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A minivan full of magnetic tape is still fast

February 3, 2023

Abstract image of magnetic tape reel

Generated image1

Y’all heard of the old Computer Science joke: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of magnetic tape”? I wonder if a van full of tape is still faster than broadband Internet these days.

Assuming a minivan has a cargo capacity of 4 m³ (140 ft³)…

  1. Image generated by DiffusionBee. Prompt: “Computer magnetic tape reel mounted in a minivan on the highway abstract art” 

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LG C2 OLED TV Settings

January 29, 2023

Stock image of LG OLED TV

I recently bought an LG OLED TV from their C2 series (OLED55C2PUA to be exact). It was quite difficult to find reasonable settings to get a faithful image online, so I spent a few days tweaking things until everything looked OK to me. I hope you find this table useful when you end up searching for settings for your TV.

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Don’t upload your passwords to the cloud

December 23, 2022

Well, it finally happened: The cloud store of popular password manager LastPass was breached, and all user password vaults are now in the hands of hackers.

While this is not the nightmare scenario (the vaults are still encrypted), it’s pretty close to it. Hackers now have users’ vaults on their drives, and they can brute-force their main passwords at their leisure. Guessing the main password will unlock the entire vault and grant hackers access to all the passwords—and TOTP second factors—in it. Remember: the encryption is only as strong as the main password, and some users may have chosen hunter22 for all we know. With 33 million customers’ data available, hackers only have to unlock a tiny fraction of the vaults to make it worth their while.

I continue to believe that it’s irresponsible for password managers to encourage regular people to upload their vaults to a central cloud. Companies like LastPass and 1Password expose their customers to risks that most of them don’t understand.

My advice? Never upload your password vaults to a central cloud—those storage locations attract hackers because they promise huge payoffs. Instead, keep local copies, replicate them across multiple devices, and back them up to an offsite location. Even keeping a local vault on one computer or phone and keeping good backups of that one device is better than uploading your data to the cloud.

Enabling Dagger in IntelliJ

December 1, 2022

I had a hard time getting Dagger to work in IntelliJ, so I’m writing down the steps so you will have an easier time at it.

Create a Java project using the usual settings.

IntelliJ default project creation dialog

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Section Your Day and Contain Your Failures

November 11, 2022

Split up each day into sections: morning/afternoon/evening; breakfast/lunch/dinner; whatever divisions make the most sense to you and can repeat daily.

Begin each section with a plan of action. Then execute your plan. Stop and review at the at the end of each section. Take a break. Replan when starting the next.

Most importantly, contain failure to a single section. So you failed your morning section; that’s ok, you learned from that. Now, let’s focus on the afternoon section.