My current frankenstein-box, before I gave in and bought a non-stock cpu cooler, was cooled by a 20" galaxy fan (about $11 from WalMart) bolted onto the side of the case in place of an actual case cover. After a few months, the entire case was a christmas wonderland of gray gunk. I had to take the whole thing apart and peel off sheets of lint that reminded me of cleaning out the lint trap on a dryer. So I bought an air conditioner filter, and duct taped it onto the galaxy fan. Changed it every few months, and not one bit of dust.
Of course, this still works with normal 80mm fans. Go to Walmart and buy an aircondioner filter, and cut out 80mm diameter circles. Just screw through them with the same screws that hold your fans onto your case. Change whenever they look really bad, or when you notice your temps going up.
Perhaps I've been out of college for too long, but the idea of a "high stakes long distance drinking game" just seems silly. What is at stake other then liver damage?
It will fail for both uses. One, I live in a dorm where people buy booze for other people all the time, and I assume most dorms are like that as well. These are underage people taking the risk of using a fake ID to buy booze for other underage people. If they are willing to take that risk, and go through that effort, then why wouldn't someone who hasn't used up his beer quota just get a drink for someone else from the Kegbot!?
Two, Kegbot is useless as an instrument for long distance drinking games, as there is no way to verify the alcohol content in Kegbot. Who is to say the other team doesn't fill theirs with a beverage of lower alcohol content, or, if the stakes are high, water? And anyway, is this a videoconference device as well, or does each team tap out in more code that they have completed their round?
Kegbot is a really cool implementation of some interesting technology, and anyone would be proud to have on in his frat house, but seriously, this invention isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The last computer I built (and the one I am typing on) has a problem with heat, even though the inside of my case has good airflow. The problem is that this is a frankenstein box, and I was too cheap to buy good fans. So what I did was take both side panels off, and put a 20" Galaxy fan (about $11 at walmart) on the side, pumping air into the case. The air then flows out where the right side panel used to be.
I get temps between 100 and 120 fahrenheit, depending on whether I'm playing a 3D accelerated game or not.
Recently, due to a very dusty nightmare (I spend hours cleaning the dust out) I now have an air-conditioner filter duct taped to the front of the galaxy fan. I change it every few months.
I have a separate password for EVERYTHING I have, no matter how obscure the website or service is. Each password is at least 10 characters long, with random uppercase/lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols; none of this "can be broken by a dictionary attack" crap.
The trick is, you don't actually have to memorize your passwords; after you type each one about 20 times, your fingers retain it in muscle memory. I actually couldn't tell you what any of my passwords are, I have to type them on a qwerty keyboard. (If I ever lose one of my hands, I'm screwed.)
Anyway, as backup, I have them all written down on a sheet of paper in an undisclosed location, with the format of login on one line, password on the line after it, with no identifying information on which login/password combo goes to what website, computer, etc. The text in this list is also encrypted using a one time pad encryption program (that I wrote myself), the key to which is in a different undisclosed location.
So if my fingers happen to forget one of the passwords, I can still retrieve it (with a lengthy process). You'd be surprised how many different login/password combos you can remember, even months after you've used them last, if you type them several dozen times over the course of a few days. But to each his own. That's just my system.
There are many people who's brains are either unable or are not very good at decyphering body language. People who are borderline autistic, and Jungian types such as INTJ (I'm one of them) fall into this category. For these people, talking over the internet is a relief from the daily embarrasing situations in real life. In text, you don't have to use the emotional processing parts of your brain to deduce if someone is happy by their facial expression. All you have to do is see, ":)". Simple.
Body language is a good thing for most people, but not all. The problem is that these 'most' people feel that the way they work applies to the rest of the human population. Body language is good, except when you can't interpret it correctly.
Those people are wrong. Dead wrong. It might not be the ultimate panacea, but its the closest thing we've got right now.
When you're chatting on AIM with a blind person, or a deaf person, or someone with no legs, or a speech impediment, irritable bowel syndrome, in a germ free bubble, etc, there's no way to know. It is the great equalizer.
