Darkoshi

Errant thought this morning while typing on my computer/laptop keyboard:

A program might be able to decipher what is being typed simply by the different sounds each key makes and/or the rhythm of the words being typed.

There are several devices around the house which could be hacked to take audio recordings.

- The Alexa Echo Dot. Often we keep it unplugged, but sometimes I forget that it's still plugged in and turned on.

- The cams; on some of them, I've turned off audio recording, but it's hard to remember which ones and if I've changed the settings or not.

- The cell phones or laptops themselves, or the TV maybe, if they've been hacked to record audio when they aren't supposed to.


This 2005 article cited a study showing it was possible: Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information

The article comments indicate similar things have been done in the past, possibly all the way back to World War 2. So intelligence agencies most likely do have and use that kind of spying.

And if intelligence agencies are using it, it's not too far-fetched that serious & determined hackers could use it too. So that's another keylogging thing for me to be concerned about in addition to the wireless keyboard signals being snooped on.

Nearly half the window shades were kept down during the flights. Have those people flown so much that they are bored with seeing clouds and sky and the land below?

Free soft drinks were still served even though the flights were short.

At the hotel, greeted by a sweet scent of pink petunias.
The room had the same layout as the one in Jacksonville.

Difficult typing without dedicated Home & End keys.

Car alarm that goes off, apparently if you open the car door with the key and don't put the key in the ignition soon enough. Though at first it seemed to go off even when opening the door with the button on the key. The rental car company did not warn us about this; we had to figure it out on our own.

Running Firefox from a USB 2 flash drive is maddeningly slow and jerky even on a laptop with 32 GB RAM.

Parlour Bells played the opening act at the concert. They were quite good. The lead singer reminds me of Billy Idol, without a sneer.

The Culture Club gig was great. They did end up playing most of the new songs I had heard on the SoundCloud page, interspersed between old songs. Here are some videos from the concert that others have posted.

The "View - Reload" menu item has been removed from version 25 of Firefox. Apparently for quite a while already, "Reload" was only available when pressing "Alt+V" to view the menu. But now it's no longer there at all. I wonder why the Firefox designers feel the need to remove functionality from the menus, when the menus aren't even visible by default anymore.

Why do little changes like this bother me so much? Because it's like coming home to find that all your door handles have been removed and replaced by knobs, and furthermore, the knobs are on the top of the doors rather than in their hitherto-normal positions. Then you find out that for the last 10 years, 98% of other people have been using wireless mobilephone apps to remotely open all their doors, rather than using the door handles.

Now I have to remember to use either F5 or Ctrl+R to refresh the page when I don't have my hand on the mouse. I feel like I'm too old to learn new mnemonics. I can never even remember that Ctrl+Tab is for switching between tabs, even though I constantly use Alt+Tab for switching between windows. (I also can never remember the hotkeys for indenting or outdenting a block of text, in my email program at work).

Hmm. To press either F5 or a Control key combination, I have to look at the keyboard. Maybe that's why I find the menu mnemonics using the Alt keys easier to learn/remember. If I need to copy/paste something while typing, I still tend to use the Alt-Edit-Copy and Alt-Edit-Paste keys. My fingers however, know that Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Ins,and Ctrl-C can also be used.... but I don't use Ctrl-V much because how am I supposed to remember that V is for Paste?

Hmm. When editing text (as opposed to typing), my left hand is in the normal position, but my right hand is centered on the arrow keys. That lets me scroll through the text with my right hand, and also lets me do copy/paste/delete operations using the keys on that side.

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I've found that it is much easier to iron clothes while they are still damp from the washer. No need to first let them dry. No need to put water into the iron, nor to drain it out afterwards. Ironing damp clothes makes them dry faster too.

This makes me more likely to iron clothes right after I've washed them, avoiding an ever-increasing accumulation of wrinkled clothes waiting to be ironed. If I know that I won't have time to iron right after washing, I may not even put those particular items into the wash.

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I've been noticing a recent tendency to bite my lower lip while washing dishes, especially if I'm in a hurry. It's an odd subconscious thing; as if biting my lip will somehow make me get done faster. I have to consciously put effort into not doing it, as it's not a habit I want to have.

People can learn multiple languages.
I am wondering if it is also possible to learn multiple keyboard layouts, without getting them all mixed up. One of my old keyboards had the backslash key in an odd position, and I eventually remembered that when using that keyboard, I had to hit a different key than normal for the backslash. But that was a single key. Will I be able to learn the odd layout of the Home/End/Insert/Delete/PageUp&Down keys on this new keyboard, without then getting confused when using my other keyboard at work, is the question. Right now I keep hitting the wrong keys on this new keyboard. I hope I don't end up confused about the keys on both keyboards.