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Your source for technical consulting, CTO experience, security knowledge, discussion, and fun projects.
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Ventura + Keyboard Maestro + iCalBuddy = Confusion
Early this year I setup a bunch of calendar related automations with my Macs, Keyboard Maestro, and the iCalBuddy script and they’ve been very successful. I have a button on my Steam Deck that shows when my next meeting is, and I have serval automations triggered when I’m currently in a meeting such as turning on a red light outside of my home office door.
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Virtual Influencers - From Cartoons to Deep Fakes
Studio71 Germany has recently launched not one but two virtual influencers and they’ve done a great job with the implementation and marketing around this project (disclosure: I am the global CTO of Studio71). I’ve been thinking about it a lot and on the one hand this idea of a “fake” or “virtual” influencers comes and goes over the years and every time it comes back we all like to pretend that it’s a crazy idea.
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The Story of My Slightly Funny Coolio Joke
Coolio, the rapper who absolutely slayed the 90s, sadly died today at the age of 59. Coolio, the West Coast rapper whose gritty music and anthemic hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” helped define hip-hop in the 1990s, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 59. His longtime manager, Jarez Posey, confirmed his death.
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The Topsy Project for DEFCON 30
This year at DEFCON, the hacker convention, I joined the Hard Hat Brigade with Topsy, a hard hat that entertains while scanning the wifi environment. Here’s a video I made walking through the basics: I didn’t cover it specifically in the video, but you might be asking: “Um, why?” My answer is: “Why not?
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Posting to Hugo from Drafts
I’ve recently been playing with the popular Drafts app (macOS, iOS, and iPadOS) and I think I get it. It’s not yet essential to me, but the actions are quite powerful and I can Drafts becoming essential after a little while. Earlier this year I setup an automation to post from Craft (my long term text app of choice) to C33Tech.
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Hacking the STLToday Paywall v2022
Here we are again. STLToday, the website for my hometown newspaper the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has updated their paywall and, as is tradition, it’s time to take a look, see what they did, and offer suggestions so they can make it better. In short, let’s hack the STLToday paywall.
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What Is the New Flipper Zero Hacking Device?
The Flipper Zero is a latest hacker tool to hit the market. It’s still early in it’s development bit it already sports a variety of functions that can allow for unauthorized access and malicious code execution. I have one, I love it already, and I spent the weekend playing around and hanging out on the Discord channel.
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A Fully Automated Home Office DND Solution
It was almost two years ago when I created a custom “Do Not Disturb” button for my home office that allowed me to tell my family that I’m in a meeting and please don’t casually pop in. I wrote a post about it, but the up shot is that I cobbled together some parts I had around, 3D printed a case, and wrote some code that so that the button, connected via USB to my computer, would act as a keyboard and fire a keyboard shortcut.
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Glanceable Time Zones With Keyboard Maestro and Stream Deck
We’ve really embraced working remotely within my Studio71 Technology team, to the point that now I have people that I work with every day across seven time zones. There are challenges and benefits of being a distributed global team, but I wanted to solve a quick challenge today and that is to quickly glance and see who is available right now.
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Rethinking My Email Workflow
My previous email workflow sucked and I’ve been working to find a new system in 2022. I knew the old workflow sucked as it was based entirely on unread status, a notoriously shaky foundation. In short, if I forgot to get back to you about something last year, I tried my best but it was probably my workflow’s fault.
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QR Codes Are Bad
We were done with QR codes (pretty much). Do you remember 2019? I think I saw one or two QR codes the whole year, but then 2020 hits, COVID comes in hot, and all of a sudden QR codes are back from the dead in every restaurant. Now, everyone’s talking about that damn Super Bowl commercial.
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Peloton Doesn’t Need to Sell
Friday, The Wall Street Journal ran a report that Peloton, the COVID darling work from home company, was exploring a sale. Peloton Interactive Inc. PTON 1.44% is drawing interest from potential suitors including Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 13.54% according to people familiar with the matter, as the stationary-bike maker’s stock slumps and an activist urges it to explore a sale.
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