Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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The Jeremy Lin story

The Jeremy Lin story:

What I’m saying is that Jeremy Lin is a head-case in the positive sense: he’s broken through into a zone where his head is level and his emotions are positive. He believes in himself, and he believes in his team. He has the poise of a player who’s been a starter for ten years. The other players he makes look good include Bill Walker, Landry Fields, Jared Jeffries and Steve Novak, none of whom are big stars.

Can’t help loving it. The story is too good not to.

[It’s the most fun a Knicks fan has had since the Ewing/Starks years]

Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Fake startups

iPhones and unprotected sex:

All these fake startups need us to let them have our personal data, the same way the mortgage arbitrageurs needed all those junk mortgages to bundle up into AAA securities. The companies the VCs are starting now are garbage too. The kids who are jumping out of college to get rich are screwing themselves. And the universities that are shoveling their kids out of the door, some even saying openly they want to make money off the next Zuck or Gates, a lot of them are going to go the way of Lehman Brothers. And I don’t think there’s going to be much in the way of bailouts coming for them.

All you need for a bubble is a steady stream of suckers.

It’s all connected. The fact that they’re pushing our data up into the cloud is just one more facet of it. You can be sure they’re not being squeaky clean about what they do with this data. If you think ethics are big in boardrooms in Silicon Valley, you have yourself to blame because the facts that say otherwise are staring you in the face.

[Yup.]

Source: Scripting News

Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled

Cheap LED Light Bulbs for Under $5 Unveiled:

Yes, the price is $4.95, but nonetheless, a long-lasting, efficient LED bulb for $4.95 is a win! The announcement was just made a few minutes ago, as Lemnis unveiled three new lines of its Pharox LED replacement bulb. The 200-lumen Pharox BLU is the bulb selling for $4.95, and the 350-lumen PHarox Blu is selling for $6.95. They are, apparently, only sold through the Pharox website.

[That’s a small step. More please.]

Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security

Crypto shocker: four of every 1,000 public keys provide no security:

An astonishing four out of every 1,000 public keys protecting webmail, online banking, and other sensitive online services provide no cryptographic security, a team of mathematicians has found. The research is the latest to reveal limitations in the tech used by more than a million Internet sites to prevent eavesdropping.

The finding, reported in a paper (PDF) to be presented at a cryptography conference in August, is based on the analysis of some 7.1 million 1024-bit RSA keys published online. By subjecting what’s known as the “modulus” of each public key to an algorithm first postulated more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek mathematician Euclid, the researchers looked for underlying factors that were used more than once. Almost 27,000 of the keys they examined were cryptographically worthless because one of the factors used to generate them was used by at least one other key.

“The fact is, if these numbers had the entropy that they were supposed to have, the probability of even one of these events happening in 7 million public keys would be vanishingly small,” James P. Hughes, an independent cryptographer who participated in the research, told Ars. “We thought that was rather startling.”

[Oy.]

Every Little Things Capistrano Does Is Magic : Ruby Fleebie

Every Little Things Capistrano Does Is Magic : Ruby Fleebie:

During all these years, Capistrano has been for me a magical gnome that I invoke by saying “cap deploy, my magical friend!” and then I close my eyes, sing a happy song in my head and when the gnome has finished his magic, I hit F5 to see if all went well. And of course, if it didn’t, I blame the damn elf.

[Blame the elf! Blame the elf!]

This Problem of Taste

This Problem of Taste:

Our essential human duty – without question – is to see into other people’s hearts and minds, no matter how heinous their thoughts and actions may be, and we must understand and empathize with why they think and act the way they do.

[A favorite writer on the topic of cycling, but just generally, I dig the dude’s work.]

weltunit – Papercrafts

papercrafts

weltunit – Papercrafts:

Why should your dock last longer than you use your current phone model? A lot of those remaining products are not being passed on when devices are sold, so people happen to collect them or even throw them away.
Not the greatest use of material, if you ask us.

So why not make some of your supporting hardware match this cycle, so it won’t last that long? This would only make sense if it can be made a lot more eco-friendly and way cheaper.

So here we go: Welcome to the Papercraft series. Made from recycled cardboard and laser-cut with carbon free energy.

[Nice idea. Now if we could locally source these things for everyone we’d be making a dent. It relates to that whole 3D printing thing. Sell the design (the cad file or what have you, either by charging a “wholesale” amount for the design the lisc. to reuse, or some such) and have it locally produced by a shop. This will further lower the environmental impact, designer gets paid, local shop gets paid, and we don’t ship finished goods around the world. Win.]

Lance’s smelly jockstrap

Lance’s smelly jockstrap and me « Cycling in the South Bay:

We got to the course and the race started. For the first lap we sat in the back and chatted. We came through the start/finish and crested the hill. Far off in the distance were two tiny specks. “Are those guys off the front?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re gone. So much for this race.”

He looked at me funny. Without getting out of the saddle, he pushed the pedals harder. In a few seconds he had rocketed off the front, never getting out of the saddle or even appearing to exert himself. I watched him vanish up the road. He caught the breakaway, dropped it, and won the race so far head of the next finishers that it was as if he had been in an entirely different race.

[The line that really gets me is this one: “The world was going to look the way he wanted it to look.” I think that can be true for us all.]