Software Development and Information Security in Portland, Oregon
I’ve upgraded to a 4096-bit RSA OpenPGP key. The new key fingerprint is FB05 D043 5BA4 6C32 66AE 2F74 17D0 60A6 16EC 3D6E and you can download it by clicking on that link.
The key is also available on your favorite PGP keyserver, or through my Keybase account.
I co-host a podcast called My Alchemical Bromance, and one of the frequent challenges I end up facing is how to record video and voice chats for interviews. A lot of podcasters use external hardware devices, such as the Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which is a great solution. But I wanted to do it all in software — and in Linux.
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If you give presentations often, you will know that one of the biggest headaches is managing slides. You have to figure out software, hardware, and connectors. I’ve usually resorted to bringing a USB thumb drive with my slides in PDF and ODP format, but then I came across an even better idea: the Raspberry Pi Zero W (or RPi0W).
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I am finally announcing my PlanetaryHours library for the Arduino. This library uses the sun_rise() and sun_set() functions from the avr-libc time.h library to calculate planetary hours.
Driftwood Public Library is great! I had a wonderful time in Lincoln City speaking about secret societies and cryptography. Links to my slides are below.
Secret Societies in Fiction How Computers Changed Cryptography
For a bibliography for “How Computers Changed Cryptography”, check my notes for my OMSI Science on Screen talk.
Also, I would like to thank the ‘D’ Sands Condominium Motel for sponsoring the talks and providing me with a really lovely room.
This is the view from my motel room balcony at the ‘D’ Sands.
Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City has selected Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore for their 2017 Everybody Reads event. They’ve invited me to give two lectures. This is going to be fun!
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Raspberry Pis are super cool. One of the neat things about them is that they have a ton of general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins, so you can use them to control all sorts of external devices. Unfortunately, most of the examples and applications are written in Python. I know, a lot of people really love Python, but it’s just not my cup of tea.
Enter the Erlang πGPIO library by Paolo Oliveira! This is a simple, straightforward library that implements the RPi GPIO stuff for Erlang. Using it, I have created an Erlang library to control a 28BYJ-48 5V stepper motor with a ULN2003 controller board.
My talk at OMSI last night, “Computers and the Dawn of Modern Cryptography,” went really well. It was a great crowd and there was a good Q&A session afterwards. I’m going to keep this post really brief. First, there will be slides for my talk. Following that will be a brief bibliography if you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating topic.
Click here to download my slides.
In addition, almost all of the photos and information on individual cipher machines can be found at Crypto Museum. This is a rich and bountiful resource for those interested in the internal workings of modern encryption.
On March 28th, I will be giving a lecture called “Computers and the Dawn of Modern Cryptography” at OMSI as part of their Science on Screen program. I’ll be speaking and answering questions just before a screening of The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. I am really excited about this opportunity! Please come down to OMSI for an informative lecture and an excellent film.
This past Fall, a bunch of big names removed StartCom from their trusted SSL Certificate Authority list. As a result, when I renewed my SSL certificates this year, I went with Let’s Encrypt. It was a pleasant experience, because Let’s Encrypt uses a command-line client called Certbot that does most of the heavy lifting for you.
After certificate renewal, everything is still looking pretty good. Please let me know if you have any SSL problems with my website through the contact form.
