Friday Hodgepodge

Four Somewhat Geeky How-Tos

Here's a picture I took of the quarter I placed on top of a cup of frozen water before we left. We did lose power at some point, but not for long enough that I needed to chuck everything (which I pre-bagged) in our fridge.

Posting Schedule Note: We're back home and firing on all cylinders at the Van Horn Estate. The area got only sub-tropical force wind and rain at Dorian's closest approach, and we never lost power for very long. I was very relieved to get home, and glad to have given my new and previously untested hurricane/evacuation checklist what amounted to a dry run.

1. If you use AirBnB a lot and are paranoid about cameras, you might want to bone up on How to Find Hidden Cameras:

Hidden cameras come inside of small objects like pens, motion detectors, Bluetooth speakers, and necklaces. There are also tiny, stand-alone cameras that are 1 inch or smaller, which people can hide in normal decor like lampshades, picture frames, house plants, and blinds. Look for any holes where someone could have placed a tiny camera. Also, turn off all the lights in the space and the shine a flashlight around the area to search for a camera lens. The lens should reflect the light, which should make it easier to spot.

Reading through this again after flagging it a while ago, this is more labor-intensive than I recalled.

Most of us probably aren't that paranoid.

2. Sometimes, I like a little background noise when I work. But I don't want to have sudden volume changes between tracks ruin my flow. (And stopping to manually adjust the volume would only make things worse.) So I use one of the suggestions I found here for How to Normalize Sound Volume on Your PC:

The popular VLC media player includes a built-in volume normalization audio filter. To enable it, click the Tools menu in VLC and select Preferences...

I have a few track collections I can run, including cafe/crowd/office noise, music, and outdoor/nature noise.

3. Security expert Brian Krebs has helped me avert a problem I didn't even realize was possible with his post on How to Prevent Calendar Spam:

The truth is, all that a spammer needs to add an unwelcome appointment to your calendar is the email address tied to your calendar account. That's because the calendar applications from Apple, Google and Microsoft are set by default to accept calendar invites from anyone.

Great. (This does explain why the occasional flight or hotel reservation would pop up in my online calendar, but that's not something I really need, so...)

I changed from the default immediately upon learning this.

4. Rounding out my list is something so esoteric I am not sure even I will use it. In "There's a Relational Database in Your Unix CLI," Chris Farber explains How to Use the join command:

By default, the join command behaves as an INNER JOIN does in SQL. That is, each pair of matching lines from both files will be printed, but no additional lines from either file that may have matched.

And, just as I read this, I thought of a way to use it, so chalk one up for reviewing old bookmarks once in a while.

-- CAV