Author: Douglas Muth

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Diceware Update

I guess I should also talk about my Diceware passphrase project. I built the first draft of that project many years ago as a modernized and web-based version of the Diceware password approach–rolling dice (for randomness) that correspond to common English words to generate high-entropy passphrases.

Well, I’m still at it, and just last week I authored some changes that bring Diceware into the 2020s. Aside from doing code cleanup and removing some things that were unused, because all modern browsers now ship with cryptographically secure random number functions, I was able to drastically reduce the size of the bundle.js file that ships with Diceware. Here are some cool numbers:

  • Old size: 735 K
  • New size: 8 K

Only 8 K, that’s it! Nearly a 99% in file size reduction. That’s huge!

Since deploying this change, I’ve done tests over my cellphone, and it’s amazing how the load time for the entire app went from ~3-5 seconds to well under 1 second. It’s probably one of the cooler things I’ve done recently, because the speedup is just astonishing.

If you want to play around with Diceware, the site is here. And if you want to see my source code, that’s over here.

Enjoy!

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Been Awhile Since I’ve Posted Here

I’ve been busy with a lot of things, just not all of them on the blog. There are two new things that I wanted to share here, though.

First, I created a “Now Page” that I updated periodically, and I also put that into the menu bar for this website. You can see my Now Page here.

And the second thing, is that after a multiple decades of involvement in the furry community, I never got around to creating a webpage that talks about it. Just took care of that, and you can read more about what I do on the weekends and at furry conventions here: Inside the Furry Fandom. I also included some links to furry telegram groups that I recommend.

That’s all I got for now, but watch this space for more updates!

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Inside the Furry Fandom

Me, in fursuit as Asriel Dreemurr from Undertale.

Hey there! I first stumbled into the furry fandom in the late 90s–attending my first furry convention in 1999 and staffing my first furry convention in 2000.

I did not realize just how much of a long-term role it would play in my life.

In nearly 3 decades, I’ve since attended more than 130 conventions and have staffed over 90 of them across a wide range of roles. I’ve done everything from volunteering and staffing to taking on leadership roles such as Department Head and Division Lead, and have spent a total of 17 years serving on the Boards of Directors of two separate furry conventions.

In addition to staffing conventions, I also moderate a number of furry Telegram groups and help run the Anthrocon and Pennsylvania Furries Discord servers, and am the webmaster of the Pennsylvania Furries website.

In 2021, I felt the time was right to get a fursuit, and began fursuiting as Asriel Dreemurr (pictured on this page).

Here are some additional web pages that highlight my involvement in the furry community:

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you do it?

Because it’s fun. I get to chat and hang out with people who have similar interests.

Does your family know?

Yep. My parents even staffed Anthrocon in the 2010s–here a picture of us at the staff dinner from that year..

What is your day job?

I am a cybersecurity engineer. Please consider reading my cybersecurity guide.

Does your employer know?

Yep.

In Closing

Feel free to look around the content above, and if you have any questions or wanna chat, do reach out!

Fursuit Group Photo at Furry Migration 2022, held in downtown Minneapolis, MN.

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Furry Telegram Groups I Recommend

I’m on a few furry Telegram groups, and I figured I would put the list here as a resource for other furries who are looking for Telegram groups to join.

For disclosure, I mod/admin a few of these groups. That said, I can endorse joining any of them if they are relevant to your interests.

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How to Migrate Follows and Blocks from Twitter to Bluesky

If you’re like me, and you’ve had just about enough of being on Twitter and would like to move to Bluesky, there’s a way to take your followings and blocks with you!

To get started, go here and download the extension “Sky Follower Bridge”, which is a plugin for the Chrome web browser.

Next, go to https://bsky.app/settings/app-passwords and click “Add App Password”. You’ll be prompted to enter a name:

…and then a password will be shown. Copy that into your clipboard and click “Done”:

Continue reading “How to Migrate Follows and Blocks from Twitter to Bluesky”
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How’s PECO? My New Website Will Tell You

Is PECO Okay?

I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. One of the projects I’ve worked on is https://www.ispecookay.com/, my first major project built in Serverless!

Thanks to COVID, I was made a remote employee, which now means most days I’m in my apartment building about 23 hours a day.  This means that if power is lost in the middle of the day, I’ll notice it.  If PECO has to do maintenance in the middle of the day, I’ll notice it. If a storm takes out power for several hours, I’ll definitely notice it.

While sitting around in the dark and refreshing PECO’s status page, I found that I really only cared about two values:

  • How many customers are without power?
  • Is that number moving up or down?