There is nothing inherently more 'psychologically healthy' about talking to someone face to face than over the wire, or playing basketball over Halflife 2. These are lies perpetrated by ignorant people who have always 'fit in' with society's views on what is normal.
I doubt anyone with a disability has ever told you, "You are too obsessed with computers." And if he has, it is only because he has never extensively experienced the world through a computer.
Just ignore them and keep doing what you're doing. And perhaps one day you will be making a higher salary than them, while they keep your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
Many geeks would have probably been monks; it's a structured environment where personality quirks wouldn't be a problem.
Many would perhaps be smiths; blacksmiths, armorsmiths, glassworkers, etc. All types of smithing requires an advanced knowledge of the craft, with nuances more intricate than any xfree86 config file. What makes geeks tick is not sci-fi itself, or computers themselves, it's systems. Geeks love systems. Systems of numbers, systems of logic, computer systems, pen and paper games rules systems, computer language systems. Even non-geeks like systems. Physical Sports are systems; they are self consistent rule-based constructions. Geeks are merely overly obsessed with certain systems, such as the stars, or physics, or computer languages, much like an autistic person could be obsessed with anything, but he chooses a certain something. So perhaps any intricate systematic smithing craft would appeal to the ancient geek.
I never use power management, except for turning off my monitor after about an hour. There are too many applications that freak out during powersave, especially ones that try to access the hard disk for various reasons. Think about it: how often do programs you write have extra code in them for handling power-save modes? Probably not many. So when your application tries to get info to/from a powered off hard disk, swap partition, etc., it many times freaks out (especially 3D accelerated games in the middle of eating dinner). I used Windows for many years, and this means lockups and crashes. Eventually I stopped using power-save options altogether, in favor of stability. I've never tried any power-save options on Linux, though. I've just been conditioned not to use them I guess. But the most important thing is the monitor; no programs freak out when there is no monitor, and the monitor sucks up the most juice anyway. So poweroff monitor after an hour is all I ever do.
I'm not a big Halo fan myself (fps don't belong on consoles, but that's a flame for another day) but it's kind of refreshing that the movie industry is whoring itself out to the gaming industry for once, instead of the other way around. I'm sick of crappy games being put out by every single movie, just as an extra boost for cash.
Of course, movies have been made before based on games, but Hollywood merely buys the name, and makes a craptastical movie having nothing to do with the actual game (see Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, soon to be Doom 3) in hopes that the popularity of the name will bring revenue. Hopefully this time a gaming franchise will be saved from this fate due to Bungie's insistance on Hollywood following the Halo Bible.
Do you, at decrypt time, specify a source file and a pad file stored on a CD you keep locked in a safe when not in use?
Actually, yes. I only store the key file on CD/DVD, and it is (obviously) in system memory during encryption/decryption. The key is never written to hard disk.
Do you use offsets into a pad and just specify the (secret) offset?
The program allows you to use an offset, so you can use the unused portions of a key file. As of right now, I have no plans of keeping this offset value secret, as doing so would not add to security.
Thanks for the tips. Anyway, basically, I'm not going for 128 bit, etc, keys here. The text in the original question probably wasn't specific enough. What I need truly random numbers for is a one time pad encryption program I just wrote. Because it is one time pad, I need a MASSIVE amount of TRULY random numbers to use, as my key must be the same length as any file I encrypt. Pseudo random number generators aren't good enough. Also, one time pad encryption is mathematically the strongest form of encryption, but it is only as strong as the randomness of its key.
So basically, I was wondering if noise into my computer's microphone would be considered random enough for this application; it's easy, and I can make an unlimited amount of numbers this way. I was planning on placing a fan next to the microphone, or singing a song, etc. Thanks in advance, and good luck with your degree.
I think SOny's focus on numbers is terrible, since none of them actually MEAN a damn thing. Even the ones that aren't just made up are irrelevant.
I agree that numbers aren't the important thing here; it's the games. I agree that Nintendo has more heart than Sony. I'm just saying that it gets me excited when I see a demo of tens of thousands of rendered leaves in a huge vortex. It also gets me excited when the man running the demo tells me that there is enough processing power to give each leaf it's own audio channel. It's not the most important thing in the world. I'm just saying that it's exciting.
