borg.org

borg.org, the nobody reads it blog.

  • Kent's Super-Simple, Excellent Password Advice

    This excellent advice is simple, in fact its excellence depends upon being simple. Complicated is the enemy of security. If you follow this advice you will be among a very rare elite in how secure your passwords will be. Four parts: 1. Write down your passwords. On real paper, with a real pen or pencil, […]

  • Snowden, the Movie

    I went to one of the first Boston matinees of the movie Snowden today. It was all very familiar territory: it could have been boring or–as with any subject I know a lot about–it could have been excruciating in its errors. It was neither. It held my attention, it did not disappoint. But was it […]

  • Why We Got Ourselves a Trump: 4 Crazy Tricks

    Four things came together to give us Donald J. Trump as the all-but-official GOP nominee. First, the so-called cable news channels in the US are, indeed, for-profit businesses, looking for ratings, looking for an edge. Thump was ratings gold for them. He got enormous free publicity in exchange for supplying viewers. He did a very […]

  • Touchscreen Password Idea

    Passwords are a problem, and lots of people say they are doomed, but I have seen no good alternatives, so I sometimes think about making them better. Touchscreens are important yet really hard to enter good passwords. Also, I would like to do more of a “key exchange” when entering my password. I use different […]

  • An Idea for Doing Background Removal from a Sequence of Stationary Images, Manual-Style [Updated]

    Update: Finally looking at implementing this and I realize that thinking of that fully populated tree is probably good for understanding it, I don’t need to store anything but the left edge. When a new frame comes in, I will calculate a new left edge based on the new frame and the previous left edge. […]

  • Our Founding Fathers–Eating

    I have occasionally imagined a piece of historical fiction, a Rip van Winkle story where John Adams (a grumpy, wise, philosopher) or Ben Franklin (a gourmand, party animal, and scientist) or maybe Tom Jefferson (a million contradictions who liked liberty and revolution and food and wine and books and women of all colors) is dropped […]

  • What Makes Anyone Think Physics is Not a Religion?

    [I am sure this is not original, on so many levels, but my fingers are compelled to try to capture these thoughts. Forgive me.] At a fundamental level physicists appear to be deeply religious. Their Articles of Faith are something like this: There is order, This order can be understood by us, It is predictive, […]

  • Will Donald Trump Split the Republican Party?

    Splitting the GOP: Refused A few years ago, when the GOP first lurched right and so seemed to be dismissing any reasonable chance of winning the presidency, I figured they needed to split in two, they needed to kick out the crazies. But they didn’t, instead they all adopted this crazy attitude, and I forgot […]

  • Benefits of The Donald

    I missed the first Democratic debate of the 2016 election. I wanted to see it and being stuck on an airplane, with CNN, while it was on, seemed a fine coincidence. Except my Virgin America flight from LA to Boston was missing a quarter of the channels it was supposed to have, including CNN. And […]

  • How Political "Red Meat" Works (and Isn't Necessarily Bad)

    What do we call left-wing “red meat”?