I have had problems importing vcards onto my Android phone. After a lot of troubleshooting, I tracked it down to embedded images in the card. The PHOTO;VALUE field to be precise.

Some images worked and some didn't, and looking at the properties some that worked were larger than others that didn't. In the end I tracked down a post on stackoverflow that hinted that the aspect ratio was important. And sure enough it was.

starting with jelly bean (4.1), android now supports contact images that are 720x720.before, starting with ICS (4.0), android has supported contact images that are 256x256.and before that, contact photos had just a size of a thumbnail - 96x96.

Stack exchange

I tried a 720x720 on a few phones but decided to settle on 256x256 for now.

To do image manipulation, I tend to use the GraphicsMagick tools instead of the more popular ImageMagick suite. You should be able to achieve the same result in either.

My requirements were:

The images should be scaled so that the maximum height/width shrinks to 256, maintaining the aspect ratio.

The images should always be 256x256 in size.

Scaled images should be padded and centered on a white background.

All color profile information should be removed.

To use an example I took the following image and saved it as Linus_Torvalds.jpg

By Krd (photo)Von Sprat (crop/extraction) - File:LinuxCon Europe Linus Torvalds 03.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Step one is to use the -size 256x256 option which you would think would do the scaling, but in fact it only reduces the file to 366x509 which is not what I expected.

$ gm convert -size 256x256 "Linus_Torvalds.jpg" Linus_Torvalds_1.jpg$ gm identify Linus_Torvalds_1.jpg

Linus_Torvalds_1.jpg JPEG 366x509+0+0 DirectClass 8-bit 56.1Ki 0.000u 0m:0.000002

However it appears that the option is used when creating new files, and is also used by the processor to determine the intended target size. Which is why I left it in. So what we actually need is the -resize option.

$ gm convert -size 256x256 "Linus_Torvalds.jpg" -resize 256x256 Linus_Torvalds_2.jpg

$ gm identify Linus_Torvalds_2.jpg

Linus_Torvalds_2.jpg JPEG 184x256+0+0 DirectClass 8-bit 47.7Ki 0.000u 0m:0.000001s

So this has done a good job at scaling the image down. It's now scaled correctly so that the biggest edge is scaled down to 256. In this case it was the height but the width is now shorter than what we need. We do want to maintain the aspect rat

Bash Tips - 18 (Extra auxiliary Bash tips)

Arrays in Bash

This is the third of a small group of shows on the subject of arrays in Bash. It is also the eighteenth show in the Bash Tips sub-series.

In the last show we looked at ways of accessing elements with negative indices and how to concatenate arrays. We then launched into parameter expansion in the context of arrays.

There are a few more parameter expansion operations to look at in this episode, then in the next episode we will look in more depth at the declare built in command and at some of the commands that assist with loading data into arrays.

Long notes

I have provided detailed notes as usual for this episode, and these can be viewed here.

Links

“GNU BASH Reference Manual”

Section on “Bash Arrays”

Section on “Shell Parameter Expansion”

Linux Documentation Project: Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Chapter 27: Arrays

HPR series: Bash Scripting

Previous episodes under the heading Bash Tips:

HPR episode 1648 “Bash parameter manipulation”

HPR episode 1843 “Some Bash tips”

HPR episode 1884 “Some more Bash tips”

HPR episode 1903 “Some further Bash tips”

HPR episode 1951 “Some additional Bash tips”

HPR episode 2045 “Some other Bash tips”

HPR episode 2278 “Some supplementary Bash tips”

HPR episode 2293 “More supplementary Bash tips”

HPR episode 2639 “Some ancillary Bash tips - 9”

HPR episode 2649 “More ancillary Bash tips - 10”

HPR episode 2659 “Further ancillary Bash tips - 11”

HPR episode 2669 “Additional ancillary Bash tips - 12”

HPR episode 2679 “Extra ancillary Bash tips - 13”

HPR episode 2689 “Bash Tips - 14 (Some auxiliary Bash tips)”

HPR episode 2699 “Bash Tips - 15 (More auxiliary Bash tips)”

HPR episode 2709 “Bash Tips - 16 (Further auxiliary Bash tips)”

HPR episode 2719 “Bash Tips - 17 (Additional au

In some stories, the narrator or dominating character can’t be trusted by the audience, creating opportunities for various storytelling effects. What makes for an unreliable narrator? What are some of the strengths and weaknesses of this technique? How can the underlying structure of a tale be similar to an unreliable narrator, even if the story doesn’t actually have one? Lostnbronx takes a rambling, off-the-cuff look at this interesting literary tool

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Hacker Public Radio, I’m Edward Miro and for this episode I decided to record an episode on the importance of good passwords. This will be part one in a series of podcasts I’m going to call “Information Security for Everyone”. As with most of the content I create in the world of infosec, my goal is to present the information in a way that a majority of people can get value from it and anyone can play this for a friend, colleague or family member and make it easy for the non-hackers in our lives to understand.