I thought Sony's presentation was awesome. The X-Box 360 presentation was all about pizazz, and how they would be everything to every gamer, and how the new Live would change everything. They also showed clips from many action and sports titles. Blah. But Sony's presentation was all about numbers, the new cell technology, and tech demos actually SHOWING what their new tech can do. It was awesome. You can get the micrososft conference here as a torrent or direct download: http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=e3xbox _20050516_300.wmv. Unfortunately, I can't find a link for the sony presentation. I myself dumped it to my hard drive from a video stream found on Gamespot http://www.gamespot.com/.
There's no DRM or anything, it's just not documented. The OpenOffice people, to reverse engineer.doc format, had to (and this is an oversimplified explainiation) change something, then see what happened. Then change something else, then see what happened. To make bold text in.doc, what is the format? Is it <B>Bold Text</B> like HTML, or is it::B9/:Bold Text.:: indicates a tag, B is for bold, 9 indicates how many characters after the tag should be bold, and/: indicates the close of the tag. Who knows? The OpenOffice people had to figure this all out by poking and prodding.doc until they got the results they wanted. That's how the format of a file is protected, it's simply undocumented.
It is a good idea to be wary of licenses that are royalty free. Every document that has a license, free or not, allows Microsoft, or any company that owns that license to have a foothold in your life.
You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.
And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.
PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
It's philosophy. :)
My current frankenstein-box, before I gave in and bought a non-stock cpu cooler, was cooled by a 20" galaxy fan (about $11 from WalMart) bolted onto the side of the case in place of an actual case cover. After a few months, the entire case was a christmas wonderland of gray gunk. I had to take the whole thing apart and peel off sheets of lint that reminded me of cleaning out the lint trap on a dryer. So I bought an air conditioner filter, and duct taped it onto the galaxy fan. Changed it every few months, and not one bit of dust.
Of course, this still works with normal 80mm fans. Go to Walmart and buy an aircondioner filter, and cut out 80mm diameter circles. Just screw through them with the same screws that hold your fans onto your case. Change whenever they look really bad, or when you notice your temps going up.
Pencil and paper also have games as well. : )
Perhaps I've been out of college for too long, but the idea of a "high stakes long distance drinking game" just seems silly. What is at stake other then liver damage?
:)
No clue. I don't drink.
The Kegbot has two uses:
1) To enforce responsible drinking.
2) To enable long distance drinking games.
It will fail for both uses. One, I live in a dorm where people buy booze for other people all the time, and I assume most dorms are like that as well. These are underage people taking the risk of using a fake ID to buy booze for other underage people. If they are willing to take that risk, and go through that effort, then why wouldn't someone who hasn't used up his beer quota just get a drink for someone else from the Kegbot!?
Two, Kegbot is useless as an instrument for long distance drinking games, as there is no way to verify the alcohol content in Kegbot. Who is to say the other team doesn't fill theirs with a beverage of lower alcohol content, or, if the stakes are high, water? And anyway, is this a videoconference device as well, or does each team tap out in more code that they have completed their round?
Kegbot is a really cool implementation of some interesting technology, and anyone would be proud to have on in his frat house, but seriously, this invention isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
I can't get my usb to work correctly under Slackware 10.1, so I can't get pictures off my (friend's) digital camera.
The last computer I built (and the one I am typing on) has a problem with heat, even though the inside of my case has good airflow. The problem is that this is a frankenstein box, and I was too cheap to buy good fans. So what I did was take both side panels off, and put a 20" Galaxy fan (about $11 at walmart) on the side, pumping air into the case. The air then flows out where the right side panel used to be.
I get temps between 100 and 120 fahrenheit, depending on whether I'm playing a 3D accelerated game or not.
Recently, due to a very dusty nightmare (I spend hours cleaning the dust out) I now have an air-conditioner filter duct taped to the front of the galaxy fan. I change it every few months.
Dude, that's a good idea. Never thought of that.
I have a separate password for EVERYTHING I have, no matter how obscure the website or service is. Each password is at least 10 characters long, with random uppercase/lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols; none of this "can be broken by a dictionary attack" crap.
