2014s
Really wish iOS could backup to iCloud and my computer.
Overheard at Apple Store Genius Bar…
“I did a cloud thing, I have no idea.”
“There’s more than one cloud then? There are lots of clouds?”
Making Wassail Tea. Officially feels like Thanksgiving now.
Wow, Science Museum of Minnesota website is really difficult to use. It won’t acknowledge that we are members. Guess I’ll have to call them on the telephone. Now I have to go 3 phone tree levels to to get “phone is unavailable at this time”.
Ads in front of YouTube train videos → frustrated 4 year old son!
Olson Grandkids
Don & Kaye and the six grandkids. (Left to right: Tyler, Mazie, Lucas, Elsa, Nora, Levi)
2014 Olson Family Weekend
This years Annual Olson Family Weekend was planned by Don & Kaye and the extended family had a great time at Grand View Lodge!
Supporting the Open Internet
“It’s only an illusion that the Internet appears to be open…” — Dave Winer
As we approach the end-of-the-year many of us start thinking about charitable donations. There are many, many great causes out there that deserve our support. I think it is critical that we consider supporting the digital future that we want as part of our giving. There is nothing fundamental about the Internet that insures free and open speech will occur. In fact, the Internet if left to the wrong interests can be the most monitored, tracked and near totalitarian environment we have ever seen. If you are curious to read more on this, I highly recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu. Great book.
We know that the Internet will continue to be a growing part of our lives. There are organizations that are working hard to make sure the Internet is the kind of place I want in my life. If the Internet is just Facebook tracking cookies and advertisements like a mall, we have failed. Supporting these organizations is one way to help this cause!
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The EFF was founded in 1990 and has been the champion of digital rights since. In many ways I think of the EFF as the “ACLU of the Internet”. They have both a legal and advocacy organization. They are pushing for the expansion of encryption technology online. They support causes like open and free access to WiFi networks. They continue to help Tor.
Donate here! Wikipedia’s EFF page is a great background.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is all about creating a copyright framework that allows for the sharing of content in a way that content creators want. My blog is creative commons licensed making it easy for people to remix and share the content here. Larry Lessig is the founder of creative commons and he does a better job than I ever could explaining why Creative Commons, and the commons as a whole, is critical to our culture. You should watch his TED talk on Laws that Choke Creativity.
Donate here! Wikipedia’s page on Creative Commons is a great background.
Wikipedia
I often suggest that Wikipedia is the most amazing thing to be born of the Internet. It could never exist in any other way. The depth and quality of content is amazing, but the ethos of it is even more amazing. Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation which runs hundreds of other wikis as well. They also open source all of the software behind Wikipedia called MediaWiki. MediaWiki is used by tens of thousands of sites on the Internet to host new and interesting content, including the software that organizations as provocative as WikiLeaks use. (My project WikiApiary tracks a large percentage of all MediaWiki sites in the world!)
Donate here! Not surprisingly, Wikipedia’s own page on Wikipedia is a great background.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has been working to archive a growing part of the Internet over time. It is the place where the history of the Internet is being recorded. It is also the place where you can find a huge amount of media that is no longer in copyright. The goal of the Internet Archive I think is often something that we forget about in the digital world. We think that the Internet is permanent, but it’s only as permanent as we make it. The Internet Archive gives me hope that hundreds of years from now people will still be able to read the blog post you are reading right now.
Donate here! The Wikipedia page on Internet Archive is a great background.
As an aside, we spend so much time focusing on the billionaires of the Internet behind services like Facebook and Twitter. Think of these names: Larry Lessig, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Richard Stallman, Brewster Kahle, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. These people deserve as much space in our minds.
Magic Pines
After years of talking about getting a cabin we have finally made the big leap! Tammy has been looking at cabins for a while now and we found one that really fits what we were looking for. It’s close to home (45 minutes from our house!) has a great, warm feel and is on a good sized lake with just over an acre of land. Great spots to play outside, setup a Kubb pitch, hang a hammock and have a fire pit along with a dock to get on the lake. It already has a name, Magic Pines.
We close in January and are excited for fun weekends away. This is completely new territory for us. It’s going to be a fun adventure!
Peter Zaballos doing “Meet the Expert” session for #TeamSPS!
. #TeamSPS tech walkup session. Great way to solve problems and build connections in the team!
Making it easy for #TeamSPS!
Love the experiments that Dan Megears and his team are doing to help #TeamSPS operate smoothly! In house Genius Bar!
Welcome to “The Cloud”! The #TeamSPS space rocks. 😊
Very excited by the announcement of Let’s Encrypt! We’ve needed this for a long time!
Upgraded 2 Macs, 2 iPhones and 3 iPads tonight. #freshbits
So happy to see The Decemberists are coming to Minneapolis! 🎶
“The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens Disrupts my reverie again” — The Decemberists
Model train clearing snow. Surprisingly awesome.
Question2Answer Number Captcha
I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.
Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!
I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:
This works really well. You can grab
q2a-number-captcha and
git clone it for your own use.
Awesome to hear SPS Commerce won Tekne Awards this evening! Missing event due to AWS re:Invent. Shout out to #TeamSPS!