Passwords

One of the first things most people think about when it comes to online safety is their password. We all know that passwords are to our online accounts what keys are for our locks. Would you use the same key for your house, your car, your office and your safety deposit box? Of course not. And if you did, what would happen if a bad guy could get a copy of just that one key? They’d have access to everything. With so much of our personal, confidential, financial and medical information accessible from our various online accounts, what can we do to make things as safe as possible?

For me personally I employ and advise a three faceted approach:

Complex passwords

Unique passwords

Two-factor authentication (where available)

Clearly the solution is to use a unique password for each account and make them complicated enough that an attacker couldn’t guess it or crack it in an amount of time that would be actionable. One problem this presents to general users is the inconvenience and difficulty in remembering these passwords or storing them in a secure way. This leads into my first bit of advice:

Password Managers

My recommendation is to use a password manager. I’m going to make references to managers such as LastPass because that’s the one I’ve always used, but I’m not saying it’s the best or would be the best for you. There are many great options and I would rather people use the one that works the best for them and not merely the one I like best. Anyways. Applications like LastPass give you the ability to store all passwords in your encrypted “vault” and then request them through browser add-ons or standalone applications. They also have built in features that allow you to generate secure passwords at any length or complexity.

When using a password manager, all you have to remember is your ONE master password. When you sign in, the manager can then decrypt all your saved passwords and let you use them. When I sign up for a website, I use LastPass to generate the longest and most complex password supported by the site and it gets stored in my vault safely for later use.

There are various options online to choose from and I suggest you do some research and try a few different ones to see what is comfortable for you. One thing to consider when using a password manager is that the master password is your single point of failure and should be a long and complex password that you don’t use ANYWHERE else.

If you’re wondering how to come up with a secure password that you can remember there are various strategies online, but I follow this:

Take a poem, song lyrics or phrase that is easy for you to remember. For this example I’ll use the phrase:

"The stars at night are big and bright. Deep in the heart of Texas."

Then I take the first letters from each word and that gives me:

TsanababdithoT.

Then I swap out the vowels for some numbers/special characters. And that gives me:

T5@n@b@bd1th0T

I checked that password on Dashlane’s Password Strength Checker, and got the following results:

It would take a computer about 204 million years to crack

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1E1xAwWpq-C4vEh8LCRw7MD7jnaclX9Faf2L3dZWiqQY

Future Eps for Series:

Sonarr / Filename Fixes

SABnzbd

Subsonic / orpheus.network /Audio Fixes

Local copy of the shownotes

In response to JWP's episode 2697 and ClaudioM's comment, this show covers the shutdown command as it appeared in Sun Solaris and OpenSolaris, and currently appears in both Oracle Solaris and OpenIndiana.

The quick version:

shutdown

-i sets the destination init state (5 to shutdown, 6 to reboot, and so on; see man init for more)

-y to answer "yes" to the safeguard prompt asking you whether you really want to shutdown

-g to set how many seconds until shutdown. Default is 60.

In practise, I don't even use the shutdown command. I use poweroff, which does a shutdown and poweroff.

Both shutdown and poweroff require root permission. On OpenIndiana, you can either use sudo bash or pfexec bash to get a root prompt.

Some links:

OpenIndiana handbook

Sun Microsystem docs (with Oracle branding on it)

Overview

A DIN Rail is a metal rail for mounting pieces of electrical equipment inside an equipment rack, for performing tasks in a building, in a machine, and so forth. It’s common to see DIN rails holding circuit breakers for example.

See the Wikipedia article on the subject for full details.

A number of people in the Maker Community have made use of these rails, and there are a number of freely available designs for stands that can be 3D printed on which you can mount these rails. There are also designs for mounts onto which devices like Raspberry Pis and disks can be fitted and attached to a rail.

This show will recount my experiences with creating a compact mounting system for one of my Raspberry Pi systems. I had the help of my son and his girlfriend in 3D printing the parts for this project.

