merlinmann

Merlin's Wisdom Project

Or: “Everybody likes being given a glass of water.”

By Merlin Mann.

It's only advice for you because it had to be advice for me.

sm-Fifteen

"What the heck is a Yubikey and why did I buy one?": A user guide

(EDIT: Besides Reddit, I've also put this up on Github Gist)

So while looking for information on security keys before getting one myself, I got very confused reading about all the different modes and advertised features of Yubikeys and other similar dongles. The official documentation tends to be surprisingly convoluted at times, weirdly organized and oddly shy about a few of the limitations of these keys (which I'm making a point of putting front and center). Now that I have one, I decided to write down everything I figured out in order to help myself (and hopefully some other people reading this) make sense of all this.

Since I'm partly writing these notes for myself, there might be some back and forth between "exp

kyhwana

#replace "<PAT TOKEN>" with your github PAT token, tested with "Update ALL user data" PAT token.

curl -q https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ | grep "href" | grep "github.com" | grep -v "\/\[" | awk -F "https://github.com/" '{ print $2 }'  | awk -F "\"\>" '{ print $1 }'   | sed 's/\///g' | sed '/^$/d' | xargs -I USER curl -i -X PUT -H "Authorization: token <pat token here>" -H "Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json" https://api.github.com/user/blocks/USER

NZKoz

# <pre>
# This file is in the public domain, so clarified as of
# 2009-05-17 by Arthur David Olson.

# So much for footnotes about Saudi Arabia.
# Apparent noon times below are for Riyadh; your mileage will vary.
# Times were computed using formulas in the U.S. Naval Observatory's
# Almanac for Computers 1987; the formulas "will give EqT to an accuracy of
# [plus or minus two] seconds during the current year."
#

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD