Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Weekend read: How to Weaponise Your Pets

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Late last month, a Siamese cat named Coco went wandering in his suburban Washington, DC neighborhood. He spent three hours exploring nearby backyards. He killed a mouse, whose carcass he thoughtfully brought home to his octogenarian owner, Nancy. And while he was out, Coco mapped dozens of his neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks, identifying four routers that used an old, easily-broken form of encryption and another four that were left entirely unprotected.

Unbeknownst to Coco, he’d been fitted with a collar created by Nancy’s granddaughter’s husband, security researcher Gene Bransfield. And Bransfield had built into that collar a Spark Core chip loaded with his custom-coded firmware, a Wi-Fi card, a tiny GPS module and a battery—everything necessary to map all the networks in the neighborhood that would be vulnerable to any intruder or Wi-Fi mooch with, at most, some simple crypto-cracking tools.

How to Use Your Cat to Hack Your Neighbours’ Wifi – Andy Greenberg, Wired (8 August 2014)

I just prefer the title “How to Weaponise Your Pets”. That’s what Coco’s evil mastermind Bransfield has called his talk on the subject taking place this weekend at DefCon. I have no idea where DefCon is, I’ve little clue what it is, I suspect there’s a WarGames reference at play, but I just care about the cat.

“My intent was not to show people where to get free Wi-Fi. I put some technology on a cat and let it roam around because the idea amused me,” says Bransfield, who works for the security consultancy Tenacity. “But the result of this cat research was that there were a lot more open and WEP-encrypted hot spots out there than there should be in 2014.”

Learn more at Wired include a preposterously happy animated graphic of little Coco’s journey around the ‘hood.

The time is now. Literally.

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now-watch
I think you’ll like this and I’m pretty sure you haven’t been married to Angela for twenty years so she’s unlikely to give it to you as an anniversary present.

So you can get your own from Tiny Time Machines right here. I can’t tell you the price, it was a gift and I’m not supposed to look, but Angela wants me to make sure you know that there are import and customs charges on top of this. She paid £12.49 to get it into the UK.

Weekend read: How Phones Go Cross-Eyed at Airports

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Wired has an interesting piece on what goes on inside your mobile phone when you switch it back on after a flight. If you think about it at all, you think that it’s just sometimes a pain waiting for it to find a carrier. But according to Wired, it’s a street fight:

The average mobile phone is programmed to search out the five closest antenna signals. When you’re driving in your car this system lets you switch from antenna to antenna — usually without losing your connection. But in an airport, things can go haywire, especially as you’re switching from the powerful outdoor “macro” antennas that you’ve connected to on the tarmac to the smaller indoor devices that AT&T has tucked all over the airport.

For travelers, that means that the moments after you walk inside an airport are where you’re most likely to have a dropped call.

Why Your Phone Freaks Out When You Get Off a Plane – Robert McMillan, Wired (22 July 2014)

The full piece has a little interview with someone whose job it is to see that your phone wins the fight.

Watch a Community writing lesson

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In case you don’t know and haven’t heard me rave about it like the late-comer evangelist I am, Community is a US comedy set in an adult education college. It is very funny but it is also so deeply imaginative that I spent the whole second season simply agog.

Now, I do believe that reading the scripts and watching the episodes is an education in writing. I believe that about most scripts: I once read all seven years of Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts in order to see how a successful show finds its feet, matures and ends. That’s 178 one-hour scripts and my conclusion, if you’re interested and have far less time than you imagine this will take, is that most of them were boring puzzles rather than stories.

Whereas I then read all 176 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in script and enjoyed it immensely.

Only a few Community episodes are online but there are some at Lee Thomson’s fabulous site TV Writing here. Unfortunately, none of them are for the episodes I want to talk to you about.

More than talk: there is a Making Of documentary about two of them that is on YouTube now. Before I show you that, though, let me say that the episodes are sequels to the show’s first big hit. That was a season one story about a paintball game gone wrong – honestly, it is one of my favourite television episodes ever and I long to have been the one to write it – and that’s the lesson I want us to focus on.

