Paul Saletan

32 posts published

Book Review: Kasparov's Deep Thinking

Book Review: Kasparov's Deep Thinking

Is AI our enemy? Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov answers that question through Deep Thinking. It's a fascinating record of how chess machine programming has evolved over decades, from a concept by Alan Turing to IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer that finally defeated the grandmaster. Millenials should take notice. They

Book Review: World Without Mind

Book Review: World Without Mind

Franklin Foer's World Without Mind bears an ominous sub-title: "The Existential Threat of Big Tech". Unfortunately, the book doesn't deliver on its broad promise. A more accurate title would have been, "How Amazon and the Free Web Are Destroying Journalism". That's the area Foer understands well,

Print CSV Files To PDF With Weasyprint

Printing a CSV file as a nicely formatted table is easy if you import it first into a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc. I found it surprisingly hard using common Unix utilities.

Install GalliumOS on a Chromebook

Install GalliumOS on a Chromebook

The GalliumOS desktop on a 1366x768 screen Chromebooks come pre-installed with Google's proprietary operating system. It's a perfectly good one, so long as you stick to web browsing. And partly thanks to its limited software, it's very secure. Google manages all that for you automatically. A while back, I experimented

Export All Your Asana Tasks

Asana is a great task manager for individuals and teams. I've used it on the job, to help me track new issues. The main feature I miss is the ability to save all your tasks to a local file. Asana's built-in export truncates the output at 500 records. This limits

Get Skype For Linux Audio Working With Your Headset Or Webcam

Get Skype For Linux Audio Working With Your Headset Or Webcam

If you've installed Skype for Linux but your audio isn't working, the problem may be that PulseAudio isn't configured correctly. This can be an issue when using multiple audio sources, e.g. plugging in an external USB device like a webcam or headset. An obvious symptiom is when you click

Tomato Firmware Install On Asus RT-N10P Router

Tomato Firmware Install On Asus RT-N10P Router

I've been running Tomato for several years on an Asus WL-520GU router. Tomato is a firmware replacement with similar features to DD-WRT, but simpler to configure. I recently upgraded to an Asus RT-N10P router. It wasn't the WL-520GU's limitation to wireless G speeds that was bothering me. It was the

Installing Oracle 11g Locally On Windows

You can install a free copy of the Oracle 11g database for development purposes. Just register for the Oracle Technology Network when prompted. It's a huge download (2GB); you'll need a reasonably fast connection. Server The problems began for me when I ran the installer under Windows 7. It may

A Mneumonic Poem For Learning Markdown Syntax

A Mneumonic Poem For Learning Markdown Syntax

Headlines start with hashes List items lead with dashes To use numbering instead Type a digit and dot ahead Please... ...indent code blocks 4 spaces Bracket link names, avoid braces Or begin them with a bang Where an is to hang Parentheses straddle a URL Two stars set off what

Beyond Passwords: 5 Ways To Prevent Unauthorized Logins

Beyond Passwords: 5 Ways To Prevent Unauthorized Logins

Hard-to-guess passwords are important to securing your network from intrusion. But think about it from the perspective of someone (or their robot app) trying to break in. They need to also pick the right user name and point of entry, and have enough opportunity and patience to repetitively guess until

RSSH: A More Secure Way To Share Files

RSSH: A More Secure Way To Share Files

You've set up a server and your users are happily transferring files with apps like Filezilla or Cyberduck. You know that plain FTP is not secure, so you're requiring secure FTP (SFTP). Very nice so far -- no FTP server required. Only problem is, your users also have SSH access,

MythTV Transcoding With Handbrake

MythTV is great for capturing MPEG2 broadcast streams with a TV tuner card. However, its built-in software transcoder leaves a lot to be desired. The format (NuppelVideo, or .nuv) uses an older MPEG4 codec that's inferior to the latest ones. Here's how to produce better and smaller conversions in Ubuntu,