If the number is moving up, that means things are getting worse and I shouldn’t expect power back for awhile. If the number is moving down, it means that restorations are happening, and I should expect power back sooner. And that is largely why I built https://www.ispecookay.com/.

I also want to state that I am throwing absolutely NO shade on PECO, I found that their existing outage page did not meet my needs, because it is very content and Javascript heavy, and when there is a power outage going on, I would like to conserve my phone’s battery.  CNN does a great job at this with CNN Lite and it was one of my inspirations for “Is PECO Okay?”.

Continue reading “How’s PECO? My New Website Will Tell You”
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Furry Artwork and Commissions of Giza as a Goat

I have all artwork of my fursona over here.

However, since I got a fursuit, I also have been getting art of me drawn as a goat, heavily influenced by Asriel Dreemurr from Undertale.

This page is for that art.

Giza Kidd holding coffee, by Jackaloo
Giza Kidd Barbie YCH, drawn by PineTreeLionCat
Giza Kidd Barbie YCH, drawn by PineTreeLionCat
Giza Kidd drawn by Willow The Wolf
Giza Kidd drawn by Willow The Wolf
Giza Kidd drawn by Rezzy Saber
Me as a goat, drawn by Rezzy Saber.
Giza Kidd drawn by NightlineZ
Me as a goat drawn by NightlineZ.

I will certainly be getting more art of me as a goat in the future. 🙂

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Behold! A QR Code Generator That Doesn’t Suck!

Awhile ago, I got into QR Codes. I’ve found them increasingly handy because I could make QR codes based on documents that I had stored in Google Docs, and then I could invite people to scan those QR Codes in person if I wanted to share what was in the doc. The QR Codes themselves could be printed out on paper, be saved to my phone and scanned from them, or even put on my Apple Watch.

But I ran into a challenge: creating QR Codes. When I did searches for QR Code generators, most of the ones I found online either generated small QR Codes, had ads, required money, or all three! It was very much Not Fun, and I felt it was a minor injustice that being able to create something as useful as QR Codes was off limits for so many people.

So I decided to create my own.

After reading some tutorials on how to do it, I found one that talked about how to make QR Codes in Python. I then remembered, that I had an app with a bunch of API endpoints available, and it was written in Python! So, I figured, why not add a QR Code generator, expose it as another endpoint, and create a form which submits to that API?

And that’s exactly what I did, you can find the QR Code generator here:

https://httpbin.dmuth.org/qrcode/

This is 100% free with no ads, no tracking, and no spam. Just QR Codes when you want them.

Enjoy!

Mirror on Medium.

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Introducing Docker in Vagrant

[EDIT: Since this post was written, OrbStack has appeared. It’s really good for running Docker containers and VMs on a Mac. You should check it out instead.]

If you’re a Mac user, you have a few options for running Docker. Aside from Docker’s official client, there also exists Rancher Desktop and Podman. I’ve used them all, and they’re all decent implementations of Docker. However, I ran into some limitations in each platform that are beyond the scope of this post that nonetheless prompted me to try building out my own Docker offering.

Having used VirtualBox and Vagrant before, I found myself wondering if I could use Vagrant to stand up an instance of Docker, proxy connections to Docker over SSH, and mount directories on the host machine’s filesystem.

It turns out I could.

Continue reading “Introducing Docker in Vagrant”
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Displaying Your Wireless Network in the Touch Bar on a Macbook

If you have a Macbook laptop, you’re probably familiar with the touch bar. It’s a neat little LED display above the top row of your keyboard that Mac OS/X uses to display context-sensitive widgets. However, you don’t just have to accept the widgets that Apple provides–you can in fact customize the touchbar however you like.

“But why would I want to do this?”, I hear you ask. Well, maybe you need to have a custom status of some kind displayed on your menu bar. For me, it was… wireless networks.

MTMR is my new favorite utility.

That sounds confusing, but hear me out. Sometimes when I am traveling, I get kicked off of whatever wireless network I’m on. I wanted a way to easily determine what network I was on, without having to keep clicking on the wireless icon in my menu bar. I found that the touch bar was a convenient way to do that, and in this post, I will show you how I did it.

First, download an app called MTMR. MTMR stands for “My Touchbar. My rules.” Installation instructions are on that page, but most users will want the dmg file.

Once that’s installed, you can edit the file $HOME/Library/Application Support/MTMR/items.json to change what appears in the menu bar. The contents of the file are JSON, and you can edit this in whichever editor you like. Furthermore, once you save changes, they take effect immediately–no restarts of the MTMR app are necessary!

Continue reading “Displaying Your Wireless Network in the Touch Bar on a Macbook”