DIGITAL

SUPERPOWERS
Open-source
friendly

Windows
Linux
macOS

A whirlwind tour of readily-available

tools that turbocharge productivity,
ignite creativity, and empower learning

Nick Touran
Digital Superpowers

Nick Touran

Mar 24, 2024

 © 2018-2024 Nicholas W. Touran, All Rights Reserved

[Link]

Icons on cover are from FontAwesome, used under a CC BY 4.0

License available at [Link]
Modifications to the laptop icon were made.

Revision: 2.0

Published on: Sun Mar 24 10:29:07 2024

 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Intended audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
About me . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Fundamentals 5
Basic parts of computers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Operating systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Files and folders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The command line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Programs and package managers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Password managers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Making secure but memorizable passwords with Dice-
ware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Two-factor authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Common scams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3 Around the House 25

Life-changing keyboard shortcuts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Avoiding printer dry-out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Get to know your router . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Setting a strong Wi-Fi password . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Guest networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Avoiding DNS hijack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

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 Opening ports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Virtual machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Ad-blockers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Using a VPN Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
The Onion Router and the dark web . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Planning a night of star-gazing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

4 Around the Office 45

Note on office suites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Concentrating in offices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Note Taking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Screenshots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Text editors and extensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Column editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Slicing and dicing PDFs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Ultimate find and replace (regular expressions) . . . . . 54
Encrypted communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Making flowcharts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
The GNU utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

5 Art Studio 77
Basic image manipulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Computer graphics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
The digital darkroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Making podcasts, music, and sound effects . . . . . . . . 97
DJing a party or show . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Making games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

6 Publishing 113
Publishing online . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Publishing PDFs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Publishing eBooks (and books) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

7 Programming 131
Tracking changes of anything . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Why program? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Programming languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Writing Python programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
The bridge to machine learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

ii
 Graphical User Interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Web applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

8 Robotics and Hardware 159

The era of cheap, user-friendly microcontrollers . . . . . 160
Some basic peripherals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
An interactive art installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Even cheaper microcontrollers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
A star-tracking camera mount for astrophotography . . 167
Controlling hardware directly from your laptop . . . . . 170

9 Self-Hosting 175
Getting your own server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Well-polished self-hosted catch-all . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Self-hosted home automation and security . . . . . . . . 178
Set up your own VPN Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Your own webserver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Hosting your own contacts and calendar . . . . . . . . . 185
Personal cloud for documents and photos . . . . . . . . . 186
Self-hosting your own e-mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

10 Conclusion 189

11 Glossary 191

Index 197

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 Introduction
1
Computers are everywhere. They’re in our purses, our offices, our TVs,
our hobby-dens, our cars, and our toasters. Many of us spend significant
parts of our days operating these machines in the palms of our hands and
on our desks or couches. They entertain us and make us laugh. They
connect us to family and help us find love. They help us get reports
written and make project videos at school. They facilitate our work by
crunching numbers, formatting documents, and helping us express our
ideas. In a sense, they are extensions of our brains. But many of us
could be getting more out of our computers. This book will show you
how.
Computers are capable of being dozens of appliances, gadgets, and even
large facilities. This overwhelming breadth of capability is easy to over-
look. I’ve been keeping a list:

Table1: Several things that computers are ca-

pable of being

TV Movie player Phone/address book Phone

Drafting table Diary Encyclopedia Photo album
Nintendo Typewriter Calculator Dictionary
Musical tuner Atlas Audio studio Newspaper
Darkroom Printshop GPS Card game
Calendar Card catalog Radio File cabinet

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This book posits that some powerful capabilities of the computers many
people have on hand are neither well-known nor easy to discover. Get-
ting exposure to some of them will directly improve your life at home,
school, work, and play. Seeing these in action should inspire thoughts
to blossom about new achievements you can reach, as well as how to do
your current activities better and with more pleasure.

Intended audience

This book is written with a few readers specifically in mind:

• The everyday school, home, and office computer user who wants
to take it to the next level
• The artist looking for ideas and orientation regarding computers
• The entrepreneur looking for new/modern skills and pathways to
success
• The scientist who knows the computer can help, but isn’t sure how
to get started
• The retiree looking to keep up-to-date on tech
• The executive who wants to be better informed on IT tools
We will go through many hands-on examples that you will be able to fol-
low right away. But because every superpower could have (and likely
does have) multiple books written specifically about it, each will not be
treated in detail. Thus, you should be ready and willing to dig (some-
times significantly) deeper into anything we talk about here when it
makes sense for you to seek mastery. This is not an in-depth tutorial
on one topic, but rather a guided tour of many for you to pick up based
on your needs and interests.
I assume you have a baseline level of computer knowledge. Ideally,
you’ll already know how to install a program, copy and paste things,
how to make a slide deck, and some basics in a spreadsheet. If you
don’t, you’ll still get something out of this, but don’t expect this book to
teach you all of those things. This is a solidly intermediate book.

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Each chapter will progress from basic to more complicated in an effort

to cover the broad scope, and the wide range of experience and interest
out there.

About me

I’m a lifelong computer lover who has spent many personal and pro-
fessional years learning about them. As much as I love computers, I
really wanted to work on the energy/climate problem, so I went into nu-
clear engineering. Conveniently, it’s a field that can be computationally
heavy. So I applied computer interests to simulating nuclear chain re-
actions. Guided by many mentors through the years, I enjoyed seeking
out and learning new or interesting technologies, and after many years,
found myself with a fairly significant body of knowledge on hand.
Along the way, I got into technical communication by founding https:
//[Link]. I have been told that I have a knack for explaining
complex things.
Then one day I thought, “Sheesh! A lot of people could use some help
looking deeper into computers in their daily lives.” and so here we are.

Philosophy

It seems that computers have diminished from exciting world-changers

to dull keepers of the spreadsheet and the cat video. People use com-
puters within the bounds of the programs they have without knowing to
explore what else is possible or available to make their lives easier and
better. I want to illuminate the possibilities of computers to help people
lead more exciting, engaged, and fulfilling lives using equipment they
already have sitting around.
In the spirit of accessibility, this book highlights many free and open-
source tools first while mentioning key proprietary software when ap-
propriate.

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4 Chapter 1. Introduction
 Fundamentals
2
This chapter starts with basics and covers a few bits of info and best
practices that everyone who uses computers regularly will benefit from
knowing. We’ll build more superpowers based on this foundation in the
later chapters.

Basic parts of computers

Computers bring in, manipulate, and present data with lightning speed
and hardly any moving parts. This is why they’ve had such a massive
impact on our lives, and have brought forth the information age. For a
bit of context, here are the key components in computers that perform
all that wonder:

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Component Purpose

Central Processor The CPU is the brain and does most of the num-
Unit ber crunching. Faster is better, speed is mea-
sured in billions of computation cycles per sec-
ond (gigahertz).
Memory (RAM) The working short-term fast-acting memory; it
holds the data while the CPU crunches it. More
is better, measured in billions of octets of ones
and zeros (gigabytes).
Hard drive The long-term but slower memory. It saves your
files and photos and spreadsheets. Also mea-
sured in gigabytes.
Monitor Displays information visually. On phones, it’s
an input device too. Measured in the number
of horizontal and vertical picture elements (pix-
els).
Network card Sends and receives data to/from other comput-
ers for posting cat pictures, etc. Measured in
billions of ones and zeros communicated per sec-
ond (Gbps).

