Cycling

A cyclist may use an application to track distance or navigate a route. A phone stored away in a pocket or pack makes access to the application less ideal, but perfectly useful for tracking performance data. Having the application at hand allows for controlling start/stop and lap functions along with immediate feedback. Navigating a new route with the directions in a pocket can become quite annoying.

I’ve always enjoyed story-driven games going back to the days of text adventures and on through Sierra Online’s graphic point-and-click games. Two of my favorites from the early 1990s pushed storytelling over gameplay: Rise of the Dragon from Dynamix (wikipedia) and Sierra’s Gabriel Knight written by Jane Jenson. Both games included intriguing plots, dark mystery stories, and some light-hearted wit. Rise of the Dragon delivered a strong graphic novel look with cinematic cutscenes, and Gabriel Knight held onto the familiar interface of other Sierra games with graphic novel clips. As far as storytelling in computer games, Gabriel Knight excels. Both original games may still be played using an emulator if one doesn’t mind the low-resolution graphics.

Story Setting

Gabriel Knight is a financially struggling author and owner of a rare books shop residing in New Orleans. Gathering material for his next novel, Gabriel begins investigating “The Voodoo Murders” by interviewing locals such as his friend, Detective Mosely, and Dr. John, a voodoo expert at a museum. An assistant at the bookstore, Grace Nakimura, helps out with research. Gabriel also suffers from nightmares that connect him with his family history.

I’ve been meaning to read The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley for over 20 years. Frankenstein is a familiar tale. Since childhood I’ve picked up bits of the story from movies and articles. With so many great novels to read, I tend to put off familiar classics. A few years ago I had finally read The Vampyr by John Polidori, the inspiration for modern vampire tales followed by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After noticing on Twitter that Helen A. Howell began reading Mary Shelley’s novel for #NaNoReMo, I decided I best get to this classic before more years slip away. I started in last evening reading the letters before the first chapter, and already I’m enjoying Shelley’s style.

Mt Hood at sunrise on February 22nd taken with Canon Rebel.

Security on the web must be taken seriously, and people should trust software and PC makers to help them remain secure when conducting business online. Sadly, too often PC makers or software publishers put your security at risk for other motivations.

Since at least September 2014, customers of Lenovo PCs have been complaining on the Lenovo forum about mysterious advertisements showing up generated by pre-installed software, Superfish, that also posed a security threat. In January 2015, security researcher, Chris Palmer, purchased a Lenovo Yoga 2 and confirmed the Superfish adware created a self-signed certificate with the same private key as on other Lenovo PCs as reported by Ars Technica. Worse yet, another security expert at Errata Security extracted the Superfish certificate by cracking the password which turned out to be, komodia. The Superfish adware makes it much easier for attackers perform a man in the middle theft by using the same certificate key to spoof other websites and fool visitors into handing over sensitive information.