Words, code, and information security in Portland, Oregon

This is the website of Erik L. Arneson. I am a freelance writer and software developer in Portland, Oregon.


Blog Posts

  • Some Great Fish Shell Plugins

    As a long-time Linux user, I am pretty comfortable with command line interfaces. However, as I started learning more about automation and how important it is to get your computer to do more work for you, I leaned toward wanting my command line shell to do more. Eventually I switched to fish shell, a very user-friendly shell with excellent scripting capabilities that is far more readable and less obscure than bash.

  • Typing Chinuk Wawa in Emacs

    Back in 2015, I took a course in being an ally for local Native American communities from the Portland Underground Grad School (PUGS). One suggested action was learning the local language, but it proved difficult to find opportunities. When the pandemic forced school closures, though, Lane Community College began offering classes online. I found out about this thanks to the Kaltash Wawa blog, and this fall I signed up to take a remote Chinuk Wawa class through Lane Community College.

  • New PGP Key for 2018

    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.

  • Recording Podcasts in Linux

    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.

  • Slides on a Stick with Raspberry Pi Zero W

    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).

  • Arduino Planetary Hours library

    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.

    Download v1.0 Here

  • Driftwood Public Library Follow-Up

    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.

  • Upcoming Lectures at Driftwood Public Library

    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!

  • Raspberry Pi GPIO with Erlang

    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.

  • OMSI Science on Screen Wrapup

    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.

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