Operating systems

When a computer turns on, a series of simple built-in operations run to

check the processor and memory, and to figure out what other hardware
is attached. Eventually, enough systems are online to read larger and
more complex programs from the hard disk. In a sense, the computer
is pulling itself up by its bootstraps (hence the term “booting up”). At
this point, the computer will find an Operating System (OS) on the hard
disk, which will tell the computer how to run everyday programs like an
office suite or a web browser and everything else.
There are many OSs out there, but we’re going to mostly just talk about
three of them: Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux. The first

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two are familiar to everyone. The third is an open-source product (mean-

ing it’s available for anyone for free and that anyone can look at its un-
derlying source code) developed over the years by a community of vol-
unteers and professionals. Linux is the underlying technology behind
Google’s Android OS and also runs many of the servers powering the
internet. In the past few years, more people started running Linux on
their personal laptops and desktops as a powerful, cost-effective, fun,
and philosophically-pure alternative. We’ll try hard to make sure every-
thing discussed in this book works fine in all three of these OSs.

Files and folders

As you probably know, most computer systems store information in a

hierarchical structure of nested digital folders (aka directories) on the
hard drive. You put your photos in the Photos folder, and so on. You can
create folders and files, delete them, rename them, copy them, paste
them, etc.

Note: If you are unfamiliar with copy/paste, you are in for a treat.
It is a core superpower but you may benefit more from this book after
1
learning about it. The WikiHow page on it is fantastic. I’d also be a little
worried that this book is slightly too advanced for you. If you already
know about copy/paste but not the keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V)
just know that those shortcuts are speed-demons.

We’ve all lost files in folders before. Many of us have opened a document
from e-mail and worked on it all day only to close the editor and then
never find the file again. This usually happens when it gets saved to
some temporary folder where files downloaded from the internet go.
I’ve done this myself many times, and have fielded dozens of calls for
help from friends through the years due to this. The solution is the Save
As button, which is distinct from Save in that it lets you choose where
to save a file as opposed to just saving it where it was opened from.
Click it, navigate to a normal place like Documents, and save it there.
Problem solved!
1
[Link]

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Organizing folders is an ongoing battle for many of us as well. We try

breaking things down by file type (Photos, Documents, Music) and then
by year. Sometimes for multi-year projects, it doesn’t go well and you
may need a Projects folder. It’s deeply personal, so just explore what
works best for you. For photos, one nice method is to organize them by
year and then name subfolders with the month and then an increment-
ing integer and an event, like 07.1 Fourth of July or 12.4 Yodit's
Christmas Sweater Party. Operating system designers are often try-
ing to move away from the hierarchical structure and use tags (so a file
can have multiple tags, similar to being in multiple folders at once) but
we’re not quite there yet.

Backups

Backups are really important, and I don’t know a lot of people who take
them very seriously besides professional IT staff. I personally am really
obsessed with my document, photo, and music collections and would
be just heartbroken if I lost them in a fire, robbery, hardware failure,
electromagnetic pulse, earthquake, volcano, and/or nuclear war. But
even I am not great with backups. The main categories of data loss to
protect against are:
• Hardware fails and data can’t be recovered
• Hardware is stolen or hacked and can’t be recovered
• User (or family member) accidentally deletes data
A reasonable and easy solution for backups is the cloud which we will
discuss momentarily.
A more-difficult-to-implement but conceptually straightforward method
for slow-moving data is to buy two external USB hard drives with a few
terabytes of space. Copy all your important files over to them both. Take
one to work or a friend’s house or some other off-site location. Every
month or six months or whenever (depends on your pace of accumulat-
ing new stuff that you care about), copy new files onto them and swap
them. This will protect your archival data against robbery and fire but
not necessarily earthquakes or EMPs. For those, you need more dis-
tance.

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Of course, there’s the challenge of finding out which files are out of date,
and having the discipline to regularly update the backups. Figuring
this out and quickly synchronizing is the job of the thousands of backup
software products you’ll hear about out on the market. Sure, you could
just copy everything over every day, but that would take a long time and
wear out your disks. Most modern operating systems like Windows,
Linux, and macOS come with backup utilities. Try those out or look for
third-party commercial products.
As your digital superpowers develop, you will become knowledgeable
in a few other systems that will lead you to exceedingly slick backup
options. git-annex is an advanced option worth noting that builds on
the git tool you’ll learn about in Programming. It’s quite powerful for
keeping well-organized and secure backups. For scientific, engineer-
ing, and data users, the datalad tool builds further upon git-annex
to add reproducibility on top of backups, so your scientific results can
be perfectly replicated by anyone in the future. In particular, datalad
auto-discovers any output files created by running particular commands
and tracks the input, commands, and output.

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

It’s not too uncommon these days to have a NAS in the home. These
are lightweight computer/appliances containing big hard drives that you
can connect to your home computers. Professional photographers and
videographers all have these. They offer some benefits in terms of shar-
ing files across the family’s computers and in terms of data reliability
(they’re often resilient against a single failure of one hard drive). You
can buy them for a few hundred bucks or, if you’re into the hobby of
it, you can turn an old computer into a NAS. PC Magazine2 (bless their
hearts) runs a review of the latest and greatest NAS machines every
year, so check them out for more advice.

Warning: NAS provides some level of backup, but they do not help
in the event of fires, burglary, or sometimes even accidental deletion.

2
[Link]

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Some NAS products come with nicely polished backup software that
can help with your offsite backups.

File Encryption

If your phone or laptop gets lost or stolen with all your work and online
dating on it, no problem, right? Because you have a backup? Great job!
But you may still worry because there’s a lot of personal and confidential
stuff on most devices. It’s wise to keep your private matters private no
matter if they’re just your mom’s recipes. You DO have something to
hide! If someone gets access to your e-mail for instance, they can reset
your bank password and cause all sorts of ruckus. So let’s just hide your
data.
Encryption is the process of scrambling the bits on your hard drive in
such a fashion that even if someone steals the computer/phone, they
will not be able to access the information within. Without encryption,
a bad guy or random teen could just plug a cable in and see all your
information. Math to the rescue!
Options for encrypting your hard drives in different systems:

Kind of computer Encryption options

Windows Find the BitLocker program and activate full-

disk encryption
Linux PC Choose to encrypt entire drive during installa-
tion.
Mac Find the FileVault utility and set it to encrypt the
full disk
Android phone Search settings for “Encryption” and ensure it
is enabled. If not, enable it. Make sure to set a
strong PIN or other credential
iPhone Almost always encrypted by default; set a strong
PIN

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Warning: If you encrypt something and then forget the password,

your data is very nearly impossible to recover (by design, after all
that is the point). Hopefully you have a backup! This seems obvious
but it is a little scary. Just be careful.

