As a child I used to have dreams of running through the city, jumping cars, climbing walls, avoiding obstacles. If Parkour had been invented years earlier, I’m sure I would have tried it as a kid. But my bones ache now, so all I can do is watch and say “wow, that’s impressive.”
I was one of those who got caught by the Back to the Future date thing. I tweeted before I checked my facts and before I could delete my tweet, it had been retweeted a dozen times. Oh well. This time I have photographic proof that will make you feel old.
Remember that episode of The Simpsons set way in the future that had Lisa Simpson about to marry that British jerk? Today’s that day. It originally aired March 19, 1995.
And yet somehow, Lisa’s still 8 years old on the show.
If you read my other blog, the Disney one, then you know that I just launched a crowd funding project for my “Dispatch from Disneyland: The Fireworks Spot and Other Tales” book on KickStarter.com. As I type this the community has pledged nearly 25% of the total in just 24 hours. I’m over the moon with the results to say the least.
I’ve spent a couple weeks researching how to best frame my proposal, how much money I should ask for, and how to best ask for pledges. I could have saved all that time and just read this excellent article by designer and Tokyo art space author CraigMod.
Follow CraigMod’s outline and Kickstarter becomes more than a crowd funding tool, it’s a first step on the path of an entrepreneurial adventure. I am roughly following his suggestions and, as you can see above, success is greater than I could have hoped for at this point.
This is a follow up to John’s earlier post about emails now being considered semi-public.
Back in the old days, encryption was not easy to use. You had to somehow first transmit a shared secret (think secret decoder ring) before you could transmit the encoded data. But nowadays with public/private key encryption, it is trivial. Any time you visit a SSL/HTTPS website, you are using it.
Want to encrypt all your emails so that only the intended recipient can read them and verify that they are actually from you? Check out Enigmail for Mozilla Thunderbird. Install the extension and generate your key pair. Once you do that, you publish the public half of your key on servers so that your recipients can download it. To send an encrypted and/or signed email, you just make sure the buttons are pressed before you send. To send encrypted email, the recipient must also have Enigmail or another PGP implementation setup to decrypt it on their end. If you just sign the email, anyone can still read the content without special software. Once you get a couple friends using the software, you can sign each other’s public keys saying you have verified their identity making it hard for someone else to post a public key pretending to be you.
I’ll admit, I don’t encrypt my emails or hard drive. But if I was dealing in confidential information or work I wanted to make sure remained private, I would make sure that I had those files encrypted.
A US Federal Court just ruled that you have no expectation of privacy for your emails if they are hosted by a third party. I hope that there will be a major email provider (Gmail anyone?) who figures out an easy way to implement private-key encryption that works on the fly and keeps your email private when you’re not reading it on your computer. Heck, that tech should be built into every browser. Should be a no brainer.
