Hugh Padgham is one of the world’s top producers, on par music industry legends like Phil Spector, George Martin, Quincy Jones, Phil Ramone, Brian Eno, and Rick Rubin, to name but a few. The reason why Padgham enjoys, perhaps, not quite the same name recognition is because he prefers to remain behind the scenes, or, in his case, the desk. He likes to call himself “an invisible catalyst,” someone who gets the best out of the artists he works with, without taking any of the limelight.

Over the course of a career spanning five decades, Padgham has been the “invisible catalyst” behind dozens of best-selling, multi-platinum albums, many of them genuinely ground-breaking. Among them are recordings by XTC, Peter Gabriel, The Police, Yes, Phil Collins, Genesis, Kate Bush, David Bowie, Howard Jones, Paul McCartney, Sting, Roger Waters, Suzanne Vega, Sheryl Crow, The Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, McFly, and many more. Altogether it earned him four Grammy Awards.

Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the privacy policy originally outlined when the government launched its TraceTogether app in March 2020 and is being criticized as a backpedal just after participation in contact tracing was made mandatory. 

Singapore ruled out using the Apple-Google system itself because officials there said they wanted more detailed infection information. Participation in contact tracing was once voluntary, but the government rolled that back late last year, and there are now mandatory check-ins at most places where people work, shop, and gather.

On March 7, 1983, New Order released the single “Blue Monday.” In addition to its massive commercial success, charting in the top 10 in several different countries, the single established New Order’s reimagined voice, distinct from the raw emotions and haunting melodies of Joy Division, and launching the world of dance music into a whole new era. As John Bush declared: “‘Blue Monday’ cemented New Order’s transition from post-punk to alternative dance with vivid sequencers and a set of distant, chilling lyrics by Bernard Sumner” At first, in the time between Curtis’ death, and “Blue Monday”, New Order struggled to find their identity as a band. Their first single” (“Ceremony” with “In a Lonely Place”) were tracks they had written with Curtis before his passing, and their first album (Movement, 1981) followed in the same vein of dark, haunting ytacks, as their work in Joy Division. What “Blue Monday” offered, instead, was a startling break away from that emotionality and into the mechanized sound of drum machines and synthesizers. As Sumner reflected in 2015: “I think ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ connects with people because of the emotional content within the song, and I think ‘Blue Monday’ connects with people because of the startling lack of emotional content within the song. It’s kind of contradictory, really.” While the sonic shift seemed to be a drastic change, there are several lines of influence that can be drawn between the track and the band’s earlier work. The impact of a band like Kraftwerk on New Order should come as no surprise; however, it was actually Ian Curtis who introduced the electronic music pioneers to his bandmates. As Hook explained: “My earliest memory of Kraftwerk was being given an LP by Ian Curtis. He gave me ‘Autobahn’ and then later ‘Trans Europe Express’. I was absolutely mesmerised by both. Ian suggested that every time Joy Division go on stage, we should do so to ‘Trans Europe Express’. We did that from our first show, until nearly our last […] Joy Division were very tied to Kraftwerk, but it wasn’t until we got to New Order and were able to afford the toys that our primary source of inspiration became, ‘Let’s rip off Kraftwerk’. Their music was beguilingly simple, but impossible to replicate.”

MIT How to Speak, IAP 2018
Instructor: Patrick Winston
View the complete course: https://ocw.mit.edu/how_to_speak

Patrick Winston's How to Speak talk has been an MIT tradition for over 40 years. Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules.

00:16 - Introduction
03:11 - Rules of Engagement
04:15 - How to Start
05:38 - Four Sample Heuristics
10:17 - The Tools: Time and Place
13:24 - The Tools: Boards, Props, and Slides
36:30 - Informing: Promise, Inspiration, How To Think
41:30 - Persuading: Oral Exams, Job Talks, Getting Famous
53:06 - How to Stop: Final Slide, Final Words
56:35 - Final Words: Joke, Thank You, Examples

If sherried single malt is very much your thing, then GlenDronach is a name you should get to know very well. The distillery resides in the Highlands, busily working away on some incredible expressions, with sherried malt sitting at the core of many of them. This particular dram, The GlenDronach 12 Year Old, is allowed to age in a combination of Oloroso and Pedro Ximénez casks from Spain, resulting in generous helpings of dried fruit and Christmas spice running through it. Bottled without chill-filtration or additional colouring, you can expect great stuff from this approachable single malt.