The Cloud

The Cloud is a nebulous term that really just means “a large semi-
automated collection of nearly identical computers out there on the
internet that is operated by some company.” A lot of computation is
moving to The Cloud because of the efficiencies of scale inherent to
mega-operators like Amazon Web Services. The deal The Cloud offers
to new business owners is that they will deal with the hassle of procur-
ing, maintaining, and servicing the computers, allowing you to focus
on software, marketing, and users. In other words, you do you. If you
do really well and need 10,000 new computers right now, they click a
button and (bloop-bleep) it’s done. If you mess up and everyone starts
deleting their account on your service, (bleep-bloop) those computers
are no longer reserved for you. What a deal! Services like Netflix and
Uber run on cloud-based back ends operated by other companies, like
Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.
What does it mean to you? Many services offer the ability to automat-
ically synchronize files on your hard drive with their hard drives in the
cloud (via the network card). This is nice because when you take a
photo on your phone, it shows up on your computer. If you experience
a tsunami, anything that was synced in The Cloud far away will survive
and re-sync when you get a new computer.
Services like Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, and Apple’s iCloud do this.
If you’re uninterested in running your own server or dealing with your
own backups, I have to recommend using these services. The risk, as
always, is that you have to trust them, because they can see all of your
files. Also, with computer systems being so complex, they always have
some new severe vulnerability, so it’s probably just a matter of time until
these services are breached. At that point, the biggest services will be
the most likely target. On the other hand, they also probably have the

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best defenses. Just something to think about.

It’s the same story with e-mail. If you use a web-based e-mail system in
the cloud you can just log on from anyone’s computer and have it.

The command line

Vast computer superpowers are controlled by a somewhat-obscure win-

dow into your computer: The Command Line (or Terminal). Go onto your
computer and launch it. On Windows, click Start, and type cmd and click
Command Line when you see it (or just press enter). On macOS, go to
the Finder and then click Go → Utilities → Terminal. In Linux, just hit
Ctrl-Alt-T. A little box will pop up with an ominous blinking prompt.
That’s it. That’s the command line. You’re gaping into a universe of
possibility, like in Men in Black when they gape into the cat’s necklace
and it’s a whole galaxy.
The idea here is that you type commands in and it responds by doing
something. These commands are precise, expressive, and repeatable;
you can tell the computer exactly what you want and it will do it. As
you’ll see in later chapters, this can be significantly faster than pointing
and clicking, especially for repeated actions. In other words, a com-
mand is worth a thousand clicks.
Most importantly, hundreds of grand-slam superpowers are hidden in
small and simple command-line utilities, the majority of which are freely
available. The elegant design benefit that led to the existence of these
rich tools is one of reductionism: many complex operations can be bro-
ken down into a series of simple operations. For example, consider a
spell-checker from a software developer’s perspective. If she writes a
word processor and needs spell checking, she can either write an entire
spell-checker in addition to the word processor, OR pray that someone
else has made a spell-checker before and made it available for her to
pull in and use. As it turns out there is indeed a spell-checker library
and utility that’s available in this regard and it has a command-line inter-
face. Thousands of such building blocks exist, and they’re all available
to you right now through the command line.
There is a reputation that the command line is for “advanced” users

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only. I don’t think this is true at all, and I hope I can convince you that
it’s accessible and useful for everyone. We’ll leverage the command line
quite frequently in this book.

Note: When you read something like “Type this in” from now, and it’s
unclear where to type it, it’s very likely the command line.

Let’s type some commands in to see that it’s fun and easy.

Operation Windows Linux/macOS

Which folder am I in? pwd pwd

What files exist in this folder? dir ls
Move up one folder in the hi- cd .. cd ..
erarchy
Move back to the original cd [NAME] cd [NAME]
folder, [NAME]
Print the current time and date /T and/or date
date time /T
Print the computer’s uptime net statistics uptime
server
Make a folder mkdir mkdir
cat_pictures cat_pictures
Remove a folder rmdir rmdir
cat_pictures cat_pictures
Convert units units "12 cups" units "12 cups"
mL mL
Make a cow say something N/A :( cowsay "Oh man I
love Linux"

That last one is not a joke.

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Some commands come with an OS and others have to be installed from

a third party. The last two examples above are the latter, and the instal-
lation of units is discussed in Unit conversion, so you’ll actually have
to wait until then to try out that command.
Here are a few productivity enhancers in the command line:
• If you ever want to get the previous command again (to either rerun
it or modify it slightly and then rerun it), press the up arrow on
your keyboard. Each time you press it goes up in a history of all
the commands you’ve executed. The down arrow goes in the other
direction.
• If you’re typing out a command you can often press TAB to
auto-complete it. For instance, if there is a folder called
my_very_long_folder_name you can just type cd my_very and then
press TAB and it will fill in the rest. This is called tab completion. I
cringe badly and then speak up when people don’t use it because
it can save hours per day when you’re working heavily in the com-
mand line.
• You can copy and paste commands into the command line.
• At least in Windows, you can drag a file into the command line
instead of typing its full path.
• If you ever typed a command that’s taking too long or isn’t what
you wanted, you can abort it by pressing and holding the CTRL key
and then pressing C.

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Programs and package managers

Your computer undoubtedly came with some programs, and you have
probably downloaded and installed others. It was once a big pain to
go out and find/install the latest versions of various programs and to
keep them up to date. In the Linux world, this was solved years ago
with special programs called Package managers, which are simple little
commands that know how to go find, download, install, keep up-to-date,
and (if desired) uninstall programs. macOS and Windows have started
catching up and there are now good package managers for them as well.
Without further ado, it’s time for your next superpower: package man-
agement!

Note: This is optional but will make it easier to follow along in sections
of the book that rely on special programs. In all future uses, you can al-
ternatively search for the program at hand, find its web page, download
it, and run its installer.

Warning: These programs change what’s on your computer (that’s

the point). It is unlikely but possible that something will go wrong.
Try these out on a computer that you can afford to break if you’re
just learning.

macOS has one de-facto standard package manager called Homebrew3

that can be installed from the command line by running the following
command (which is also on their webpage if you’d like to copy/paste it):

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL [Link]

,→Homebrew/install/master/install)"

A good package manager called Chocolatey4 is available on Windows.

To get it, you have to open the Command Prompt with Administra-
tive privileges, meaning commands you type can change system set-
tings. You generally do this by typing cmd in the Start Menu and click-
3
[Link]
4
[Link]

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ing the choice that has the word “Administrator” in it (or by right-
clicking the normal Command Prompt choice and choosing “Run as
Administrator”). Once you’re in, copy/paste the command shown at
[Link] into it and press Enter to run it (it’s sim-
ply too long to reasonably put in this book expecting you to type it). You
may have to right-click and choose Paste to paste, or (in Windows) just
press Control-V.

Figure1: Opening the Administrator Command Line in Windows 10

(hover your mouse over and right-click, then left click on the Adminis-
trator option). You generally have to use the Administrator option every
time you run a choco command.

Now you have a package manager and can install common programs

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with simple commands! The commands will look similar to what’s shown
below. We’ll provide similar tables frequently.

Table1: Installing programs with package man-

agers

OS Command

Windows choco install [program_name].

Linux apt install [program_name]
macOS brew install --cask [program_name] or brew
install [program_name]

After issuing a command like these, there may be some prompts and
alerts that scroll by as the packages are downloaded and installed. In
some cases, if things look frozen, you may have to just press Enter (I
had to do this in choco a few times). If you install a large package, the
process may take a few minutes depending on your internet connection
speed.

Note: In Windows with choco you have to either run refreshenv or

open a new command terminal after you install a program before it is
available as a new command-line program.

You can just as easily uninstall anything installed through these systems
by running the same kind of command but with uninstall or remove
instead of install. And you can update as well.
Life’s getting easier already! Let’s put that new skill to work.