Long notes

I have provided detailed notes and pictures for this episode, and these can be viewed here.

Links

Wikipedia article DIN Rail

Thingiverse designs used:

DIN Mounts: Pi, Arduino and disks by imstrng

DIN Rail Stand by RedWraith

Other Thingiverse DIN Rail-related items:

DIN Rail Stand v2 by philklaus

Raspberry Pi Zero Vertical Edge-Mounted DIN Mount by coffeenut

Original idea I had with my toy game project was to have Yesod render most of the user interface as static HTML and have as little client side scripting as possible. Later I realized that there would be parts with significant amount of client side code and it might be better if whole site was written in Elm.

Couple goals I had in my mind when I started this:

easy to work with

type safe

extensible

user authorization

regular player

administrator

Backend is written in Haskell and front end in Elm. Communication between them is via REST interface and most of the data is in JSON. All JSON encoding / decoding is centralized (more or less), same with initiating requests to server.

API Endpoints

End points used for REST calls are defined in single data type that captures their name and parameters. These are used when initiating requests, meaning there’s smaller chance of typo slipping through.

type Endpoint

= ApiStarDate

| ApiResources

| ApiStarSystem

| ApiStar

| ApiPlanet

| ApiPopulation PlanetId

| ApiBuilding PlanetId

| ApiConstructionQueue PlanetId

| ApiConstruction Construction

| ApiBuildingConstruction

| ApiAvailableBuildings

For example, sending a GET request to retrieve all construction projects on a planet is done as:

Http.send (ApiMsgCompleted << ConstructionsReceived) (get (ApiConstructionQueue planetId) (list constructionDecoder))

GET Request is sent to ApiConstructionQueue endpoint and it has planetId as parameter. When server sends response, our program will parse content of it will be a list that is parsed with constructionDecoder and create “ApiMsgCompleted ConstructionsReceived” message with result of the parsing. Update function will process this and store list of constructions somewhere safe for further use.

Update function

Update function is in charge of reacting to messages (mouse clicks, page changes, responses from server). In a large program update function will quickly get big and unwieldy. Breaking it into smaller pieces (per page for example), will make maintenance easier. This way each page has their own message type and own update function to handle it. In addition there’s few extra ones (cleaning error display, processing API messages and reacting to page changes).

Same way as API end points are encoded in a type, pages are too:

type Route

= HomeR

| ProfileR

| StarSystemsR

| StarSystemR StarSystemId

| PlanetR StarSystemId PlanetId

| BasesR

| FleetR

| DesignerR

| ConstructionR

| MessagesR

| AdminR

| LogoutR

| ResearchR

routeToString function is used to map Route into String, that can be placed in hyperlink. Below is an excerp:

routeToString : Route -> String

routeToString route =

case route of

HomeR ->

"/home"

StarSystemR (StarSystemId sId) ->

"/starsystem/" ++ String.fromInt sId

PlanetR (StarSystemId sId) (PlanetId pId) ->

"/starsystem/" ++ String.fromInt sId ++ "/" ++ String.fromInt pId

Because mapping needs to be bi-directional (Route used to define content of a href and string from a href used to define Route), there’s mapping to other direction too:

routes : Parser (Route -> a) a

routes =

oneOf

[ map HomeR top

, map ProfileR (s "profile")

, map ResearchR (s "research")

, map StarSystemsR (s "starsystem")

, map StarSystemR (s "starsystem" </> starSystemId)

, map PlanetR (s "starsystem" </> s

Raid 6 is a take of raid 5 but with support for 2 drive protection.

New hosts

Welcome to our new host:

Edward Miro / c1ph0r.

Last Month's Shows

Id

Day

Date

Title

Host

2696

Mon

2018-12-03

HPR Community News for November 2018

HPR Volunteers

2697

Tue

2018-12-04

The Linux Shutdown Command Explained

JWP

2698

Wed

2018-12-05

XSV for fast CSV manipulations - Part 1

b-yeezi

2699

Thu

2018-12-06

Bash Tips - 15

Dave Morriss

2700

Fri

2018-12-07

Episode 3000

Ken Fallon

2701

Mon

2018-12-10

First impressions of the Odroid-go

dodddummy

2702

Tue

2018-12-11

Audacity set up and response to episode 2658

Tony Hughes AKA TonyH1212

2703

Wed

2018-12-12

Fog of war in Yesod based game

tuturto

2704

Thu

2018-12-13

Intro to Scribus