Category Archives: Computers

How a bad password policy at Bank of America reduces security

When you force people to use hard-to-remember passwords, you’re actually forcing them to use bad passwords.

Trivial discovery of the day: “calorie” data in Garmin data exports is actually joules

Garmin data exports measure activity energy in joules but label it as calories. 1 calorie == 4.184 joules.

Hack of the day: keep the Emacs server running in the active login session

Prereqs for this hack being useful to you: (1) you use GNU Emacs; (2) you keep a single Emacs running in your session and use emacsclient to open files for editing in it; (3) you have Linux computers that use systemd on which you keep multiple concurrent login sessions open; and (4) you want emacsclient… Read More »

How to access your encrypted Linux system from the Ubuntu installer when your system won’t boot

I had to figure out the steps for myself by assembling pieces of it from many different web pages, so I’ve collected them all here for my benefit and yours.