The trick is, you don't actually have to memorize your passwords; after you type each one about 20 times, your fingers retain it in muscle memory. I actually couldn't tell you what any of my passwords are, I have to type them on a qwerty keyboard. (If I ever lose one of my hands, I'm screwed.)
Anyway, as backup, I have them all written down on a sheet of paper in an undisclosed location, with the format of login on one line, password on the line after it, with no identifying information on which login/password combo goes to what website, computer, etc. The text in this list is also encrypted using a one time pad encryption program (that I wrote myself), the key to which is in a different undisclosed location.
So if my fingers happen to forget one of the passwords, I can still retrieve it (with a lengthy process). You'd be surprised how many different login/password combos you can remember, even months after you've used them last, if you type them several dozen times over the course of a few days. But to each his own. That's just my system.
There are many people who's brains are either unable or are not very good at decyphering body language. People who are borderline autistic, and Jungian types such as INTJ (I'm one of them) fall into this category. For these people, talking over the internet is a relief from the daily embarrasing situations in real life. In text, you don't have to use the emotional processing parts of your brain to deduce if someone is happy by their facial expression. All you have to do is see, ":)". Simple.
Body language is a good thing for most people, but not all. The problem is that these 'most' people feel that the way they work applies to the rest of the human population. Body language is good, except when you can't interpret it correctly.
Those people are wrong. Dead wrong. It might not be the ultimate panacea, but its the closest thing we've got right now.
When you're chatting on AIM with a blind person, or a deaf person, or someone with no legs, or a speech impediment, irritable bowel syndrome, in a germ free bubble, etc, there's no way to know. It is the great equalizer.
There is nothing inherently more 'psychologically healthy' about talking to someone face to face than over the wire, or playing basketball over Halflife 2. These are lies perpetrated by ignorant people who have always 'fit in' with society's views on what is normal.
I doubt anyone with a disability has ever told you, "You are too obsessed with computers." And if he has, it is only because he has never extensively experienced the world through a computer.
Just ignore them and keep doing what you're doing. And perhaps one day you will be making a higher salary than them, while they keep your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.
Ascii to ascii, Dos to Dos...
Many geeks would have probably been monks; it's a structured environment where personality quirks wouldn't be a problem.
Many would perhaps be smiths; blacksmiths, armorsmiths, glassworkers, etc. All types of smithing requires an advanced knowledge of the craft, with nuances more intricate than any xfree86 config file. What makes geeks tick is not sci-fi itself, or computers themselves, it's systems. Geeks love systems. Systems of numbers, systems of logic, computer systems, pen and paper games rules systems, computer language systems. Even non-geeks like systems. Physical Sports are systems; they are self consistent rule-based constructions. Geeks are merely overly obsessed with certain systems, such as the stars, or physics, or computer languages, much like an autistic person could be obsessed with anything, but he chooses a certain something. So perhaps any intricate systematic smithing craft would appeal to the ancient geek.
Is Congress susceptible to the Slashdot effect?
I never use power management, except for turning off my monitor after about an hour. There are too many applications that freak out during powersave, especially ones that try to access the hard disk for various reasons. Think about it: how often do programs you write have extra code in them for handling power-save modes? Probably not many. So when your application tries to get info to/from a powered off hard disk, swap partition, etc., it many times freaks out (especially 3D accelerated games in the middle of eating dinner). I used Windows for many years, and this means lockups and crashes. Eventually I stopped using power-save options altogether, in favor of stability. I've never tried any power-save options on Linux, though. I've just been conditioned not to use them I guess. But the most important thing is the monitor; no programs freak out when there is no monitor, and the monitor sucks up the most juice anyway. So poweroff monitor after an hour is all I ever do.
If Walt Disney were alive today, and saw what was happening to his company, he'd be rolling over in his grave!
Wait a minute...
Hey, once you go Track, you never go back!
I'm not a big Halo fan myself (fps don't belong on consoles, but that's a flame for another day) but it's kind of refreshing that the movie industry is whoring itself out to the gaming industry for once, instead of the other way around. I'm sick of crappy games being put out by every single movie, just as an extra boost for cash.
