Nick Briz nbriz

An Open Letter to Young Software Authors

I harbor a great fear that we have become overwhelmingly misguided in our mass popularization of networked computing and large-scale reliance/transcendence of proprietary software into our personal and social lives. We have strayed far from some of the revolutionary ideas from which the internet and personal computing were birthed and if our present trajectory is left unaltered the technological future we will find ourselves in is not overwhelmingly bright. It is for this reason that I feel compelled to speak up, asking much from young software authors like myself that are finding their skills so ever more in-demand and who I know care so deeply for the future of a media in which they have found such connection, challenge, and personal achievement.

For them (and others), this document is intended to present a perspective of technological positivism at its core layered deeply under a mantle of skepticism regarding aggr

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Short version: I strongly do not recommend using any of these providers. You are, of course, free to use whatever you like. My TL;DR advice: Roll your own and use Algo or Streisand. For messaging & voice, use Signal. For increased anonymity, use Tor for desktop (though recognize that doing so may actually put you at greater risk), and Onion Browser for mobile.

This mini-rant came on the heels of an interesting twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/591074055018582016

Count the number of unique characters in a file

# https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5010/how-can-i-count-the-number-of-different-characters-in-a-file
# works for linux. There is a variation for MacOS in the link ^
sed 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g' text.txt | sort | uniq -c # sort -nr # uncomment this to sort the list by frequency

	#!/bin/sh
	CHROME_CACHE=$HOME/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache
	TMP_DIR=$HOME/Downloads/tmp
	mkdir -p $TMP_DIR
	for i in $(file $CHROME_CACHE/* \| egrep -i 'jp\|gif\|png' \|awk '{print $1}' \| sed 's/://g'); do cp -v $i $TMP_DIR/`basename $i`.$(file $i \| awk '{print tolower($2)}') ; done

	// forked from subimage's modifications of my much messier prior scripts
	// ( https://gist.github.com/subimage/d952e49c9184d6a7a74f )

	// after entering jquery into ur console, enter the code below in ur console
	// then load a few months of activity && enter leaveFacebook(); into ur console
	// u can specify parameters like so: leaveFacebook('Unlike'); if u only want to unlike
	// or leaveFacebook('Unfriend'); if u only want to unfriend
	// etc...

	// visit nickbriz.com/facebook for vidz && details

	/**
	* Renders a template string based on positional and keyword arguments.
	* Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Template_literals
	* @example
	* // returns 'YAY!'
	* let t1Closure = template`${0}${1}${0}!`;
	* t1Closure('Y', 'A');
	* @example
	* // returns 'Hello World!'
	* let t2Closure = template`${0} ${'foo'}!`;

	/**
	* Simple Node Script for Downloading Google Drive files (Drive API v3).
	* Use these instructions to get a GAPI_CLIENT_EMAIL and GAPI_PRIVATE_KEY: https://github.com/The-Politico/api-to-sheets#making-a-google-service-account
	* See all available types by document here: https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/manage-downloads
	*/

	const { JWT } = require('google-auth-library');
	const { google } = require('googleapis');

	const client = new JWT({

Nick Briz nbriz

An Open Letter to Young Software Authors

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Count the number of unique characters in a file

Replace a string in all instances of files in a directory