Password managers

You know that feeling when you are trying to buy something and the web
page forces you to make a new account? Many of us just reuse the same
old password again and again, maybe with a few modifications based on
the site name. This ends up being really dangerous in addition to annoy-
ing because the likelihood that Arnold’s Pizza Shop has rock-solid secu-

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rity practices is low, and after you give (roughly) the same password to
a billion such establishments, the probability of some nefarious hacker
breaking into them and getting your password approaches 100%.
Annoying and dangerous!? Hopefully there’s a superpower for that.
Indeed, there is: Password Managers. Password managers are pro-
grams you run on your computer or phone that do two essential things:
• They act as your own personal encrypted vault of passwords so you
can look them up easily when you need them
• They have random password generators that will whip up a 25-
character password whenever you need a new one for Arnold’s
Pizza Shop or similar
If you use a unique and random password for everything, the threat dis-
cussed above is neutralized. Plus you don’t have to type in the password
ever, Password Managers allow you to copy it and then paste it right into
the web form. In this workflow, you never actually know most of your
passwords.

Tip: You will still need to memorize a few key passwords for extra-
important accounts. Just keep them unique. See Making secure but
memorizable passwords with Diceware below for ways to do this well.

There are some great open-source password managers out there like
5
KeePassXC as well as commercial offerings (with better support) such
as LastPass6 or 1Password7 . A good combo is to put your KeePassXC
database in a cloud synchronization program so it synchronizes across
all your devices.
To try out KeePassXC with a package manager (see above), run the fol-
lowing in the Command Line:
5
[Link]
6
[Link]
7
[Link]

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Table2: Installing KeePassXC with your package

manager

OS Command

Windows choco install keepassxc

Linux apt install keepassxc
macOS brew install --cask keepassxc

You may also want to store credit cards in your password manager, mak-
ing it really easy to copy/paste them into web forms when shopping.
Of course there is a new threat now: If someone finds out the one pass-
word you use for your password manager and has access to your files,
they can get all of your passwords at once. This is less likely to happen,
but you should consider it when typing your master password into the
password manager. Keep in mind that Edward Snowden puts a blanket
over his head whenever he types a password, and he’s somebody who
knows what’s going on out there.

Tip: Does your password at work auto-expire every few months? Com-
panies used to think this was good for security but in 2016, NIST re-
leased guidelines saying that unnecessary auto-expiry was leading peo-
ple to choose weak passwords. They now recommend to only force
someone to change a password if there’s been evidence of a data breach.
Same with password complexity (it’s no longer wise to require mixes of
uppercase and symbols), just make a long password and check it against
a common password list.

Making secure but memorizable passwords

with Diceware

For the few very strong passwords you do need to memorize, the Dice-
ware method is here to help. Here are the steps:

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• Grab a Diceware word list like one of these8 from the EFF. These
have 5-digits between 1 and 6 (for each possible value of a die).
Here is an excerpt:

46663 reflex
46664 reflux
46665 refocus
46666 refold
51111 reforest
51112 reformat
51113 reformed
51114 reformer

• Get 5 dice and roll them. Line them up and then look up the word
that corresponds to the values you rolled (if you had 4, 6, 6, 6, 4,
your first word would be reflux, from the list above).
• Roll 4–7 more times. Now you have 5–8 random words. String
them together and that’s your super-secure but still memorizable
password.

Note: Don’t have 5 dice sitting around? You can find online genera-
tors of diceware passwords. Just know that they aren’t random enough
and the Diceware method recommends against using anything but ac-
tual dice. Besides, everyone should have some dice around for playing
10,0009 .

Two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a login method offered by many web

pages and institutions these days. It makes it so you have to type a
password and also type in a one-time code sent to your phone via text or
through a special app. The idea here is to combine something you know
(your password) with something you have (your phone). It’s similar to
8
[Link]
9
A surprisingly fun dice game, similar to Farkle. Try it out, you won’t regret it:
[Link]

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typing your zip code at the gas pump when using a credit card10 , or a PIN
with a ATM card. For your most important accounts, it’s really essential
to turn it on to minimize the likelihood that someone can access them.
Banks, big shopping sites, and e-mail providers are good first places to
start. You can learn how to activate it with a web search along the lines
of:

activate [web page name] two-factor authentication

The new risks here are that it takes longer to log in and, if you lose
your phone, it’s extra hard to just reset your password. Such are the
tradeoffs. Many companies are relaxing the pain by only requiring that
you use the 2FA code on new computers so it’s not all that bad. Other
companies make you obtain and enter a 2FA token twice per transaction,
which is really annoying.

Warning: Getting 2FA tokens through text messages is probably

better than nothing, but it’s significantly less safe than using a dedi-
cated 2FA app. Why? Because it’s possible for a bad guy to use social
engineering to convince your phone operator to change your phone
number to a different SIM card, thereby allowing them to access your
2FA tokens and get into your accounts. This has happened in serious
attacks, such as one on CloudFlare in 201211 . It’s much harder for
them to get access to an app on your phone.

Common scams

Billions of dollars are lost each year to fraud, much of which occurs on
computers. You should always be a little skeptical if someone you don’t
know asks you to pay for anything or give you access. Here are a few
guidelines for avoiding fraud.
10
In the USA, ZIP codes are used for credit card authentication at many self-serve
gas pumps because the cards themselves don’t have PINs like they do in most of the
rest of the world.
11
[Link]

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• Never give your password out

No well-meaning entity will ever ask you for your password on the
phone or in e-mail or in any other place than a log-in form. If this
ever happens to you, you should recognize it as a huge red flag.
• Computer companies will never call you
There are lots of scams where people pretend to be calling from
some big company you’ve heard of offering to fix something on your
computer if you just go to a certain link. This is someone trying to
access your PC to find banking information about you. Hang up!
• E-mails where people know an old password of yours don’t
have video of you
Through the years, various companies have experienced data
breaches. If you had an account with any of them with a weak pass-
word (i.e. a single dictionary word), they may e-mail you and say
they know your password and claim that they hacked into your com-
puter and recorded you doing something naked or private. They
threaten they’ll send it to all your friends if you don’t send them
about $1000 via Bitcoin. It’s very unlikely they have anything on
you since these breaches are widely available. If you used that
same password on other accounts, you do need to change it, like,
yesterday. See [Link] for help in checking
to see which accounts of yours have been compromised in known
breaches.
• If someone tells you that you’re in big trouble, but they can
help, it’s probably a scam
You may get a call saying that you have dozens of unpaid violations
at [your county courthouse] but if you go down to Walgreens and
get $2000 worth of gift cards and read them one after the other to
this person on the phone they’ll get you out of it. That’s a scam.
Gift cards are very hard to trace and are a favorite instrument of
scammers. If you’re in actual trouble just deal with it through the
proper channels and get a lawyer. This happens with people im-
personating the IRS as well. They may know a little about you,
like where you live and some previous addresses. This is all public
record but it makes the scam seem more real. Don’t fall for it. If
you’re really unsure, ask them for the number of their institution,

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check it online, and then call them back.

