Day 62 - Frustratingly stalled at 40% of Emma, Juicero meltdown, Plastc shutdown despite $9 million

Emma has been out of this blog for a few posts now. I have made absolutely no progress with it! Frustratingly, I am still stuck at around 38%. With exams Saturday, and 4 days of the next week, there is absolutely no way to read any more.

There was no resisting such news, no possibility of avoiding the influence of such a happy face as Mr. Weston’s, confirmed as it all was by the words and the countenance of his wife, fewer and quieter, but not less to the purpose.

– Mr. Weston just told Emma that Frank was going to visit the next day, at dinner time.

Okay, I read till about 40% in the past 15... Read More

Day 61 - So, you think webcams can't be turned on without the indicator light?

2 days ago, I wrote this list about improving your security online and practices that you should follow. The last point on that list was Tape your webcam. The question that most people seem to have is:

  1. Are there any existing exploits which can turn on your webcam without turning on the light that is there next to it? How widespread are these lights?

  2. Why should I tape the webcam if I have nothing to hide? (This was the argument used by Shailene Woodley’s character in the movie Snowden (2016)).

I think the FBI director Comey answered both these the best:

I saw something in the news, so I copied... Read More

Day 60 - Nostalgia hits - Masaan and Lunchbox, Search for the Indian Railway Commercial Ticketing Manual

Yesterday’s post, that I wrote 13 hours ago, was one of the most detailed and informative blog posts that I have written in this series for about 20 days now. I shared it with a lot of people, I hope people see it, read it and implement some of those measures in their lives too. For me, to implement all of those things took almost a year. I started with 2FA and now, I have implemented all of them. It takes considerable time and effort to implement some of those measures, but the time spent will be well worth it.

I had a strong bout of nostalgia today, movies related. I watched scenes from Masaan (2015) and Lunchbox... Read More

Day 59 - A list of things to improve your security online

A new day, a new attack on HTTPS.

Checking certificates is a great practice, and almost always I stop after opening a certificate and looking at the certificate signing chain. That tells most of the story. Specifically, when using some other computer, it tells you whether the computer’s owner is trying to fake some certificate sign by putting a malicious Gmail certificate on the computer and effectively implementing a MITM attack. It’s as simple as installing MITM Proxy which automatically creates a... Read More

Day 58 - Reddit karma now at 978, animals see themselves in a mirror and Gnome's weird semantic versioning conventions

Today my Reddit comment karma increased a bit more. It actually moved slowly towards 1000. It’s 978 right now. This particular comment got me 388 KARMA! WHAT?! STAGGERING.

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Anyway, I also read an article about how animals might recognise themselves in the mirror. The tests are admittably absurd and although they appear legit, I feel like the opposition to it have a very very valid point. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting article and you should definitely give it a read.

Nautilus is, in general, a great publication. I subscribed to their mailing list which sends out emails every day (or more frequently?) with links to atleast 4-5 articles and I am never able to complete... Read More

Day 57 - Double-Entry Book-keeping; Homeland Season 6 Finale - Let's talk

In yesterday’s post (which I posted about an hour ago), I said that I was going to figure out how GnuCash worked. I made short work of that, and I have ended up learning what the basics of Double Entry Bookkeeping are:

The whole software makes a lot of sense now. I have setup the initial entry to get started with the expense stuff (I like the report feature, hopefully I should be able to generate some meaningful reports in a few months).

I think it’s finally time to talk about the Homeland Season 6 finale. Yeah, I should get this out of the way.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD; DON’T CONTINUE IF YOU EVER... Read More

Day 56 - MISSED; Nautilus update is irritating, switching to Dolphin(?)

So, I recently updated to Ubuntu 16.04. (Not really recently, I updated 41 days ago :O )

Alongwith the update of the distribution update, I got an update for most of the native apps. One of them: NAUTILUS. That’s the file manager thing on Ubuntu. It’s standard, it’s everywhere, I loved it. Used to love it. Now, they have done something annoying.

Most people have many partitions, I have several of them. Some of them are encrypted, some of them are NTFS to transfer files between Windows and Ubuntu, etc etc. Earlier, there was just one icon on the left-side task bar. Clicking once and opening it anywhere would add a window there. And now, things are different.

Each... Read More

Day 55 - BTP final presentation; Metakgp Talks session 2; Watching random Seinfeld episodes

Today was the day of the BTP presentation! It was FAR BETTER than my expectations, and the uncertainty has all been over-written for now. In about 2 weeks, I will leave for Chennai and subsequently from there to Bangalore. In those two weeks, I have to give 5 end-term exams for the 5 subjects that I took, most probably give a lab test for the Operations Research Lab.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about a Semester Review post on the 30th of April, which is the first non semester day or something like that in which I go over what all I think I learnt this semester and is worth mentioning. The more I thought about it, the more sense it... Read More

Day 54 - 80 hour work weeks; 100 hour work weeks(!!); BURN OUT

I found myself thinking about how people survive and put in 80-hour work weeks or 100 hour work weeks. Assuming that you put in 80 hours over the 7 days of a week, that gives you about 11 hours of work each day. On top of this, there is the commute time from your home to your office. That will be atleast 30 minutes for most people anyway. Add 1 more hour for lunch, and that comes to an even 13 hours each day. Say you leave your house at 7:00 AM, you will come back at 8 PM. Sufficiently exhausted to not be able to do anything except eat and sleep so that you can get back up the... Read More

Day 53 - United Airlines mess, Prep post for the detailed one, Homeland finale (preview)

Ah, the United situation is such a total mess. I have been hanging out at Reddit and learning and absorbing so much information the past whole day (my first complete day with Reddit since a hiatus, which I am not sure why I took), I hope to make like a compilation of what to do when asked to leave a plane?

The short answer: Leave the plane.

The long answer will have all sorts of links to comment threads that share a lot of information about what it really means when revenue passengers are asked to leave the plane, why airlines do it, how they approach it, how systematic it is (they have software that will pick out people randomly,... Read More