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Matthew

COVID-19 Personal Rants WTF

The Outbreak – Day 3 of work from home, Day 5 of lockdown

Yesterday the Prime Minister of Canada announced that no one should leave their home unless absolutely necessary.  So we are now on official lock-down. We broke our volunteer lock down the other day just to make sure we had enough food as it looks like this is gonna be a lot longer than 2 weeks.  Most stuff was stocked, as long as you were looking for fresh goods… toilet paper, most pasta, canned goods, mac & cheese, those were all gone… But we got what we needed.

Last week, before I left Montreal, my work sent out a notice that they were going to test the feasibility of working from home by sending the IT workers home for 2 weeks starting Monday, that was last Thursday.…

COVID-19 Personal Rants WTF

The Outbreak – Covid 19 Crisis

As I look out the window of my friends shop at the 401, seeing nothing but Transports going back and forth, I have but a glimmer of hope that this will all blow over.  The shipping industry is still moving, so it cannot be that bad… Right?

The problem is trying to gauge the affect of something that we, in our life time, have never dealt with.  A pandemic this size has not been seen since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918.  We should know better right? Except this is not 1918, and this is not the flu.  We are more advanced now, medically and technologically, so why is this such a threat? …

Personal

Updates coming to Considered Normal… Shortly… I hope

It’s no secret that I have not posted much in the last little while.   I mean I managed to get 2 posts up the whole of 2019… What the hell is that?

First and foremost, 2020 marks the 8th year, I have lived on “The Island”, or 2920 Days (As of January 1st).  So I will be posting an update on that as a lot has happened since my last “X Days on the Island” post.  And of course, I am learning a lot of new techs with my job, from Kubernetes to Mongo, to a whole slew of other stuff I can write about. …

Personal

Deepfake – What dangers are we facing?

I have been wanting to write this article for a while now. In fact, I actually wanted to do a video about it, but I just have not found the time. Deepfakes are hitting the web by storm, and the technology that creates them is getting more and more complex, and near indistinguishable from reality. What are the implications of this? What are the benefits? What are the dangers?

So what is a Deepfake? Wikipedia describes Deekfake as:

We have a similar technology which we have used for years where we map one person’s face onto another.  One great example of this was Weird Al’s “We Perform this way” where they used the body of an actress and mapped Weird Al’s face in post, however, this is not quite the same as a Deepfake, and in several frames, you can see how the mapping didn’t quite work so well.…

Personal Photos

The Art of Photography

So many things have changed over the years when it comes to Photography. My mindset before this point was that the art of photography was lost as taking pictures became simpler and easier to do. The things you would do in a darkroom can now be done in camera. No more having to know what order the chemicals needed to go in to develop your film, or photo. No more need for safe lights (or complete darkness in the case of color photography). But the most amazing advancement in the world of photography is the post processing.

Here is a quick before and after look at a photo I recently took on my walk home from work.…

Fun Gaming Linux Technology Windows

Creating a Local LAN with Zerotier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af758HL6VkA

I have been meaning to create a video about this for some time.  I am a tech fanatic, and when a better solution than Hamachi crossed my path, I was instantly indulging myself with its vast capabilities.  Zerotier is an amazing application.  It can be used to create a Local LAN so that gamers can play legacy titles like Warcraft III and the like, but it can also be “privatized” giving you full control over who has access to your network.  I have tested it on Windows and Linux, and use several personally created networks to play games with my friends back in Ontario, as well as administer my web servers, and lock down SSH to use only the internal network.…

Rants

Why Social Media and the Internet are our biggest downfall

Yes, its time for another rant.  But this one comes with a disclaimer:

Now with that being said, the title is the major topic.  The internet, although a solid tool for so many things, also brought the world to our fingertips.  Go back to the early 90’s, millennials were in their infancy, the only digital way to socialize was via BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), and we got our world news in the paper and on TV by major reputable broadcasting corporations.  The only exposure we had to other cultures was, in a way, sanitized and cleaned of all the horrific things we had no control over because it was not on our soil and not of our laws…

Now fast forward to today, the millennials are full-grown adults, the internet is now our major news source, and rarely ever from a reputable news agency. …

Fun Technology

The wonderful world of IFTTT (IF This, Then That)

A little while back, I noticed that Instagram stopped supporting its ability to post to Flickr… at least I think it did.  I mean a lot of my pics from Instagram can be found on Flickr… But in any case, at this time there is no link between the two. And as I use Instagram whenever I don’t have my real camera at hand (I love the filters), and my website has a Flickr stream, I started to look for a way to connect them.

Now be forewarned, what I am about to present is a tool that can connect all your counts to each other, so be warned that you will have to yet again provide your credentials to a third party site. …