Introduction I can't believe that it's been almost 3 years since my last blog post. Interestingly enough, that was on a deterministic card shuffle that I decided to call "Ouroboros". Well, this post is also about a deterministic algorithm with a deck of playing cards, but rather than shuffling the deck, we'll be extracting the […]
Introduction For the most part, I don't play a lot of table games, and I don't play party games. But occasionally, I'll sit down with my family and play a board game or card game. When we play a card game though, I get teased by how I shuffle the deck of cards. I know […]
Introduction The very first software algorithm to generate random numbers, was supposedly written in 1946 by John von Neumann, and is called the Middle Square Method, and it's crazy simple. Enough so, you could execute it with a pencil, paper, and basic calculator. In this post, I'm going to cover the method, it's drawbacks, and […]
Recently, Goodreads sent out a tweet about how to remove social media and the Internet from your life, so you can focus on reading 1,000 books in one year. The post follows this sort of math: The average person reads 400 words per minute. The typical non-fiction books have around 50,000 words. Reading 200 books […]
The TL;DR Go to https://ae7.st/g/ and check out my new comprehensive password and passphrase generator. Screenshots and longer explanation below. Introduction Sometime during the middle of last summer, I started thinking about password generators. The reason for this, was that I noticed a few things when I used different password generators, online or offline: The […]
A couple weeks ago, I purchased a lava lamp for $5 at a thrift store. It was in brand spanking new condition, and worked like a charm. The only thing going through my head at the time? I can't wait to point my webcam at it, and start generating some random numbers! Okay, well that, […]
I've been on IRC for a long time. Not as long as some, granted, but likely longer than most. I've had my hand in a number of IRC clients, mostly terminal-based. Yup, I was (shortly) using the ircII client, then (also shortly) BitchX. Then I found irssi, and stuck with that for a long time. […]
Peter Gutmann on the "[Cryptography]" mailing list wrote some thoughts about the impending crypto monoculture of all-things-Bernstein that seems to be currently sweeping the crypto world. In his post, he mentions the following (emphasis mine): The remaining mode is OCB, which I'd consider the best AEAD mode out there (it shares CBC's graceful-degradation property in […]
You may have noticed some tweets from me that look.... strange. Probably something like these: UNYEf FXgOZ ILokj nIbFM qIlTr BRwQX iQciZ OtVhi GbUzj IGMVC SrOix sXHRZ TCtfJ #talon #cardciphers — Aaron Toponce (@AaronToponce) February 17, 2016 1455741420: 198027fd95bb881b223161d0df1b325fea7dab7f #ripemd160 #unix #epoch — Aaron Toponce (@AaronToponce) February 17, 2016 First, let me provide some background. […]
This probably the 40th millionth time, since owning this phone, that I've needed to root my device. Because I keep doing it over and over, while also referring to past commands and notes, it's high time I blogged the steps. If I can benefit myself from my own blog post, then chances are someone else […]
Lately, I have been studying pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs, also called "deterministic random bit generators", or DRBGs). I've been developing cryptographically secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs), and you can see my progress on Github at https://github.com/atoponce/csprng. This project is for nothing more than for me to somewhat get a feeling for new languages, while also learning a […]
I hope my readers don't mind, but I'm going to break from the standard geekery for a second, and type up a personal post about something that has been bugging me for the past few years. For those that don't know, I live in Utah, and work in Salt Lake City for the best local […]
On June 25, 2004 I received the following email: To: Aaron Toponce From: Gmail Team Subject: Gmail is different. Here's what you need to know. Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit First off, welcome. And thanksfor agreeing to help us test Gmail. By now you probably know the key ways in which Gmail differs from traditional […]
I've owned a pair of GUNNAR Optiks for a couple of months now, and figured it would probably be a good time for a review. For those unaware, GUNNAR Optiks are specially designed eyewear for long exposure computer use. The claims on the main site are: Eyes are more moist. Headaches are reduced. Blurry vision […]
I'm pleased to announce something I've been working on, on and off, for over a year. Introducing d-note, a self hosted web application with self destructing notes. d-note is written in Python using the Flask web framework. d-note comes from the idea that sending private information across the Internet can be very insecure. Ask yourself- […]