• Watch out for phishing
Phishers will send you an e-mail that looks like it’s from a familiar
institution. It will have the right logos, the right address, and will
have a link you can click to do something important, like reset a
password or confirm something. The best defense here is to hover
your mouse over the link and take a look in the address bar (usually
at the bottom of the screen) to see where the link is actually going.
If it’s to some weird internet address or some misspelling of the
actual site, it’s a scam. If you do click the link, you can also check
the address bar of the web browser. Be careful, these can be very
tricky. This has been such a problem that your employer may hire
someone to send phishing-like messages to you and if you click
them you’ll have to take mandatory training. It’s like anti-phishing
phishing.
• Ransomware is real
If you get a message that all your files are encrypted and you have
to pay to get them decrypted, it may be real; especially if you can’t
access your files. Ideally, you’ll have a backup of your files and can
just wipe your computer clean and restore the backup. Otherwise,
you have to choose whether you want to give the criminal what
they want or kiss your files goodbye. Another good reason to have
backups!
Those are just a few. The FBI has hundreds more to watch out for at
[Link]

Well, that sums up chapter one. I hope you’ve learned something new
and useful.

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24 Chapter 2. Fundamentals
 Around the House
3
You browse the web through your phone and computers at home, you
print stuff, you e-mail friends, you learn, you play. In this chapter, we’ll
make these more pleasant, productive, and safe.

Life-changing keyboard shortcuts

You probably use a keyboard, at least a little. A few subtly-sublime key-

board shortcuts can really speed up your work and play. You may have
heard that professional typists never click around in a word to go back
and make corrections, they just delete the world and hammer it out
again in under a second. These shortcuts can help you when changing
text in anything (e-mail, word processor, web browser, etc.). Anything
you can do to prevent yourself from switching from keyboard to mouse
and back is going to turbocharge you. If you think about it, the keyboard
is more expressive than a mouse. Try them out; you’ll love them!

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Table1: Some surprisingly useful keyboard

shortcuts while editing text:

Effect Windows/Linux macOS

Delete previous entire Control-Backspace Option-Delete

word
Delete next entire word Control-Delete Function-Delete
Move cursor to previous Control-LEFT, Option-LEFT,
or next word Control-RIGHT Option-RIGHT
Move cursor to beginning Home Control-A
of line
Move cursor to end of line End Control-E
Move cursor to beginning Control-Home Command-Up
of document
Move cursor to end of Control-End Command-Down
document

Here’s the kicker: for all of these “move cursor” shortcuts, you can
throw a SHIFT in there as well to select everything from where you are
now to where the cursor’s going to go. Once something is selected you
can delete it, copy it, change the formatting… You can do anything!

Exercise
Try these out. Open an e-mail editor and type out a sentence of your
choosing. Now don’t leave the keyboard! From the end of the sentence
press Shift-Control-Left (to select the previous word) and then press
Left three more times (while keeping Shift-Control held). This should
have selected the previous three words. Copy them with Control-C,
press End, and press Control-V a few times to paste them.
Now try Control-Shift-Home followed by Backspace. You’re really
hauling now!
(macOS people use the equivalents from the table above)

I didn’t learn Control-backspace until well into my career and it has

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really been useful since then.

Besides editing text, keyboard shortcuts can streamline web-browsing
too. The same “leaving the keyboard is slow” philosophy applies online
in its own way. The most essential shortcut takes you to the address bar
with Control-L (Command-L on a Mac). Now you can type a new web
address or a search and just press enter to proceed.
To turbocharge this, combine it with the !bangs feature of the Duck-
DuckGo search engine and you’ll really be moving. If you set Duck-
DuckGo as your default search provider (something you can do in the
settings of your web browser), then you can put, for instance, a !t any-
where in the search and it will take you directly to the thesaurus page
for your search term. So big !t goes to a thesaurus page for the word
big. Thousands of bang codes are available, and you can even submit
your own. Here are a few more good ones:

Table2: Some other awesome DuckDuckGo

!bang codes

!d Dictionary !a Amazon
!g Google !gi Google images
!gschol Google Scholar !wu Weather Underground
!w Wikipedia !cl Craigslist
!fb Facebook !yt YouTube
!tw Twitter !pub PubMed

That’s right, if you whimsically want to conjure up your ex-boyfriend

while you’re in the middle of reading a news article, you can just type
Control-L !fb Jacob Olson Enter and there he will be. Sigh.
Dozens of other keyboard shortcuts are available in various browsers.
See if you can find the list of them (usually in Help → Keyboard shortcuts)
and see if any others seem useful to you.

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Avoiding printer dry-out

Printers have a bad reputation for never working right and having re-
ally expensive ink. Regarding the ink issue, InkJet printer jets dry out if
they’re not used frequently. So if you’re shocked by a printer never re-
ally working or always needing its jets cleaned, that’s why. If you print
less than once a month but still really need that printer when you need
it, consider getting a laser printer instead. They’re a bit more expen-
sive (especially for color or combo printer/scanner), and their color for
photo-printing is not as good, but their ink reliability is usually worth it
for a lot of people.

Get to know your router

Home networks consist of public internet coming in from your inter-

net service provider (e.g. Comcast) and going into your router which
distributes it around your house via Wi-Fi radio waves and sometimes
Ethernet cables. Your router and each device connected to it gets as-
signed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are like street addresses,
but for the internet backbone. There exist a few special blocks of IP ad-
dresses for local networks (e.g. the one in your home), and the most
common of these is anything that starts with 192.168.

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Public internet via ISP Your neighbor

[Link] [Link]

Your Router Neighbor's router

[Link] [Link]

Phone 1 Phone 2 Laptop Smart TV

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

Figure1: Your home network with example IP addresses

Your router is a little computer in itself and it has settings where you
can change your Wi-Fi password, set up a guest network, adjust security
settings, and other things. It doesn’t have a screen or keyboard like your
laptop so it presents its user interface through a web browser. To get to
it, simply point your web browser to its IP address, which is very often
[Link] or [Link]. If you struggle, check the bottom of your
router for a sticker that says what its default address is.

Setting a strong Wi-Fi password

With more smart-this and smart-that in the home, the security of your
Wi-Fi router is fairly important. It’s easy for people driving around with
laptops to get onto unsecured networks or ones with easy-to-crack pass-
words (they’re called war-drivers). It’s no problem to tote around ter-
abytes of pre-hashed passwords (called rainbow tables) and try to get
in. So try to come up with a password that is unlikely ever to have been
used before. As always, no single dictionary words.

Note: Did you know? Wi-Fi doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s just
riding upon the good reputation of Hi-Fi stereo equipment, which means

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High Fidelity. “Wireless fidelity” would make no sense at all.

You can use your password manager to make a random Wi-Fi password.
This might annoy your family if it’s too hard, but you can at least make
it easy to get on by generating a 2-D barcode (QR code) in a special
1
format. Websites like [Link] do this for you in a few seconds. Once
it’s done, anyone can use a barcode scanner app and just scan it to get
online. Just don’t make it visible from any windows! Also beware that
some devices like printers will still require you to type the password in
manually.

Figure2: Scanning a QR code to connect to Wi-Fi.

1
[Link]

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Guest networks

Many Wi-Fi routers allow you to set up a separate network for guests.
Doing so gives them unfettered internet access without exposing your
devices to any viruses or misbehavior they may be dealing with.
It may be wise to connect your Smart TVs and other devices with ulte-
rior motives to the guest network. Some devices have been known to
monitor other devices on the network to try to figure out how to send
better ads or otherwise track you. If they’re on a different network they
can’t watch your phone and laptop.

