Dan Ballard is a decentralization and privacy dev. Works at Tor Project. Board and contributor to Open Privacy Research Society.
The RoboSapien was a high end premium consumer piece of robotics released in 2004. I don’t quite remember what it’s launch price was, but I think over $200 which was far too much for a teen like me. I got to see one once in action. I went to a electronics and robotics meetup at a local collage where the main event was mini sumo bots and competitions but someone had got their hands on a RoboSapien…
I’ve been journaling more and this is something that was percolating in my head the last bit of time and I finally dumped to there. It seemed adequate enough to then further dump to my blog, so it’s presented more as thoughts in progress than a strong argument C never had a package manager, and it’s always been a bit hard to include packages, usually need to get the precompiled and supplied…
Google is requiring all new submissions to playstore have 16kb page size support/alignment . This is I assume for new devices anyways so is what we should all be doing and aiming towards. If you have an android native project, just using newer SDKs should do it. If you’re compiling some C code for android to bundle, using NDK 28 or later “should” take care of it for you. However at Open Privacy we…
I have a problem where I look at software and want to add onion service support to it because they have a lot of useful properties including making self hosting from residential easier, and just generally being a good tool for making some software more p2p capable. And making distributed and p2p software is another life long interest of mine. To that end, I’ve been hosting this site, made with…
Originally stream of conscioused on social media and reposted here with minor edits and formatting. I’m still trying to recover from a friend telling me about the “tech lead” at their security job who wouldn’t merge my friend’s Merge Request because “why does it have all these functions? i can’t read it, just make it flat and put it in one big try catch? here I redid it for you, see with out the…
The last year was good for me but tiring. Been enjoying some time off doing just about nothing to charge up for the new year. To that end, as much as I like doing these, gonna whip through it with some briskness. General As I said, the year was good to me, as much as could be, but tiring. A lot going on. Direction and trends wise, it continues to be clear that for app development, despite my…
A bunch of folks are feeling, to put it mildly, off balance, in need of distraction, or recentering. I’ve been asked by a few people this week about shows I like, so here’s a quick list of shows I am attached to, in alphabetical order: Babylon 5 : Peak space politics and anti-facism. Some of the best character arcs on TV. Slooow start tho. Being Erica : Cute show about finding self acceptance by…
So the show in my head I was calling “Lena Heady in space”… they killed Lena Heady’s character Aster technically in the finale of s1. they just instantly confirmed it in the opening of s2. So that was a gut punch. Get rid of the high profile main character I was here for. Her performance of the character (less the character and writing) was what drew me in in season 1. It was just really fun to…
Rewatching Dark Angel and it is weird the shift between season 1 and 2. I blew through season 1. They had good elements like the tension between Max and Logan, and not just romantically, but Logan’s overworking idealism vs Max’s survival instinct. They had a good story generating engine with Max being on the run, mysteries about Manticore, the other escapees etc, and it created tension and…
General 2023 was a good but tiring year. In retrospect I took nearly no vacation and that was a mistake. Even when travelling and visiting family I worked pretty much the whole time “saving” my vacation days for a vacation we never got to planning or taking. And after also running ragged in 2022 and not even taking a break between leaving Open Privacy and joining Tor, that was prolly dumb. So this…