Green Knight's Quest

There recently has been a security breach at a service (Cloudflare) used by many companies.

It was ugly: data, including passwords and personal details - was sent, in easily decryptable form, to unrelated websites, and this data was promptly indexed by search engines. Google & Co are trying to scrub this from their databases, but, well, yeah.

I had not known that DW was one of the possibly affected parties.

There's a short list in this article and the full, very long list (with a shorter highlights one) on Github.



Uber, Patreon, Medium, and Yelp are on the list, along with two password managers, authy.com and 1password.com, which claims to be not affected, but siderea just warned that Dreamwidth is also on the list, so I've just changed my passwords just in case.

I will not delete this account, but for now I have disabled the automatic crossposts from DW.

Even if you have no interest in computer programming, this is an article worth reading: It examines a 'great hacking feat' from a different perspective: not as an act of great daring, but taking into account the people whose jobs are made harder (if not impossible) by some guys having fun (and deciding how programming 'should work').

I am, as an aside, so very, very deeply impressed with Margaret Hamilton who had the confidence to diagnose that no, it was not her software that was wrong, there was something wrong with the hardware. Which are the time was still fairly experimental and should not have malfunctioned in this manner.

From where I'm sitting it's a tale of unexpected consequences and of arrogance.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

More details at http://julesjones.dreamwidth.org/3… - shorter post: they're closing down at the end of the month, they're still taking money, but they're no longer paying authors.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

We've just come back from seeing Rogue 1 (which was good fun, but ultimately a story we knew the ending of; I liked it, I am glad I saw it, but it didn't push my buttons quite as much as The Force Awakens did), so the news of Carrie Fisher's death seems particularly poignant.

(George Michael. Richard Adams. Seems like every time I blink someone who has touched lives dies.)

Farewell, General Leia. May the Force be with you. We will fight on.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

Firstly, I wish y'all a Merry Christmas, but secondly, I have a spare key for Broken Age (a point and click game that I haven't even played once). If you're short on funds and would like to try this, or know someone who'd appreciate it, ping me.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

At least two of my livejournal friends have been hacked in the recent move of LJ servers to Russia. One was an account that hasn't been active since 2013, which I would have thought is a 'good' target, but the other was active within the last month. They're not the same -the b_twin_1 (who I don't have a contact for) account has posted a number of Putin press conference items, while brooksmoses has only a single item were Putin says that people who lose elections should do so gracefully, but, yeah. Let's stamp this trend out, shall we?

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

A number of the Macphun photography apps are currently deeply discounted in the Appstore. Intensify, for instance, which retails for £45 through the website, is £3.99, so if you're looking at photo enhancement apps, this is the time to pounce. I've been using a number of their offerings for a couple of years now, and have been _very_ pleased with the results, to the degree that I've uninstalled various other apps I also own because I never use them anymore and when I try to, I find them cumbersome and unsatisfactory.

(The deal for Luminar is somewhat better on the Website because they give you additional materials.)

Ah, Luminar. I do not often fall in love with apps _that_ much - the last was Storyist - but this one hits all of my buttons.

- It's well designed. Everything works smoothly, the interface is smooth and slick and has a lot of useful settings and controls right where I expect them.

- It lets me create. Cool stuff happens when I use this app, I really like the results. There's a lot of 'oh, wow' coming from my direction at the moment.

- it makes me feel competent. I have another app, which gives me in its (much narrower) domain results of similar quality, but that one just has a list of presets to click, with no adjustments and no explanations. It's a good quick fix solution, particularly as there's much less cognitive load when you have only eight settings to choose from (instead of several dozens *plus* all of the individual filters). But 'apply this' is not very satisfying. I don't know why it works, I can't replicate the effect other than by using the exact same app, and I definitely cannot work out what's happening, and how I might tweak it to suit a different photo or solve a different problem.

- I'm learning *what* to apply and *how* to apply it. Twice this morning, after selecting a preset visually (they all give you previews of what your image will look like when they'e applied) I was able to apply an additional filter with not too much random moving of sliders to see what happens: I had a fair idea what effect I wanted, and which filter might be able to provide it. I'm still at the start of learning what all of these settings *really* do, but the app is set up in a way that completely cuts out the 'aaaargh, too many settings' bit and lets you go 'oh, combine filters a, b, and c, and you get this effect. Got it.'. I'm hoping that by the end of 2017 I have a much better handle on image processing - what *can* those tools do for me - but I feel that I am well on the way.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

(I'm not getting money for this; these are offers that I'd wish I'd have heard about if I had missed them.)

1) PacktPub is selling all of its books and video courses for $5 right now (until January 9th). Usual offer prices tend to be $15-25; list prices considerably higher. So far, I've found the books I own good value for money - solidly written, aware of best practice. If you want to level up your learning in any computer field (programming and software), this is a good opportunity.


2) I have five invitations for the SetApp beta. (beta until January, $10/month afterwards, which you may find useful or not; but the beta - which involves fully-fledged software - is definitely worth it. Included software is a bunch of utilities, but also includes Aeon Timeline 2. I'm still not sure what I think of this service as a whole - you need to have the SetApp app installed to be able to use any of the other software, so if that ever breaks, you're without - but on the other hand, it's definitely worth 'some hassle'. Whether it's worth $10/month... I don't know. I cannot afford a regular payment for software I would not otherwise have paid money for, though after trying HazeOver, I'd definitely buy that one.

And I failed my savings throw against advertising (I've known about this software for some time) and bought Luminar at a deep discount. I took a break from editing (intense! So, so good, but very intense) and played with the demo a bit. Ho-ly Cow.






That was a quick play with a couple of images, just to see what I could do with it... nice. £40 is pricey, but it beats the >£200 regular price tag, which will never happen. One of the things I want to do more of in 2017 is play with photo software. I'm still an utter fan of trying to get pictures right straight out of the camera, but I want to learn what's possible, and where I could take pictures. Post processing is time-intensive. (And if you always run the same filters, you may be better off changing your camera settings, or saving up for a camera that does not have the same shortcomings.) But there's a world of Doing Stuff With Images out there that I know very little about, and which I want to explore further.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.

I have just built a version of the app I'm working on, and have started to use it. Which promptly showed up a bug - I forgot to change my data in response to checking an item off the list - but that doesn't provide much of a problem right now.

My first app. It has a long way to go, and I have - the above bug aside - a fair few things I need to implement before it's ready to be tested by anyone who is not-me, but I wrote myself a tool and it's 70% useful. It is at least as useful as the app it is replacing.

Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org… where it has gathered comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.