Highland Park 12 Year Old remains one of the gold- standard malts for other distillery bottlings to aspire to. With a delicious sweetness (heather-honey is their preferred description) and a warming, silky mouthfeel, this is a whisky that never lets you down. "The greatest all-rounder in the world of malt whisky". Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson's Malt Whisky Companion

This bottling has been replaced by Highland Park Viking Honour

The entry level bottling from Scotland's most northerly distillery, Highland Park, aged for 12 years with plenty of citrus and green notes.

Tasting Note by The Chaps at Master of Malt

Nose: Fresh, clean and very aromatic. Floral notes abound the senses with a light grassiness. Notes of creamy Manuka honey and a touch of juicy citrus with cream and a well-balanced sweetness.

Palate: Rather full with a pleasant depth. Lurking somewhere in the substratum a grilled orange lies. Notes of granary toast and green tea with jasmine. A touch of sweetness.

Finish: Quite long with peppery spice and wood shavings.

The goto shell utility allows users to navigate to aliased directories and also supports autocompletion.
How it works

Before you can use goto, you need to register your directory aliases. For example:

goto -r dev /home/iridakos/development

then change to that directory, e.g.:

goto dev

goto.gif
goto demo
Autocompletion in goto

goto comes with a nice autocompletion script—whenever you press the Tab key after the goto command, Bash or Zsh will prompt you with suggestions of the aliases that are available:

Explore Joe Grand’s life journey as a hardware hacker. Known as Kingpin, his curiosity has been manipulating electronic devices since the 1980s. Learn more about his hacker lifestyle and get a glimpse inside Joe’s mind as he explains how hacking, technology and engineering fuels his passion.

GitHub has just beta-released GitHub CLI, an open-source tool that allows developers to work with issues and pull requests from the command line. Written in Go, GitHub CLI can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Using GitHub CLI, developers will be able to list open issues and filter them based on assignee, label, and state; to create pull requests; to check out pull requests locally; to view the status of your work, and more.

Accenture released its Technology Vision 2020 report with a call for corporations to build trust as they develop new services for a "post-digital" population that has moved beyond the wow-factor with new technologies and understands the dystopian possibilities in an unplanned future.
Featured

It's not a total backlash against tech but a love/hate relationship that Accenture dubs a "tech-clash."

“Code is law” is a form of regulation whereby technology is used to enforce existing rules. With the advent of Blockchain and Machine Learning, we are witnessing a new trend, whereby technology is progressively taking the upper-hand over these rules.

This release adds support for FIDO/U2F hardware authenticators to
OpenSSH. U2F/FIDO are open standards for inexpensive two-factor
authentication hardware that are widely used for website
authentication. In OpenSSH FIDO devices are supported by new public
key types "ecdsa-sk" and "ed25519-sk", along with corresponding
certificate types.

ssh-keygen(1) may be used to generate a FIDO token-backed key, after
which they may be used much like any other key type supported by
OpenSSH, so long as the hardware token is attached when the keys are
used. FIDO tokens also generally require the user explicitly authorise
operations by touching or tapping them.

I also use a tool called Storm, which helps you add SSH connections to your SSH config, so you don’t have to remember them all. Y

A nice feature I’ve become used to in the last year is a so-called “smart directory changer” that keeps track of the directories you change into, and then lets you jump to popular ones quickly, using fragments of the path to find the right location.

There is quite some prior art in this, such as autojump, fasd or z, but I could not resist building my own implementation of it, optimized for zsh.

For bureaucratic reasons, a colleague of mine had to print, sign, scan and send by email a high number of pages. To save trees, ink, time, and to stick it to the bureaucrats, I wrote this script.

It's just been one security disaster after another for Intel the last few years. Meltdown, Spectre variant after variant and this week the "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" aka Zombieload attack have all required performance-degrading fixes and workarounds. There is no way around turning hyperthreading off to be safe from MDS/Zombieload and this is a rather high performance-price to pay. So what if you don't want to?

Disabling SMT/HyperThreading to get full protection against MDS/Zombieload on top of the mitigation code for "meltdown", several "spectre" variants and other security-issues discovered on Intel CPUs is a high price to pay for security on Intel CPUs. The total performance-penalty in many workloads is adding up. Unfortunately there is no safe and secure way around the performance-penalties - so you may want to..

An IT-etymology/linuxguistics page for people wondering "how come the package yasysmand-cling has such a strange name?"

Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition, and the explanations are often missing from the documentation, either because the developers imagine it's obvious (usually wrongly) or because they think nobody cares (and here they're usually right, or it would turn up as FAQ material).