technonaturalist

Update 20180202: I didn’t realise this was still coming up in search results, but it’s been brought to my attention from a couple of sources that TrueCrypt seems to now be defunct and a lot of the Firefox add-ons now won’t work with the most recent versions of Firefox. So please keep this in mind if you’re reading this now.

For good results do levels 1 and 2. I highly recommend level 3. 4 is optional extra and 5 if you’re extra paranoid. In a section after level 5 I also include some slight modifications to the installation guide for Ubuntu because I believe making the switch to Linux is really worthwhile if you don’t need a program (or suite of programs) that doesn’t have a Linux version. If you find any of “free”, “secure” and “probably ethical” (I think) desirable in an operating system (all at once even!) hit up the Got Linux? section first and then come back to top. It’s at the bottom because I was building up from pretty-easy-to-do to requires-a-bit-of-effort.

So apparently full disk encryption is not the best idea for people who work with “large” files (where “large” was loosely defined as “multi-megabyte” in one of the threads I skimmed through). I couldn’t find anything informative never mind definitive on how full disk encryption would affect 3d and large digital painting work, so decided to run some experiments particular to my usage. These are not benchmarks in any way, shape or form, I was entirely too lazy to do things properly.

There’s probably a script for this. Or maybe drush is the script. Is all good, some things are done much faster with commandline :)

drush vset maintenance_mode 1 
drush cc all 
drush arb default --destination=../[site]-[date].tar

And if there’s updates to be done:

drush up -y

At the end:

drush vset maintenance_mode 0

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Maths

Forgot 7yo already had a maths book so he’s continuing on with his old one. He got away with doing only one page instead of two as I also made him read the thing by himself which taxed him quite a lot as he was already a bit tired and we started later than we should have. Kumon book is much too easy for 5yo so will have to get another one that’s slightly more challenging. Seems like it would be a good thing for 3yo so either he will get 5yo’s book or I’ll get him another one like it.

In which I once more attempt weekly updates on the homeschooling side of things. Going to see how I go just writing about the bookwork and if I remember to add the Other Stuff we do as I go (and I found out after reading the curriculum outlines that we actually do most of the stuff in the curriculum without making much effort to do it, wonder how long I can get away with that… :).

Some people have made them. As far as I can tell from an extremely quick skim, they’re all round coins and bills, familiar looking money.

The current block I’m working in uses local currency and bitcoin for a global currency. While contemplating bitcoin and how it gets accepted/exchanged as readily as the local currency of any given area, I wondered if they had a physical version of it. Which then of course had me wondering how cool it would be if they were dice.

I can’t even count in miles.

I was a touch concerned about adding anything else to the sidebar as it’s already quite long. Then I had a look at the sidebars some of my friends and other miscellaneous people have on their blogs and I don’t feel too bad adding a couple of blocks. Then of course there was a mental kerfuffle about folds and whether blocks should be above or below them. I eventually decided to keep “About” up the top as it summarises the silly blog, and drop everything else in under it.

Happy Father’s Day to all the people that do Father’s Day!

We had JJ’s dad, my uncle and one of my cousins over for lunch. My uncle offered to cook the fish so we pulled 6 trout out of the tanks. I’ve been observing that some of them were pretty big when feeding them, and one of the ones that Tao pulled up was quite large.

…privacy concerning if you’re one of those people that object to things like tracking you around the internet, and not a big deal if you’re not.

It bugs me a little bit (especially as I realised recently that I’d forgotten to mention tracking cookies and scripts etc that would have been coming from the share module I was using in my privacy thing) so in the event it bugs anyone who happens to drop by I’ve replaced the module I was using for sharing with [Social Share Privacy](Social Share Privacy). Anywhere you see +1/Like/Pin/Tweet/etc buttons on a website, it’s set scripts and cookies and things in your browser already (unless you have a Fortified Firefox). What this module does is load the button image for the socnet in question but doesn’t set the cookie or the scripts etc. Your first click will activate the button so it can plant its cookies and scripts and do its little tracking thing. Your second click will launch the sharing thing.