Thoughts and Ramblings | Thoughts and Ramblings

Grace has $20 in Her Account

Grace has $20 in her bank account in Pittsburgh, PA as of 7AM this morning. I’ve never met Grace and yet I know this fact about her. I also know her phone number and when she met with people at this bank about her account. How do I know all of this? Grace gave her bank the wrong email address. This XKCD comic exemplifies it well:

Over 40 different people have provided companies my email address instead of their own. As a result I have had information sent to me that includes their addresses, phone numbers, names, and other details. The only thing I have never had sent to me is their real email address.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Thursday, July 28, 2022

My Current Media Setup

After changing my blog over to Hugo, I had to go through many posts to clean up conversion issues and I noticed that I hadn’t mentioned anything about my media setup since 2018. I have since changed the hardware, OS, and softare I use for playback.

Hardware

For the hardware I bought a “Phantom Canyon” Intel NUC. This machine only needs to have RAM, SSD, and OS added to it and it is ready to go.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Friday, July 15, 2022

Switched to Hugo

You may have noticed that this blog looks a bit different. I’ve decided to ditch wordpress and switch the blog over to Hugo. The primary reason is the maintenance cost for a wordpress installation. This cost comes is two forms:

Keeping wordpress up to date
Moderating comments

Keeping up to date

I know that the first can be mitigated by moving over to wordpress’s hosting but I liked the advantages of my domain hosted on my server. It allowed me to put hidden content at URLs of my choosing which I often did for distributing files to others too large to send via email.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Using Netflix DVDs to Measure The Post Office Decline

I subscribe to Netflix’s DVD by mail service occasionally (yes they still have it). I subscribe until I’ve run through the queue of movies I’d like to see, cancel, and repeat a year later. I’ve done this for several years now and the for the past few years I’ve tracked when disks should arrive and when they actually do. It’s uncommon for a disk to be late but 2022 has seen a dramatic decline in the service the post office delivers.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, April 30, 2022

GF(5^2)

I got curious about the design of a puzzle a few weeks back using $GF(5)$, or more specifically, the extension field $GF(5^2)$. I was hoping that I could find pre-computed examples and while I found many examples of lectures discussing $GF(5)$, I didn’t find anything with extension fields of it. So I wrote a quick program to find primitive polynomials of degree 2 over $GF(5)$. For what I had in mind I needed 6 primitive polynomials which could be selected for construction of this field but sadly that was not the case. Since I went through the work to find all possible polynomials and I didn’t find anyone else that had done so, I decided I’d make a blog post of them in case it’s useful to someone else.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, August 17, 2021