In this post, I’m going to tell you an easy trick to play ukulele if you know guitar, or to play guitar (almost) if you know ukulele. It is based on the circle of fifths, pictured at left. Read More
Make a ukutar
Here we go again with a “new” hybrid instrument. A ukutar is a guitar that wants to be a ukulele. It has four strings and it plays exactly like a ukulele, but it sounds rather like a guitar, with all that deep resonance that we love in the instrument. Read on to see how you can make one with a $30 budget. There’s also some sound samples. Read More
The Looming Face ID Debacle
As of late-October, 2017, only one week is left before the spanking new iPhone X stars shipping. I predict FaceIDgate to start within a week of the first units being received, with no end in sight. The source for this prediction is Apple’s own documents.
Update 11/12/17: It took researchers only five days to break Face ID, from the moment the devices were available. Read all about it here, or at the end of my post.
We’re doing passwords wrong!
You suspected it all along, and now it’s official: the “experts” have been forcing us to use passwords the wrong way. Among those practices that actually decrease security: adding weird characters to your text-based password, forcing people to change their password after a certain number of days or logins. The revelation comes from a recent document from NIST. Now there’s only hope that Government websites will start adopting the new guidelines (they’re the worst perpetrators).
In this article, I am repeating much of what I already said in this other article, but with less technical jargon and a few more months available for testing.
Learn guitar at an (relative) old age
I just turned 57, and my new project is to learn how to play guitar. After many failed attempts, here’s what seems to be working. And it only requires two pieces of wire. Read More
Page Cage released
Ever got a funny feeling when your password manager popped up offering to save a login that you thought was really, really confidential? Well, you should get it, because this is a sign that the app is able to see everything you’re doing. The developer of this app could get hacked (or the developer of any add-on or extension you’re using, for that matter), and then all your precious logins would be sent to some hacker’s computer without your noticing anything amiss. That is, until you look at your bank account and find that all your life’s savings have been sent to an account in Cayman Islands.
Page Cage is here to help you with that. It won’t work always, but it will work with a number of sites. Read More
Make an octave ukulele
An octave ukulele is a 4-string instrument tuned like a regular ukulele (gCEA, with the g being one octave higher than one would expect), but a whole octave lower. It is still played exactly like a ukulele but it sounds more like a guitar, with pretty deep bass. For those of you who actually want to accompany your singing and don’t want the instrument competing with your voice, yet are too lazy to learn a new instrument and set of chords. In this post, I tell you a simple way to make one starting from a baritone ukulele. Read More
PassLok Privacy becomes an extension/addon
PassLok has had a Chrome app version since 2.0, but now Google has announced that packaged Chrome apps will be discontinued in early 2018. Rather than wait for the blade to fall, we have worked hard to keep the nice features of hosting PassLok though Chrome, and we are adding Firefox in the process. Read More
Make a cuatrolele
A what?
Well, there is the ukulele, and then there is the cuatro. So the cuatrolele is their love child. Essentially a ukulele that sounds like a Venezuelan cuatro, but can still play along with other ukuleles. The good news is that building one requires less than one hour of your time, plus a two-dollar budget ($38, starting from scratch). The result is a sweet-sounding instrument that your friends will want to borrow constantly. Read More
Guitar vs. ukulele
I am the kind of guy who has a musical interest but not a whole lot of musical talent, or at least not a whole lot of musical training. I have begun to learn guitar many times, always to give up with some frustration or another. Sometimes it was the pain in my fingers, other times the inability to make any chords that sounded half decent, still other times said fingers getting tied up in knots as I attempted to move from one chord to another. But I think I’ve found a way to end this. If you have a similar history, you may want to read on. Read More