Avoiding DNS hijack

Have you ever mistyped a web address only to be greeted by a page

with ads from your internet service provider (e.g. Comcast)? That’s
something they can do because they are providing the internet phone
book of lookup tables between web page names and actual server IP
addresses (more on this phonebook system, called DNS, in Publishing).
They may also be slower and less secure than some of the other options.
You can adjust your DNS settings in your router’s setup (near where
you set the Wi-Fi password). You’re looking for DNS Server settings
or Custom DNS. I recommend using CloudFlare’s DNS entries for good
security and performance:

Table3: CloudFlare’s DNS settings

Primary (IPv4) [Link]

Secondary (IPv4) [Link]
Primary (IPv6) 2606:4700:4700::1111
Primary (IPv6) 2606:4700:4700::1001

They have detailed instructions at [Link] if you’re interested.

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Opening ports

Your router acts as a firewall between the dangerous public internet

and your devices in your home. Sometimes you may need to carefully
poke holes in this firewall for one reason or another (you want to access
your security system from afar, or your video game needs to commu-
nicate with peers for multiplayer, or something else). This is done in
your router configuration, near the Wi-Fi password setup. Search for
Firewall settings and/or Port Forwarding. Once you find it, you’ll see a
table similar to this:

In this form you choose which port number to forward and which inter-
nal device it should get forwarded to. So if you had a Raspberry Pi at
[Link] you wanted to remote into on Port 22, you’d enter 22 for
both the internal and external port, and the IP address for internal IP
address. Make sure that Raspberry Pi is on lock-down though because
it will be subject to Script Kiddies trying to hack into it almost immedi-
ately. Consider using a non-standard port number as the external port
to reduce this.

Virtual machines

Virtual Machines (VMs) are programs that emulate a fresh, empty com-
puter. They allow you to run an entire other operating system as a pro-
gram on your computer. At home, this can be really useful if you have
a particularly curious family member who really wants to mess around
with computers, but you don’t want them to break yours. You can let
them mess around all they want in the virtual computer on your com-
puter!

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Professionally, they’re great for seeing how your products or services

work on other kinds of computers. If you’re making a website on a Mac
2
and want to make sure it works in Windows, a VM can help .
They can also be useful for trying out a program or operating system
that you don’t feel comfortable with or trust for some reason. If it does
have a problem, you can just reset the VM to its initial state. This is
a phenomenal way to try out things like Linux that you’re just curious
about getting a feel for. It’s also how security researchers research and
monitor known computer viruses.
A few Virtual Machine managers exist, but let’s just get started with one
called VirtualBox3 .

Table4: Installing the VirtualBox VM manager

OS Installation method

Windows choco install virtualbox

Linux apt install virtualbox-qt
macOS brew install --cask virtualbox

When you run virtualbox it will pop up a window from which you can
either import pre-made virtual machine “appliances” or make new ones.
Here are the steps to try out Ubuntu Linux in a VM:
• Download the latest Ubuntu image from here4 .
• Open virtualbox and choose Machine → New. Name it Ubuntu and
set type to Linux, version: Ubuntu_64.
• Click through the defaults for Memory size, hard disk, etc. (or
adjust as you please)
• Click Start to boot the empty machine.
2
You can grab a functional Windows 11 VM from Microsoft at [Link]
[Link]/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines. It took me a while to fig-
ure it out, but they’re zip files that when unzipped can be loaded in VirtualBox.
3
[Link]
4
[Link]

. Virtual machines 33
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• It will prompt you for a start-up disk. Click the browse button and
choose the downloaded Ubuntu iso image.
• Click Start and the Ubuntu installation process will begin!
• If you haven’t been exposed to Linux before, bask in the glory of
how nice it is.

Note: Related to VMs, you’ll also hear about containers which set
up isolated “jails” for programs to run in while sharing the same host
operating system. Containers require less hard-disk space, are faster
to spin up and down, and require fewer system resources, so they’re
really popular in modern cloud-based data centers and infrastructure.
The Docker container manager is the most popular. Some software de-
velopers/vendors are distributing their programs these days in docker
containers to simplify the setup process for users.

Nostalgia alert

It’s sometimes fun to re-live your younger years by setting up virtual

machines with old versions of software like DOS and Windows 3.1 (or
whatever was around when you were a kid). You can get the images
of the installation discs at places like WinWorld5 and then mount those
images one by one as floppy disks in VirtualBox and have a good old
time6 . Designasaurus, anyone?
Along these lines, the DOSBox7 project is a better way to actually play
old games on your current computer. It will integrate nicely with mod-
ern video and audio hardware, which is harder to do with pure virtual
machines. It’s in your package managers (dosbox).
5
[Link]
6
If you want to see exactly how to install old OSs in VirtualBox, check YouTube for
tutorials, and you’ll find dozens of them doing just this.
7
[Link]

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Figure3: MS Works running on DOS 6.22 on a Virtualbox VM.

Ad-blockers

Ads are like a sad knock-off of Santa Claus. They track us and watch over
our shoulders as we shop. They try to get us to buy boots for months
after we buy some boots. We can’t afford to give up precious brain
cycles. If they ever sneak onto Netflix, it’s game over. You can do a
few things to reduce your shopper footprint in the nefarious systems of
commercial retail if you so desire. Here are some options:
• Use the Firefox web browser instead of Chrome or Edge, and install
the EFF’s Privacy Badger8 plugin and/or the uBlock ad blocker9 .
8
[Link]
9
[Link]

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Google at its core makes most of its money off of advertising. Fire-
fox works on your phone as well as on your laptop. Try using your
package manager to install firefox if you don’t have it yet.
• Enable the “DO NOT TRACK” setting in your web browser.
• If you’re into Raspberry Pis (small $30 computers) get another one
and install Pi-Hole10 on it. This is slightly advanced (you have to
adjust your Wi-Fi router settings as part of the setup) but is really
effective in the home. It “hijacks” the internet phonebook system
(DNS) that maps human-readable internet names (such as https:/
/[Link]) to the actual IP addresses that underlie networking
(like [Link]) and compares them to a crowd-sourced blacklist
of advertisers and baddies. If the name is on the blacklist, the re-
quest just gets sent to the abyss. Ads on all your devices on your
home network simply disappear. It’s pretty nice. My Roku tries
to talk to a blacklisted site like 5,000 times per day but can’t get
through. Muahahaha.
• Turn off your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you’re in malls. They’re
apparently watching metadata from your phone’s modem as you
walk around even if you don’t connect to the hotspot. Look up
“people counters” if you don’t believe me.
• Just don’t ever shop or carry a cell phone.
• Move to Antarctica.

Using a VPN Service

Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers are useful for peace of mind,
especially while traveling or in places where you don’t trust the Wi-Fi
operators (hotels, coffee shops, on travel with sensitive business infor-
mation, hacker-friends’ houses, etc.). When you get on a network, any-
one else on the same access point and especially the people operating
it can “sniff” the network to see what websites you’re going to and, if
there’s no green lock in your browser window, what information you are
10
[Link]

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sending and receiving (though more and more websites have the green
lock these days as a best practice).
You can pay a VPN provider that will help with this. You can click a but-
ton on your computer and it will create a strongly-encrypted connection
between you and the VPN server. Then you will tell the VPN server
which sites you want to interact with and it will go out and do your
bidding, sending the results back to you through the super-encrypted
channel. Anyone between you and the VPN is now in the dark as to
what you’re doing online. They can’t see what servers you interact with
nor what data is being sent to and fro. Instead of trusting dozens of
operators and their staff along the way, you only have to trust the VPN
provider. Huzzah!

