Another silly fun Japanese game. The idea seems to be to send the guy flying as far as possible, using a combination of moves and taking advantage of people on the ground while avoiding others. I don’t really understand everything that’s happening, but it’s kinda fun! My best score: a…
Physical security
A long time ago (in university) I read this lock picking guide. I recently re-read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman which contains (among other things) memoirs of how Richard Feynman cracked safes at Los Alamos during WWII. (The safes in question weren't very secure.) And now I read Safecracking for…
Thunderbird
It's a great email client, but why don't the junk mail controls also work on news? They're all still there in the interface, just greyed out. I want to be able to treat junk usenet posts the same way as junk email!
SHA-1 Followup
More re the SHA-1 result: Around $30M (give or take a few million) should build you a machine to find a collision in a few days. What previously took (say) the NSA 40 years to figure out now takes about a week. A second preimage attack is theoretically 2106, according…
Final Fantasy II
Is it just me, or is it needlessly difficult? The problem is this: 1. Characters progress according to how they are played. If you fight with swords a lot, you get good with swords. If you get hit a lot, your HP goes up. If you do a lot of…
Atomic brain to power, fingers to speed…
I’m not a touch typer, but I am a pretty fast (8-finger or so) typer after 20 years of keyboarding, and I don’t actually have to look at the keys much. Of course, most of the kind of typing that I do is quite different from actual written English –…
SHA-1 now IHA-1
Bruce Schneier reports that SHA-1 has been “broken” by a Chinese research team. I'm assuming this is a birthday attack resulting in collisions rather than a general purpose ability to find a collision for a given hash (which would be much more serious). Nevertheless, it is a major result against…
Libraries are fun
Got around to going to my local library today. And of course they were having a book sale. I picked up several nice geek books at a dollar apiece.
Bees
It is an interesting thought that (I conjecture) a very high percentage of the edible items available for purchase in a supermarket were, at some stage in their lifetime, helped along by a bee (most likely pollinating a plant). Thus the humble bee* is clearly very important to man. *The…
iPod Shuffle
The existence of the iPod shuffle merely serves to draw my attention to the fact that my iPod (3rd gen, the one with the dock) cannot do shuffle play. Apple wants people to pay $99 for the privilege of being able to do something that's been de rigeur since the…