Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Have I mentioned I like L-shaped furries recently? Anyway, this is my work desktop, and I'm finally, *finally*, going to start writing up how I made the fancy group of desktop icons and framing, and how I maintain it, this week.

It took literal days of searching, poring over hundreds, maybe thousands, of results, but I did finally manage to find what I was looking for: Programs that compute sun and moon data (one in Perl, another in Ruby), then print them in a form shellscripts love.

It's amazing and appalling just how many questions for "how to get <computable almanac data> in bash" wind up being "just use curl on <website> and parse that data" answers.

Just-use-curl folks, I know it's shocking, but...

I have a computer.
It's pretty good at computing.

I don't want to depend on someone else's computer, that might get turned off at any time, and that's only reachable by an often crappy 'Net connection.

One of our 50 is missing again... https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/heart-of-nm/one-of-our-50-is-missing/

Fifty years ago tonight, two people walked on the surface of a world not the Earth for the first time in recorded history. Dr. Carl Sagan had this to say about what that night meant: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/carl-sagan/the-gift-of-apollo.html #Apollo11

I'm a ✨ sparkly shellscript princess ✨ and you can be, too! Today I wrote about finding what's up on a private subnet (such as a LAN) quickly with ping. https://thornton2.com/unix/shellscript/find-ip-addresses-quickly.html

It's actually quicker than nmap:
$ time nmap -T5 -sP 192.168.0.0-255
17.90 real 0.08 user 0.06 sys
$ time findip 192.168.0
0.96 real 0.00 user 0.27 sys

A RAR file, notable for being a mainly-Windows format (Winrar, anyone?), named like a gzip file, notable for being a mainly-Unix/Linux format, containing a Windows executable. That's why I think I was spear-phished by an idiot. Anyway,
VirusTotal container scan: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c4254ab5dfc0842bda533e7b1a157d47afad55b364d690373afb0acc7fffe9c8/detection
VirusTotal contents scan: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c4b10672d7ba37c074f03c7d889706834d3c837d96d14cad096f233fd4172109/detection

I think I was just spear-phished by an idiot. A typical "DHL consignment couldn't be delivered" spam sent to my ISP's abuse desk, but the attachment was named "DHL_RECEIPT.PDF.gz". Who gzip's anything on Windows? (Does Windows even *have* gzip support?) Anyway, save & check out:

BTW, if you're bored and have a half hour, here's Berkeley Softworks' GEOS 2.0 demo disk. The demo proper has no sound, but I added a full-time sound track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZJynzIVQG0

I got both the demo disk and the brochure from https://www.lyonlabs.org/commodore/onrequest/geos/

Remember the lobster from the GEOS demo? It apparently has a hidden history, only a part of which was ever revealed: "[...] been multiplying so fast we've had to build new corrals and feeding troughs just to keep up with our stock. We can't even ship them off to makret fast enough before they've gone and created more of [...]"

Fifty years ago just a few days from now, we landed people on the surface of the Moon. Now, one of the guidance computers that helped make it happen is mining bitcoin. How many hashes per second, you ask? 10.3 *seconds* per *hash.* http://www.righto.com/2019/07/bitcoin-mining-on-apollo-guidance.html

My office keeps getting checks mailed from a guy named William Payment. He keeps using a shorter form of his name.