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Your laptop Local government

Other guests Nefarious routers

Hotel Wi-Fi Website

Local Wi-Fi contractor

Figure4: Browsing the web from a hotel. Everyone along the way can
see any non-TLS (i.e. green lock in browser window) traffic and all meta-
data, including what sites you’re browsing and for how long. This is bad
if you don’t want people along the way to know what you’re doing.

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Your laptop Local government

Other guests Nefarious routers

Hotel Wi-Fi VPN operator

Local Wi-Fi contractor Oblivious routers

Website

Figure5: Browsing the web through a VPN hides what you’re up to from
almost everyone. After the VPN service, metadata is available but it’s
anonymized to everyone except the VPN operator themselves. So you
only have to trust the VPN operator in this scenario.

The downside here is that your connection will be at least a little slower
since it has to route everything through the VPN service, wherever it
may be.
Companies offering VPN services include ExpressVPN, Private Internet

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Access VPN, IPVanish, NordVPN, Cyber Ghost, and many others. Prices
are borderline $40–$50/year.
Instead of connecting each of your individual devices to the VPN, you
can alternatively choose to configure your Wi-Fi router as a VPN client
(only certain router models have this feature). I’m not sure this makes
too much sense at home unless you really don’t trust your ISP. Some
people actually take a travel router with them on trips that automati-
cally connects to their VPN, and they only connect through it. That is
particularly neat.
Depending on your interests, you can also run your own VPN service
right from your home as discussed in Set up your own VPN Server.

The Onion Router and the dark web

Speaking of network security, we have to mention the ultimate system

in this regard: The Onion Router (Tor)11 and the so-called dark web.
The underlying technology was started by the US Naval Research Lab-
oratory and later well funded by DARPA. Its job is to get you as close
as possible to truly anonymous internet communication where the user
doesn’t have to trust anyone along the communication pathway. It pre-
vents people from monitoring what you browse and it prevents the sites
you visit from knowing where you are.
Web server admins can put their web page up as an onion service and
it’s supposed to be hard to figure out who’s operating it and hard to shut
down.
It’s used by secret agents, hacktivists, normal people who want to try
it out, people who want to look something sketchy up without leaving a
trace, and many other legitimate people.
It’s also used by criminals. There is a thriving black market for drug
sales coordinated through Tor and other illicit stuff.
It’s called the onion router because it has many layers. The Tor network
consists of a bunch of nodes run by volunteers. These nodes pass en-
crypted onion traffic from node to node. When a user sends a request to
11
[Link]

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browse to website x, their system chooses a random pathway based on

a network directory server, puts a bunch of layers of encryption over the
request, and tosses it into the network. The first Tor server decrypts the
first layer and finds the address of another Tor server so it passes the
binary blob along. The second server pulls off the second layer, and so
on. Eventually, when no layers remain, the website to visit is revealed.
Whichever random server in the Tor network gets this goes out, grabs
the requested information from the website, and sends the request back
through the Tor network to the original user in an equally randomized
way.
Tor is not impossible to see through. Governments monitoring networks
can know when you’re on Tor and if they really want, they can have
their hackers use one of the thousands of unpublished major computer
bugs (called zero-days) to just get on your computer and watch what
you’re doing directly. Or they can use end-to-end correlation to guess
what you’re doing. If you send a request that causes website x to send
you some exact number of bytes, those bytes will eventually go to your
computer. By monitoring the entire internet, governments can say, “OK
well these 3987345 bytes came out of that server and, ope! 3987345
encrypted bytes just went into this guy’s computer way over here right
after that! I think I know what they’re doing!”
Tor can be useful. But don’t think you can get away with something
horrible.
Using Tor is actually really easy. The Tor Project folks have set it up so
you just download their web browser and it auto-connects to Tor and
you’re off. You can find phone apps that trivially connect to it as well.
From your package manager:

Table5: Installing Tor Browser

OS Installation method

Windows choco install tor-browser

Linux apt install torbrowser-launcher
macOS brew install tor
Android Download Orbot: Proxy with Tor from Play
store or F-Droid

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Launch Tor Browser (it’s in your Start Menu in Windows) and you’re
good to go. Don’t go logging into your Facebook now though, that would
deanonymize you rather quickly. On second thought Facebook did make
a Tor Service address ([Link] and that might
be a fun first Tor Service to try to access. This would be useful to ac-
cess your Facebook when you’re not supposed to. Again, if Facebook is
banned where you are, connecting to Tor might raise some red flags too
so just be careful.

Note: Due to the nature of Tor, browsing the web through it is inher-
ently slower.

Planning a night of star-gazing

To wrap up this chapter, let’s leave the network and take a step out into
the yard or a nearby park. Have you ever wondered which star, planet,
constellation, or moon you’re looking at in the night sky? Ever need to
know exactly when an eclipse is going to peak at a particular location?
If so, you’re in luck because your computer and phone can easily have
12
all this information on it. Stellarium is an open-source planetarium
for your computer, available on all platforms, and Androids and iPhones
have apps with some related features.

Table6: Installing Stellarium and other star-

map software

OS Installation method

Windows choco install stellarium

Linux apt install stellarium
macOS brew cask install stellarium
Android Download Sky Map from Play store or F-Droid
iPhone Download SkyView Lite, or similar

12
[Link]

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Stellarium allows you to choose your location and date/time (defaults to

your here and now) and shows you the sky. You can search for particular
planets or constellations, figure out which side of the house to set up for
an upcoming eclipse, even zoom way in on deep-space objects like the
Horsehead Nebula. You can step through in real-time or in fast-forward
to see how the stars and planets will shift over the night or across the
seasons. If you have a motorized telescope, Stellarium can hook into
it and steer it to (and track) any visible object. It’s a whole lot of fun
and you or your family members will have a wonderful time searching
around on it. It’s basically a sky simulator.

Figure6: Stellarium showing the night of a lunar eclipse.

After you have Stellarium installed, open it and you’ll see its best esti-
mate of your current sky in your current location. If you push the mouse
to the left edge, some widgets will appear. The first one lets you adjust
your location, and the second lets you adjust the time. Change these to
see how the sky changes. If it’s not night, try spinning the clock until it is
night. When you push the mouse to the bottom of the screen, you’ll see
various toggles to turn on and off constellation labels and other points
of interest. Now just click and drag in the screen to turn your view, and
scroll with the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. If you click an object

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like the Moon, you’ll see all sorts of interesting information about it.
This is a wonderful program for people of all ages.

That’s all we’ll cover for the home. I hope you are already enjoying some
of your newfound superpowers!

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 Around the Office
4
Fluorescent lights. Cubicles. Bosses. TPS forms. Computers. Many
of us dread these things even though we go into an office full of them
every day and get paid to do so. I swore to myself in high-school that
I’d never end up in one of those places! But when I actually got a job
that involved cubicles, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. One thing
I didn’t realize was just how mentally big a computer can make a small
cubicle. The computer is an infinite window. Inside a computer, we can
make wonderful things happen. We can coordinate a project with people
itty bitty
around the world. We have phenomenal cosmic power in an living
1
space .
But we have to make the computer our partner in crime to get into this
mindset. The computer, as an extension of our brains, should be seam-
less and natural. This chapter shows how to make that computer at
work a more valuable and cooperative life-comrade.
1
That’s an Aladdin reference…

45
, Release 2.0

Note on office suites

A lot of people spend a lot of their time in e-mail programs, presenta-

tion software, word processors, and spreadsheets. Most offices have at
least a few people who are power-users of these programs and are re-
lied upon for giving tips. The superpowers from the previous chapter
should help a lot in these programs. Beyond that, skills in these tools are
well-known or discoverable enough that we just aren’t going to focus on
them much. In many cases, the things you’re learning here provide new
options beyond your typical office suite.

