borg.org

borg.org, the nobody reads it blog.

  • Touchscreen Password Idea

    Passwords are a problem, and lots of people say they are doomed, but I have seen no good alternatives, so I sometimes think about making them better. Touchscreens are important yet really hard to enter good passwords. Also, I would like to do more of a “key exchange” when entering my password. I use different […]

  • An Idea for Doing Background Removal from a Sequence of Stationary Images, Manual-Style [Updated]

    Update: Finally looking at implementing this and I realize that thinking of that fully populated tree is probably good for understanding it, I don’t need to store anything but the left edge. When a new frame comes in, I will calculate a new left edge based on the new frame and the previous left edge. […]

  • Our Founding Fathers–Eating

    I have occasionally imagined a piece of historical fiction, a Rip van Winkle story where John Adams (a grumpy, wise, philosopher) or Ben Franklin (a gourmand, party animal, and scientist) or maybe Tom Jefferson (a million contradictions who liked liberty and revolution and food and wine and books and women of all colors) is dropped […]

  • What Makes Anyone Think Physics is Not a Religion?

    [I am sure this is not original, on so many levels, but my fingers are compelled to try to capture these thoughts. Forgive me.] At a fundamental level physicists appear to be deeply religious. Their Articles of Faith are something like this: There is order, This order can be understood by us, It is predictive, […]

  • Will Donald Trump Split the Republican Party?

    Splitting the GOP: Refused A few years ago, when the GOP first lurched right and so seemed to be dismissing any reasonable chance of winning the presidency, I figured they needed to split in two, they needed to kick out the crazies. But they didn’t, instead they all adopted this crazy attitude, and I forgot […]

  • Benefits of The Donald

    I missed the first Democratic debate of the 2016 election. I wanted to see it and being stuck on an airplane, with CNN, while it was on, seemed a fine coincidence. Except my Virgin America flight from LA to Boston was missing a quarter of the channels it was supposed to have, including CNN. And […]

  • How Political "Red Meat" Works (and Isn't Necessarily Bad)

    What do we call left-wing “red meat”?

  • Which Gadgets Do I Need, Again

    Four-years ago I asked the question “What gadgets do I need?”, and it seemed time to revisit the question. First, what gadgets do I have? Pebble Watch This is my most-present gadget these days. I like that it is limited, it is too small a screen to offer a rich experience, and it is too […]

  • Pebble Battery Life

    I decided that, cool as the shake-to-light feature is on the Pebble watch, I turned it off. Saves battery life. And, frankly, it can be annoying if one sleeps with a watch or is in a movie theater. But I don’t know how long my year-plus-old watch lasts in this setting because I have taken […]

  • Net Neutrality: An Objective Definition (with Technical Gotchas)

    I saw someone on Twitter looking for a definition of net neutrality that was objective, and doubting it was possible. Here is my attempt, and I am going to maybe cheat a little by trying to give two perspectives. Disclaimer: I am for net neutrality. The Case For Everything seems to run over the internet […]