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WristCoin

You’re going to notice a complete lack of new material here today. This is due to the fact that I spent last night putting the final touches on the initial design of an application I’m writing. A couple of weeks ago I purchased a Pebble wristwatch. If you haven’t heard of it it’s a wristwatch that connects to your smartphone via low powered Bluetooth and presents notifications in a manner that doesn’t involve digging your phone out. My interest in the device stems from the fact that it’s programmable.

For my first program on the watch I’ve decided to write a Bitcoin price checker. Since I’m horrible with names I’ve dubbed the application WristCoin. Obviously the application is still in the pre-alpha stage, which means it’s riddled with bugs and isn’t feature complete. But I’ve published the source code on GitHub if anybody is interested in following my progress.

WristCoin requires both the 2.0 beta Pebble firmware and the 2.0 beta Pebble smartphone application. In its current state WristCoin grabs prices off of Bitstamp and displays the last price on the Pebble. I will be adding more exchanges in the near future and the ability to bring up more detailed pricing information for each exchange. Progress on the application will heavily depend on my free time but it’s small and shouldn’t take a great deal of time.

The application, as you can guess based on my views regarding intellectual property, is public domain so you can do with it whatever you wish.

Nothing to See Here

Last not ended up being busy so I didn’t get anything written. Check back later. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

Posting Forecast isn’t Looking Good

I spent my entire Halloween evening helping a friend move from a shitty living situation to a far better one. That being the case I didn’t have time or energy to write anything. Maybe I’ll post some material later or maybe I won’t. In the mean time I do have a little good news. It appears that the National Security Agency (NSA) is going to Hell:

ROME — The National Security Agency spied on cardinals as they prepared to select the new pope — perhaps including even Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who emerged from last spring’s conclave as Pope Francis, a leading Italian news magazine reported in Wednesday’s (Oct. 30) editions.

Too Much Three-Gun, Check Back Later

I could have written new material for today but I spent yesterday at the three-gun match in Pine Island. It was a ton of fun but between that and other things I had to do this weekend it didn’t leave any time for writing. In the mean time I’m quite excited to see Magpul 25 round magazines for 7.62x51mm rifles.

Check Back Later

There’s nothing to see here at the moment. Well, almost nothing. I’ll leave you with Bruce Schenier’s guide to air gapped computers. As it turns out, maintaining an air gap between networks and a computer isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

More to Come

I had a late night so I didn’t manage to get any new posts up. A lot has happened since I wrote my posts for yesterday though. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) claims to have Dread Pirate Roberts in custody:

The FBI arrested Ross William Ulbricht, known as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” in San Francisco on Tuesday, according to court filings. Federal prosecutors charged Ulbricht with one count each of narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, according to a court filing.

As of right now Silk Road remains offline so Mr. Ulbricht may very well be the actual Dread Pirate Roberts. Reading through the complaint [PDF] explains how the FBI was able to nab him. Tor wasn’t exploited as far as we know, Mr. Ulbricht simply fucked up by failing to separate his “legitimate” life and his secure life. I will write about this in more detail later. For now I urge you to read through the complaint because there are many things we, as online denizens, can learn from Dread Pirate Roberts’ mistakes.

Check Back Later

There’s not much here right now. My weekend was spent helping my girlfriend move and settle into her new place so, needless to say, I didn’t much time to write blog posts. If you check back here later tonight I’ll probably have something for you. Until then sit back and hope that the federal government will kind of shutdown for a day or two.

Seriously, this shutdown debate would be far more interesting if a government shutdown actually meant the entire government completely shutdown. Instead we get this wishy washy “emergency services only” malarkey.

All Work and No Play

All work and no play makes me a rather unproductive blogger.

After this weekend’s AgoraFest I’m left with no energy to write so I’m going to take a break this morning and hopefully catch up on some much needed rest. I’ll put some fresh material up when I’m feeling more energized.

AgoraFest 2013

I’ve got nothing for you today, sorry. This week has been a little hectic as I’ve been finishing up what I need to do for my AgoraFest talks. If you look at the schedule you’ll note that I’m doing four presentation on crypto-anarchy covering Off-the-Record Messaging, OpenPGP, Tor, and TrueCrypt. I will also be giving a short presentation during the Ten Talks about my idea to stop basing societal agreements on geographic location.

To make matters more difficult access to reliable Internet connectivity is in question so I’ve had to build a couple of server images to host the software I want to distribute and perform the demonstrations on. Nothing makes crypto-anarchy talks more exciting than questionable Internet connectivity.

Anyways, I plan to be back on Monday with more material. Until then enjoy yourselves and remember that it’s not too late to sign up for AgoraFest.

Check Back Later

You’ll notice a lack of fresh content today. That is due to the fact that I had to travel to Duluth this weekend for a wedding. Instead of going to the wedding and rushing back to write more posts I decided to tour the city with my girlfriend. While I can’t comfort those waiting with bated for new posts I can offer the vast library of previous posts for your reading pleasure.