Of course, movies have been made before based on games, but Hollywood merely buys the name, and makes a craptastical movie having nothing to do with the actual game (see Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, soon to be Doom 3) in hopes that the popularity of the name will bring revenue. Hopefully this time a gaming franchise will be saved from this fate due to Bungie's insistance on Hollywood following the Halo Bible.
Do you, at decrypt time, specify a source file and a pad file stored on a CD you keep locked in a safe when not in use?
Actually, yes. I only store the key file on CD/DVD, and it is (obviously) in system memory during encryption/decryption. The key is never written to hard disk.
Do you use offsets into a pad and just specify the (secret) offset?
The program allows you to use an offset, so you can use the unused portions of a key file. As of right now, I have no plans of keeping this offset value secret, as doing so would not add to security.
Thanks for the tips. Anyway, basically, I'm not going for 128 bit, etc, keys here. The text in the original question probably wasn't specific enough. What I need truly random numbers for is a one time pad encryption program I just wrote. Because it is one time pad, I need a MASSIVE amount of TRULY random numbers to use, as my key must be the same length as any file I encrypt. Pseudo random number generators aren't good enough. Also, one time pad encryption is mathematically the strongest form of encryption, but it is only as strong as the randomness of its key.
So basically, I was wondering if noise into my computer's microphone would be considered random enough for this application; it's easy, and I can make an unlimited amount of numbers this way. I was planning on placing a fan next to the microphone, or singing a song, etc. Thanks in advance, and good luck with your degree.
I think SOny's focus on numbers is terrible, since none of them actually MEAN a damn thing. Even the ones that aren't just made up are irrelevant.
I agree that numbers aren't the important thing here; it's the games. I agree that Nintendo has more heart than Sony. I'm just saying that it gets me excited when I see a demo of tens of thousands of rendered leaves in a huge vortex. It also gets me excited when the man running the demo tells me that there is enough processing power to give each leaf it's own audio channel. It's not the most important thing in the world. I'm just saying that it's exciting.
Yes, I was referring to the tech demos. The other stuff is meaningless.
But Sony's presentation was all about numbers, the new cell technology, and tech demos actually SHOWING what their new tech can do.
I thought Sony's presentation was awesome. The X-Box 360 presentation was all about pizazz, and how they would be everything to every gamer, and how the new Live would change everything. They also showed clips from many action and sports titles. Blah. But Sony's presentation was all about numbers, the new cell technology, and tech demos actually SHOWING what their new tech can do. It was awesome. You can get the micrososft conference here as a torrent or direct download: http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=e3xbox _20050516_300.wmv. Unfortunately, I can't find a link for the sony presentation. I myself dumped it to my hard drive from a video stream found on Gamespot http://www.gamespot.com/.
There's no DRM or anything, it's just not documented. The OpenOffice people, to reverse engineer .doc format, had to (and this is an oversimplified explainiation) change something, then see what happened. Then change something else, then see what happened. To make bold text in .doc, what is the format? Is it <B>Bold Text</B> like HTML, or is it ::B9/:Bold Text. :: indicates a tag, B is for bold, 9 indicates how many characters after the tag should be bold, and /: indicates the close of the tag. Who knows? The OpenOffice people had to figure this all out by poking and prodding .doc until they got the results they wanted. That's how the format of a file is protected, it's simply undocumented.
It is a good idea to be wary of licenses that are royalty free. Every document that has a license, free or not, allows Microsoft, or any company that owns that license to have a foothold in your life.
You don't have to pay for MetroReader version 1 or 2, but MetroReader version 3 might not be free, and they also might change the format slightly, and suddenly you're a Word '97 user in a Word 2000 world.
And then guess what? You have to wait for OpenMetro to reverse engineer the format so you can read Metro documents without MetroReader, because Microsoft decided not to freely license the format to Sun Microsystems.
PDF is here, it's open, it works well, it's already integrated into many businesses, and regardless of how much you hate Adobe Reader, the format itself is good. There's no reason to switch.