Hi, my name is Allison, and I’m not very smart. Over Christmas, all of our kids and grandkids came to visit. It was positively glorious. Kyle and Nikki and their 3 little darlings flew in early to spend a full week with us. They came early to miss the flight rush, and so they had […]
Continue readingCategory: Blog Posts
Security Bits — 3 January 2024 (Bart & Jill from the North Woods)
Deep Dive — Operation Triangulation TL;DR — Kaspersky labs have discovered that they, and Russian government officials, were targeted by very advanced iOS malware that completely took over iOS devices for the last 4 years. Apple have patched all the exploited vulnerabilities, regular users were not targeted, and Kaspersky say there is not enough evidence […]
Continue reading
Mirror iPhone and iPad to Mac with Bezel
The Problem to be Solved In my work creating screencasts for ScreenCastsONLINE, if I’m demonstrating an app on iOS or iPadOS, I have to have a way to record the screen of the iPhone or iPad. We use ScreenFlow to record the Mac screen and in more recent versions it’s been possible to record the […]
Continue readingThe World’s Most Expensive Sour Raisins – a Story of Dark Patterns
We’ve mentioned dark patterns a few times on Security Bits over the years, they are commonly used design techniques engineered to be effective at tricking humans. They are the dark side of one of the areas of computer science enjoyed most when studying for my degree back at the turn of the century — HCI […]
Continue reading
OCR PDFs using Free Open Source Tools with Apple Shortcuts (or Automator)
I’ve been talking a lot lately about different methods of running Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on PDFs using only free open source tools after George from Tulsa taught us about OCRmyPDF. All of the methods I’ve described work, but they’re pretty high on the nerd scale. OCR PDFs with Open Source Tools on Linux by […]
Continue readingCreate GPTs with Bodie Grimm
Bodie Grimm of the Kilowatt Podcast sat down with me in a screensharing session and he taught me how to create a GPT using ChatGPT 4. Before we got started, I didn’t know what “a” GPT was, or why you’d want to make one. Bodie explained both of those things and we recorded audio for […]
Continue reading
The Night Before Christmas
Since Christmas will soon be here, I thought it would be a good time to resurrect the poem that has become a holiday tradition on the NosillaCast. In 2019, we lost our beloved Honda Bob, a long-time NosillaCastaway and contributor to the show and a very dear friend. But his memory and the silliness he […]
Continue reading
Find Any File – by Christian from Germany
This week I got an email with a review from Christian: Hi Allison! Today I stumbled upon a little app that is called Find Any File. It is shareware and it works just great. It occurred to me that it might be an idea to send a little review as I could not find one […]
Continue reading
Be My AI for Creating Photo Captions and Alt Text
On NosillaCast #969, Tom Mattock explained how important it is that we all add alternative text to our images when we post them on social media. We say we want more engagement, and one of the ways to get that is to be inclusive in your postings. Without alt text, blind folks can’t tell anything […]
Continue reading
OCR PDFs using Free Open Source Tools with a Shell Script and Keyboard Maestro
Last week I walked you through how I was able to create a bash shell script to perform OCR on PDFs using the open source library ocrmypdf that George from Tulsa taught us about. I was very proud of my little script, but I realized that running a script isn’t a very mainstream thing to […]
Continue reading