Tyler Oderkirk's Blog

Introduction
It’s a hassle to shop for physical goods online because you don’t have the opportunity to put your hands on the item before making the purchase.
For camping gear this means you can’t…

Yank on a zipper to see if it’s sturdy.
Set up a tent to see if your other gear will fit inside.
Check tags for “Made [...]

One of the biggest North American electronic music festivals, Ultra, just wrapped up in Miami. I think it’s about time that I blogged about my experience there last year.
I attended last year’s edition with Carolyn just prior to a return trip which included visits to…

Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL
Georgia Tech in Atlanta, GA
UNC Charlotte, [...]

The problem
Have you ever named a file something like…

main.cpp.GOOD

… to indicate a “known-good” copy of `main.cpp`?
This simplistic method for storing file metadata is great because it’s filesystem-agnostic – the metadata (e.g. “this is known-good source code”) “follows” the file wherever it goes – from ext3 to FAT32 to NTFS, etc.
However, it has a few limitations:

Certain [...]

Way back in 2004, I spied an offer in Circuit Cellar magazine for a free evaluation kit from Aladdin Knowledge Systems (AKS), manufacturer of copy protection tokens. These are the little gadgets that you often need to plug in to your computer to prove that you ”really” own the particularly expensive application you’re trying to [...]

Have you ever wanted to transform a run-of-the-mill photograph into a complete 3D scene automagically like Jack Black does in this mildly-NSFW 35MiB 2min clip from Enemy of the State?
Well too bad — it’s just not possible to ascertain details that are hidden from the camera’s view!
You can get pretty close, though, with some software [...]

After a few false starts this Winter, I finally made it to Boston this weekend. I went with Carolyn and Jumbo. It was great to take a road trip where I wasn’t in the driver’s seat `:]`
We stopped at the Museum of Science as soon as we arrived. It housed an excellent “history of mathematics” [...]

I’m happy to announce the first release of a credentials (e.g. “usernames and passwords”) management system that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. It’s called Creds101 and this excerpt from the documentation gives some more detail:
Creds101 has 2 parts:

Software that you run on your computer (the “host”) to send commands to…
A USB [...]

“A5/1 [the encryption scheme used in most cellular voice calls] has operated unchanged for the last 21 years but it has now reached its cryptographic end-of-life, engulfed by the march of Moore’s Law. However, the operational end-of-life of A5/1 may still be decades away as there are approximately 2 billion GSM subscribers, commanding about 80% of [...]

The problem
You want to create local mirrors of the apt repositories that you use but you don’t have enough hard drive space to mirror every package. Or maybe you have a slow link and you don’t want to spend time downloading packages that you’re unlikely to need.
The solution
Only mirror packages whose popularity (as reported by [...]

Tommy Murphy recently released photograbber, a simple Python/tkinter app that uses the Facebook API to…
1. Find all the photos that you’ve been tagged in and…
2. Download each photo to a chosen directory.
It worked fine for me after I fixed a trivial tkinter bug.
Right now I’m adapting photograbber to download entire albums for me. Here’s the [...]