why I'm not sold on YubiKey OTP

March 7, 2015  ⚙️ 🔐

[ update: I added a bit of an update at the end, in which I find that my fundamental worries were wrong, because the system is less convenient than I hoped! So it goes. ☹ I decided to post this anyway, because the thoughts were worth thinking, so maybe somebody else will find them interesting to see. Or not. Who even reads this thing? ]

todo for 2015?

January 17, 2015

I wrote a todo for 2014, which I probably stopped thinking about roughly two weeks after writing it. Here’s a summary:

The Great Infocom Replay: Planetfall

January 9, 2015  🎲

I am a lousy record keeper. I actually played Planetfall quite a while ago. August, if my filesystem is to be trusted! The problem is that I played it pretty hard, and tried to get to the end, but eventually I gave up. I knew I wasn’t too far from the end, but I just didn’t have it in me to work my way to the end. It’s the same as with Starcross, actually! And, as with Starcross, I kept deluding myself with the idae that I’d really finish it, maybe by finding a walkthrough. I didn’t.

I got an Xbox One (part one?)

January 1, 2015  👾

I decided quite a while ago that I’d use some of my American Express reward points to buy a next-generation console, eventually. Once the intervals between my compulsive price-checking and review-reading grew short enough, I placed an order. This Tuesday, I received:

Parental controls don't help

December 12, 2014

My parents recently got new computers, and my mother’s old (but still pretty modern) Mac Mini has more or less become my daughter’s. It’s what she’s been using to play Minecraft, as I mentioned recently. OS X has a “Parental Controls” system, and I figured it would be useful. I’d tell it to use its default anti-porn web blacklist, to have a list of (say) ten allowed applications, and to limit her instant messaging to a few approved people. It was a big mess.