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Is it safe to buy refurbished hardware?
If I were a state actor looking to get stuff behind people’s firewalls, refurbished items would be a great attack vector.
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AppleScript program to find duplicate JPGs in Apple Photos
When Apple moved to HEIC (a more efficient file format for photos) a few iOS versions ago (I can’t remember when, exactly) they created a very confusing situation where sometimes photos would be converted (if you had an arcane setting buried deep in iOS set a certain way) when you export them from your iPhone […]
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Is technical analysis and algorithmic trading a legal form of market collusion?
Despite all dictates of logic against it, technical analysis actually works some of the time. I’m not talking about the random luck of any scheme working, but the fact that an uncanny amount of the time, “support” and “resistance” theories seem to be borne out in actual stock data. Assuming I’m not just imagining this, […]
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Free program for finding duplicate photos in the Apple Photos App on OS X
If you have a huge Photos library on the Mac, you very likely have a bunch of duplicate photos. People have also found that duplicates photos are sometimes created when you upgrade from iPhoto or Aperture to Photos. Unfortunately, if you look at the “free” programs on the App Store, you find that they are generally […]
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Verizon and Netflix problems resolved by routing around Cogent?
By now the problems between Verizon and Cogent are well known, at least to nerds. FiOS users, especially on the East Coast, have been complaining of increasingly poor Netflix streaming performance. The reason stems from the saturated connections between Cogent and Verizon which neither refuses to fix; see here for a good background on the dispute. […]
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Stephen Wolfram is killing Mathematica
One of the saddest consequences of Steven Wolfram’s descent into megalomaniacal insanity (vis his decision to save science from itself by reinventing it in the image of a popular science book from the 1980s) is the continuing decline of Mathematica, his greatest (and, he seems intent upon forgetting, only) accomplishment. Why the return to bitter […]
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Looks like we’ll be here awhile…
I had originally made plans to move this to a private server, but since I’m working at MIT Lincoln Lab, it looks like I’m going to be able to keep all of my MIT computer access from when I was a graduate student. So, this will stay up indefinitely. I know you’re relieved. I may […]
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How to rotate iPhone video on a Mac
I ran into what is apparently a not uncommon problem with iPhone video: you start to take a video while phone still thinks it’s in portrait orientation (long axis of the phone vertical) and then the rest of the video is stuck that way, even if you took 99% of it in landscape mode (the […]
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Finally, a good Subversion client for Mac OS X
If you don’t have a Mac, or don’t know what SVN is, please accept my apologies for this very directed post. To the one guy remaining, rejoice: For the longest time, there has been no good SVN interface available on the Mac. Windows folks had TortoiseSVN, and Linux folks wouldn’t be caught dead using anything […]
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Getting the most data speed out of your cell phone
You may have noticed there have been very few posts here. There’s a reason for that. The first and foremost is that sending my rants in to the void has not been as personally cathartic as I’d hoped. My other goal for the blog, which actually has been somewhat successful, was to simply provide a […]