Category: Internet

  • 25th Anniversary of The Web Invites some Introspection

    If you’ve been following Internet news recently, you know that the World Wid Web is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this year. Lots of people have been talking abou tthe first websites they ever set up. Unfortunately for me, my earliest sites were not captured by the Internet Archive. But I started on the web around…

  • Photos and the Changing Online Landscape

    I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site.…

  • Netflix does what many have been recomending

    Lots of technologist have been suggesting that the entertainment industry should view illicit Internet sources of their products as indicative of unmet demand. Netflix is doing just that. Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each…

  • Abraham Lincoln

    “The problem with internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy”. – Abraham Lincoln -1864

  • Technology Growth is Pretty Awesome

    It’s pretty neat how much technology has changed in the past 8 years. Eight years ago Rich West and I coded up a web server on a microcontroller (code here) and part of my justification was that, for only $50, someone would be able to have a web server on a microcontroller. Wouldn’t that be…

  • Social Steganography

    Steganography is the process of hiding a message within another message. The difference between steganography and encryption is that encryption seems to make a message indistinguishable from noise. Encryption will turn “my cat is black” into “df cok eropz” while steganography could involve you sending a picture of a car and the receiver would run…

  • Micro-blogging: 3 years later… (5 years in)

    It’s been three years since the last time I posted about micro-blogging. Since then Google Buzz has been killed off, Google Plus has taken its place, Tumblr has arrived on the scene, and Identica doesn’t exist in the same way as it once did. I’m also using KDE now, so I went from using Gwibber…

  • What WordPress 3.6 Developers Could have Done Better

    I first blogged about WordPress 3.6 in April. I was extremely excited about the new Post Formats UI and the new theme Twenty Thirteen. At the time there was a month left before the release. Then, things got pushed back a bit which messed with my image formatting. Then, at some point, they decided they…

  • Two Stories about Governments Not Understanding the Internet

    Singapore has attempted to bring websites under the same decency standards are other media. The Singapore government just announced an intention to begin regulating websites that report on the country, requiring a S$50,000 ‘performance bond’ and compliance with any takedown notices from the government within 24 hours. The reason for this is apparently to regulate…

  • Zach Braff’s Kickstarter

    A little over a month ago I came across an article on Boing Boing about the movie Zach Braff was trying to get funded via Kickstarter. It was interesting time as I had just contributed to two Kickstarter projects for the first time – I Fight Dragons’ Project Atma and the Code Monkey comic by…

  • Skype Text Message are NOT Secure

    A little less than a month ago Ars had a story about Skype’s text messages being insecure. This is pretty devastating considering how many political activists are using Skype to stay secure from governments like China and Russia. The article doesn’t mention anything about the voice communications, but I would be a little cautious if…

  • Strongbox

    There’s an interesting tension in democratic nations. For democracy to work there needs to be transparency. A lack of transparency leads to corruption via information asymmetry. Humans, being humans, tend to exploit this to bad ends. Sometimes they have noble intentions and sometimes they have evil intentions, but the results are the same – an…

  • I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma Interview

    My first ever Kickstarter! I just backed Project Atma – @IFightDragons Creates An Epic New Album on @Kickstarter http://t.co/Bo5XglkChl — Eric (@djotaku) May 5, 2013 Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever – I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really…

  • Happy 10th Birthday WordPress!

    Happy 10 years of the software that allowed me to free myself of the shackles of other corporations and take blogging into my own hands.  I started this blog almost around the same time as WordPress (WP was only 1.5 years old) Here’s to another ten years! And, here’s my version of what Dougal suggested:…

  • Bitcoin Roundup

    Boing Boing pointed me to a few Bitcoin articles and then there was another one on Ars on 6 May. I’d be pretty surprised if you haven’t heard about Bitcoin; it’s been all over the news because of the crazy bubble the Bitcoin exchange rate was having recently. But, just in case, Bitcoin is a…