because you are hip and probably all thin, cool type people (whether this is because you count calories/diet, I do not know).

But you must know that there is a significant membership of yours, or passive readers of yours who are fat, and who, further, do not diet, and have no interest in doing so, nor in counting calories.

Surely a blog as cool as yours has noticed the growing national awareness of the fat acceptance movement recently. And the growing numbers of studies coming out that do not attribute fatness to laziness or other synonyms, or necessarily to one’s diet.

We (as I am one of these people) are probably tired of your posts like these, where you talk about calories, which leads to talking about eating patterns and dieting and healthiness. Why? Because I think we have had enough of those sorts of discussions in public fora.

I’m not discounting the great discussion of foods (that sound sometimes interesting and sometimes not) that also derives from this original post, but I think it’s possible to get there via other means, and not just decrying how bad for you a particular food is.

Just a datapoint for you. I don’t wish a flamewar and I’m not trying to troll, just trying to give you honest feedback about your post topics.

Anyhow. Onward.

I am having a work issue that involves needing to plan and strategize and implement a large standards/process library for my IT department (at work, natch). The project is long-term, and just starting out, and while I am a member of a team (and thus not solely responsible), I need some guidance vis a vis where to start looking for formal guidance. As such, I posted a question on ask.metafilter.com and would also love your help if you’ve got comments or suggestions.

In order to avoid spamming, here’s the link to the post on ask.metafilter.com, but feel free to comment here if you’d rather.

I would deeply appreciate any meaningful feedback you might have, not only in answering my original question but also if I’ve obviously left out steps in what I’ve already said about the context or my planning.