Not why you should make a sequel to a hit since that’s obvious financially if in no other way. But actually why you shouldn’t. Why the show was told it could never top that original and how it did. Watch the episodes, would you? In fact, just watch the show. Part of the fun of seeing the episode A Fistful of Paintballs and its second part, For a Few Paintballs More, was the anticipation. And the part of the fun of watching was to see how it used the season leading up to it, how it was a true finale instead of a stunt episode.

You can get Community season one on DVD at Amazon UK here and at Amazon USA there.

Now, YouTube. The Making of the Paintball episodes:

Clickhole: Clever Dad Organised His Children By Giving Them Each a Different Name

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Now you can use this hack on your family too:

David and Rebecca Lehigh had a familiar problem: four children—1, 5, 9, and 12 years old—with no way to organize them. It was a logistical fiasco…until David came up with an utterly genius solution.

Instead of keeping their kids in color-coded binders or driving themselves crazy trying to memorize their faces and voices, David and Rebecca did something so simple you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it first: They gave each child a distinct name.

“We called one of them Leo, one of them Tara, one of them Megan, and one Zach,” said David, explaining that doing so has “made our lives a thousand times simpler.” “And the kids know what their names are, so when I want one of them to listen to me, I just say their name, then whatever message I want to send to them.”

The Lehighs say their name system is helpful for telling the difference between kids who look similar or are the same gender, and allows them to get their attention without pointing and shouting, “Hey, you!”

Clever Dad Organized His Children By Giving Them Each a Different Name – Clickhole (21 July 2014)

Read the full articleto find out how you can use this timesaving productivity trick on your own children.

Roll your own Popclip extensions

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If you understand every word of that title in order, off you pop to Brett Terpstra’s website to get it.

If you don’t, then here’s the thing. You know how on an iPhone or iPad when you tap a word, you get a little black bar appear with options like Copy, Cut and Paste? Popclip is a utility that gives you that same thing on Mac OS X – but adds much, much more than those three choices. Popclip can send text to OmniFocus, it can paste plain instead of styled text, it can do oodles.

And now it can do more. You can do more with it. Terpstra’s begun building an add-on that lets you define what else you want this Popclip to do. It is early days but if you’ve become a fan of Popclip, this is where you need to be going.

If you’re not a Popclip fan, the odds are that you haven’t used it. In which case, take a look at this:
20140721-134040-49240390.jpgAnd now go buy it.

You can be Siri-ous

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Hand on heart, I love Siri. I use it continually for setting timers when I’m cooking, for scheduling or rearranging meetings, for sending text messages and always, forever, constantly for adding tasks to OmniFocus.

Hand on heart 2, though, it is as if Siri has good days and bad days. There are times it just won’t work for me and they are exasperating. So far the days it has worked well have outnumbered the problem ones and the new discovery of something else Siri can do has kept me using it a huge amount.

I use it so much that there isn’t anything in Re/code’s top ten Siri tips that I haven’t used but still it’s a fine list and if you’re only ever aggravated by Siri, take a look at their full article for ideas big and small.

And as much of a Siri fan as I am, I can’t resist this:

“It is usually pretty easy to become a happier person”

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Is it bollocks. How’s that deadline coming along? Going to make your next mortgage payment, are we? Oh, let’s turn that frown into a smile!

But I wouldn’t point you at some happiness articles just to snipe about them. Not just to snipe. In among the less bearable parts of The Positivity Blogs feature on 7 Small Habits That Will Steal Your Happiness there is a near-gem:

It is usually pretty easy to become a happier person.

It is also quite easy to rob yourself of your own happiness. To make yourself more miserable and add a big bowl of suffering to your day. It is common thing, people do it every day all over the world.

So today I’d like to combine these two things. I’d like to share 7 happiness stealing habits that I have had quite a bit of trouble with in my own daily life (and I know from all the emails I get that many of you do too).

But I’d also like to add what you can do instead if you find yourself being stuck in one of these destructive habits.

7 Small Habits That Will Steal Your Happiness – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (24 July 2014)

The seven habits are good – and I recognise far too many of them – plus Henrik does offer some solid advice about coping with each of them over on the full article.