I’ll be documenting my Europe trip on here. Because it’ll have personal details and stuff in it, I will be password protecting the posts. If you would like to know the password, get in touch and I will send it to you. Get in touch via email or Signal/Whatsapp/Instagram.
I enjoy playing songs by The Mountain Goats. I enjoy listening to songs by The Mountain Goats. The songs are often deep, and dark, and touch on subjects that most of us have faced, but don’t talk about. Universal Harvester is by John Darnielle. The same John Darnielle who is the persistent (and often only) member, and primary songsmith, of The Mountain Goats. I didn’t realise that Darnielle was an author, but when my neighbour and fellow fan told me about it I really wasn’t surprised.
I’m half a dozen chapters in, and so far it’s dark. Bleak, even. I don’t often read scary books, but this is triggering some very deep fear responses from me, in a similar way to the animal masks in on of the seasons of the Danish/Swedish TV series Broen/Bron/The Bridge. Creepy AF.
Let’s see how it goes!
Foundation was slow. A lot of dull dialogue. Really not much happening. I’m hoping someone will set me straight, and explain to me what I was missing while reading this novel.
Anyway – I didn’t finish it. I don’t often give up on books, but this one I had to.
We’re all told to have strong passwords for everything. Long, good, complicated passwords with symbols, numbers, capital letters. Passwords that are a pain to enter without a passwords manager, in essence. Because password managers exist, that’s all good for nearly every situation, except when it comes to logging in to your desktop.
I know this kind of thing exists already, but I don’t think they exist quite as simply (and potentially as un-securely) as this.
What I’ve made, using an old Digispark ATTiny85 arduino board with a built in USB-A plug, is a device that, when plugged in to a USB port, and the button is pressed, will type in a pre-determined string of characters followed by the enter key. There are two use-cases I can think of for this. Logging in to your desktop where there’s no password manager available, and entering your long-winded password into your password manager when setting that up.
There are obviously security issues with this – it’s a single factor authentication system. And you’re keeping the entire password available to anyone who picks up the doodad, plugs it in, and presses the button. There are things that could be done to make that safer – like only keeping part of the long-winded password on the device, requiring user input for to complete the password. But as a little one-hour project, this was fun.
My soldering is a mess, but it works. The button circuit includes a pull-up resistor, to stop any erratic button behaviour when there isn’t a definite high or low signal, as per a tonne of tutorials online. Like this, straight from the Arduino source: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/BuiltInExamples/Button
Here’s the completed product:
The code that’s running it is as below. Firstly, import the HID library from Digispark (there are tutorials on how to get that happening on the Digispark website). Initialise the button state, configure the required pin to wait for signal, then repeatedly wait for button press. If there’s a button press, send the defined string to the computer, and to prevent multiple entries, wait for a second before moving on.
#include "DigiKeyboard.h"
int buttonState = 0;
void setup() {
pinMode(5, INPUT);
}
void loop() {
buttonState = digitalRead(5);
if (buttonState == HIGH) {
DigiKeyboard.sendKeyStroke(0);
DigiKeyboard.println("notmyactualpassword");
DigiKeyboard.delay(1000);
}
}
At the end of April (2022) there was a burn-off in Gandy’s Gully. A few weeks after, I walked through with Bear and took some photos. I was surprised to find some trees still smouldering. I heard that the burn-off got a bit hotter than expected thanks to a surprise change in wind direction during the burn-off.