Turning a Pogoplug Into a Music Player

Turning a Pogoplug Into a Music Player

The Pogoplug Classic is a popular item on eBay and online retailers, often selling for less than $20. It was marketed as a way to share media like external hard drives on your home network (it has several USB ports). The company behind it hopes you'll use their service to

Plank: A Simple Dock For Launching Applications

Plank: A Simple Dock For Launching Applications

For those of us who dislike the Ubuntu Unity interface and its ugly dock, there are several options. The Cairo Dock is the most aesthetically appealing to me, with its Mac-OSX-like animations. But do I really need icons that bounce up and down, and dozens of other visual effects --

Relay Mail With Postfix and Stunnel

Relay Mail With Postfix and Stunnel

Let's say you've just installed your own virtual server running Postfix. Now you want to send mail from it to the outside world. You don't want the work of running a full-blown mail server. That would be like delivering a letter in person, instead of letting the United States Postal

pfSense: A Router That Stands Up To Traffic

I've gone through hardware routers at the rate of about one a year, primarily cheap brands like D-Link and Airlink. They were inexpensive in dollars yet costly in terms of the time I spent wrestling with their limitations. They rarely locked up but were often a bottleneck. Streaming a TV

Shrink Image Files With GraphicsMagick

GraphicsMagick is a fork of the ImageMagick project that describes itself as "the swiss army knife of image processing". It contains command-line utilities for converting from one image format to another with the option to resize images. This makes it perfect for routine jobs that don't require a

Make Grub2 Boot the Last Operating System You Used

Make Grub2 Boot the Last Operating System You Used

The GRUB2 boot loader can seem confusing at first. Instead of one configuration file, there are several. You run one command update-grub to update the configuration file, another command (grub-install) to write the configuration to the Master Boot Record (MBR) on your hard drive. On the plus side, GRUB2 can

Social Media and the Wisdom of Crowds

Social Media and the Wisdom of Crowds

James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, has been influential in financial markets and corporate transformations. It also has plenty of ideas relevant to social networking's future. The book's leading concept is that that collective intelligence -- aggregating diverse opinions -- can out-perform judgments made by alleged experts

The Long Tail Revisited

The Long Tail Revisited

I've been reading The Long Tail, the 2006 blockbuster extolling the unlimited consumer choice made possible by the internet. The book was written by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. Its title is now part of the marketing lexicon, and aptly captures the author's thesis: there's a lot of money

You Are Not a Gadget

You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier’s recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is a broad criticism of the internet. Lanier thinks cyberspace is full of unimaginative software. Web 2.0 is window dressing on a tired paradigm. Silicon Valley is funding trivial applications.not much better than than the hasty business plans

Installing a Local DNS Server Behind a Hardware Router

Installing a Local DNS Server Behind a Hardware Router

There's not much work to installing and using a typical hardware router. Just plug it in, attach cables from your non-wireless computers, and it will automatically connect them to the internet without any special configuration. That's because the out-of-the-box router/firewall acts as both a DHCP server and DNS relay.

Tracks: a To-Do List for Getting Things Done

David Allen's Getting Things Done struck a chord with compulsive organizers as well as people struggling to bring order to their lives. The book was written at a time when Day Planners, paper and index cards were still common business tools. However, its principles haven't become obsolete. Just google "

Rework: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Growing

Rework: How To Succeed in Business Without Really Growing

Rework is as much a manifesto as a business guide. The content is less bombastic than some of its advance publicity, but be prepared for a polemic. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of Ruby on Rails) argue why you should keep your company's size and products

Virtualbox as a Remote Desktop Server

Virtualbox as a Remote Desktop Server

VirtualBox has gained a following as an alternative to VMware. Although the binaries are proprietary, they're free for non-commercial use. VirtualBox has some compelling features for desktop users: Automated installer that runs under Windows, Linux, and OSX. For Linux users, there are official versions for Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, Red