In November, I was following a news story the Washington Post broke about Trustcor, a Certificate Authority with root certificates pre-loaded in all popular browsers. A few academics identified some problematic relationships and facts about Trustcor that puts into question the process used by Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to determine which companies can issue the certificates that our browsers use to indicate a connection is secure. From the article:

“koala bear eating eggs benedict in a bistro” is the prompt I entered into OpenAI’s DALL·E system to generate this image. I have been reading articles about AI image generation since DALL·E 2 launched earlier this year, and have been experimenting with it hands-on since I received access earlier this week. It is lots of fun, but doesn’t always generate the results you might expect. I’ve been trying to describe to it artist Henri Julien’s Chasse-gallerie, a drawing of 8 voyageurs flying in a canoe at night, and DALL·E struggles with the flying canoe. For each prompt, DALL·E initially creates 4 image variations - I’ve selected the most interesting one for each below.

I have been in IT “war room” type situations a number of times, working to get service to a production system restored. It was with professional interest that I followed the Rogers outage on July 8th, 2022.

For anyone looking for more information than what was covered in the media, Rogers’ response to the CRTC’s questions about the incident was published and can be downloaded from the CRTC (the .DOCX link on the July 22, 2022 post).

I recently participated in GeekWeek 7.5, the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s (CCCS) annual cybersecurity workshop. I was assigned to a team of peers in banking, telecom, government and academia. We were to work together on analyzing how Bluetooth item trackers (eg: Apple AirTags, Tile) can be covertly used for malicious purposes, and developing processes and tools to detect them.

It was my first time attending the event, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Here’s how it worked. The CCCS builds teams from the pool of GeekWeek applicants, based on interests and skills identified by the applicant in the application process. Leading up to the event, CCCS appoints a team lead, who defines goals for the team.

Ever since I first read about Hackinthoshes, I’ve thought about building one. A friend of mine edits all of his video on a purpose built Hackintosh. I never did build one - for myself, I like to run Linux, I don’t really need a Mac for anything, and I find that off-lease corporate grade laptops are the best value in computing. But, every once in a while, I have something I want to build on my iPhone, and a Mac is like a dongle that makes it possible.

I wanted a hard copy of an eBook I had that is out of print. There are many resources out there for binding books. Many recommend using acid free PVA glue. I can’t speak to how it compares to other glues, but “Aleene’s Tacky Glue” is a PVA glue, available acid free, which was available at craft stores in my area.

This post will focus on prepping an eBook for print. As US Letter is the common paper size here, which is too big for a book, I decided to print 4 pages per US letter page, 2 pages per side, each 5.5" wide by 8.5" tall.