Concentrating in offices

Offices are loud. Open floor plans are making them even louder. Many
victims of such an environment have already discovered how impor-
tant noise-canceling headphones are (they’re worth it and can even
drown out baby cries on airplanes). I still struggle sometimes because
it’s often difficult for me to concentrate when music is playing. I dis-
covered a simple solution in the form of a wonderful web page called
MyNoise.net2 . They feature free, high-quality noise generators with dif-
ferent ambiances (like Café Restaurant, Rain, Temple Bells, etc.). I can
concentrate fully again; they’re really a lifesaver. Best of all, they re-
cently released an app that can do offline playback which is a godsend
on airplanes.
You can also make custom white noise in Audacity, discussed below. If
you’re on Linux, you also have a nice noise-generator available on the
command line. You can pipe the random number generator into your
speakers at various frequencies (e.g. 10 kHz) like this:

cat /dev/urandom | aplay -r 10000

2
[Link]

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Note Taking

Organizing thoughts and notes is a time-honored challenge. People

come up with all sorts of ways to take notes, ranging from using real
or digital sticky notes for everything, to putting everything in one or
many word processor or text files, to using fancy note taking applica-
tions. Several extremely capable note taking applications have emerged
in the past few years that really do make a difference: Obsidian3 and
Logseq4 . To a degree, these are based on concepts that first showed up
in a commercial tool called Roam Research5 .

Table1: Installing logseq for note taking

OS Installation method

Windows choco install logseq

Linux sudo snap install logseq
macOS brew install --cask logseq

Logseq starts with a daily journal of bullet points. You can write how
your day is going. You can put [[ and ]] characters around certain key
phrases (for recurring meetings, big projects, specific people, specific
things) when you mention them, and logseq will set up bidirectional
links to them. So for instance if you mention [[Tom]] a bunch of times,
you can Shift-Click on it as a link and a side window will open up
and show all the times you ever mentioned Tom. It’s exhilarating and
extremely useful. It’s the only note taking system I’ve used daily for
over a year.
3
[Link]
4
[Link]
5
[Link]

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Screenshots

Oftentimes you’ll need to make a step-by-step tutorial for someone to

follow on a computer system you’re demonstrating at work. For this
and other uses, screenshots, or capturing what’s on your screen to a
file or the clipboard can be useful. You can paste what’s captured into
a slide deck, document, or image editor. Generally, pressing the Print
Screen button will capture the entire screen to a file. On Windows,
check out The Snipping Tool (search for it by typing after clicking
the Start button), which is nice because it will let you lasso a rectan-
gle over the region you’d like to snapshot. On macOS, you just press
Command-Shift-4 to get a custom rectangle to snap (it will save to the
Desktop unless you also hold Ctrl, which will send it to the clipboard).
On Linux, the lasso-clipboard is usually Shift-Print Screen.

Text editors and extensions

Many digital superpowers we’ll soon see involve manipulating files con-
taining only text. There’s minimalism and elegance in pure text files that
puts them at the forefront of power. Text files are the universal medium
upon which many digital power-tools operate. Text files are what web
pages and new programs are written in (as you’ll see in Programming).
Some poets and writers prefer writing in pure text to minimize distrac-
tions.
“Surprisingly”6 , many computers don’t come with overly useful pro-
grams for viewing and manipulating text files. We’re all used to word
processors but those add special whitespace characters and formatting
controls in proprietary (or at least widely varied) formats that we want
to avoid when dealing with text and data. Many computers come with
default text editors (like Notepad) that are bad at dealing with text files
properly.
Fortunately, this is easy to reconcile. In Windows, an excellent option
6
Not too surprisingly; many software companies have a profit motive to push you
into their more expensive software tools.

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called Notepad++7 can hop into your digital toolbox with a flourish via
your package manager (see Programs and package managers) using:

choco install notepadplusplus

On a Mac, sublime8 is one of many good choices:

brew install --cask sublime-text

On Linux, the often-included editors (like gedit) are likely sufficient for
what we’ll be doing here.

Tip: For those of you who work in text a lot, whether it be for writing
books, programming, making web pages, etc., you may be interested
in the next-level text editors like vim. It’s available on all platforms
and has a significant learning curve. Most people’s first experience is
rebooting their computer because they can’t quit it (hint: use :q). But it
is extraordinarily useful if you dedicate yourself to it. It took me years,
but I got to a point where I couldn’t live without it. It’s basically an
advanced magic wand. The best resource to get started is a book called
Practical Vim by Drew Neil9 .

We should mention file extensions too. The extension is just the filename
suffix; the stuff after the dot, like txt in [Link]. By convention, it
determines the type of a file, and therefore which program your com-
puter will pass it to when you click on it. Windows and macOS hide these
extensions by default, but you can turn it them back on if you want:
7
[Link]
8
[Link]
9
[Link]

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Table2: Showing file extensions by default

OS Operations

Windows Start → Type show or hide file extensions

→ uncheck Hide extensions for known file
type
Linux Already shown ☺
macOS Finder → Preferences → Advanced → Show all
file extensions

In text editors, when you are creating a new file and you press Save As,
the save dialog will let you specify both a file name and a file type. If the
file type section is set to something like Text files (*.txt) and you
type [Link] there is a reasonable chance it will actually get written
as [Link]. So if you want to specify a different extension (e.g.
for making a .py file when making a Python program), then first choose
All files (*.*) from the file type dialog and then type your desired
extension in the file name area.

Column editing

This superpower really blew my mind when I first experienced it. Did
you know you can edit an entire column of a text file at the same time?
Well, you can, and it’s called Column Edit or Block Editing. This can
really be a time-saver in certain scenarios. For example, the screenshot
below was made by entering Column Select mode and then just typing
testing 123 OK HERE GO a single time:

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Figure1: An example of Column editing in Notepad++. Note that my

cursor is 21 lines tall!

I could just as easily go in there and delete all the OKs in another easy
swoop. This is remarkably useful for rapidly manipulating columnar
data.
Column editing isn’t available in every text editor, but here are a few
that can do it:

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Table3: How to get to Column Edit mode in var-

ious editors

Editor How to activate Column Edit

Notepad++ [Click starting point], then hold Alt-Shift

and [Click and drag]
Word Alt + [Click/drag] to select. Now you can
delete or change formatting but not insert text.
Eclipse Alt-Shift-A to toggle on and off
Vim From starting point, press Ctrl-v. Now use nav-
igation to select column. Now edit (i.e. with I)
and escape.

Note: In macOS Alt is often replaced by Command.

Slicing and dicing PDFs

Portable Document Format (PDF) files were developed in the 1990s to

ensure that documents would look as intended no matter what hardware
or software the viewing user was running. Before them, files even from
different versions of the same program could experience unintended
format changes. The format is defined by an open standard, and as a
result, plenty of programs can create and view PDFs, including many
well-known office tools.
The task of modifying PDFs is often reserved for Adobe Acrobat Pro. If
you only need to do simple modifications, however, you may enjoy ex-
ploring an endlessly useful utility called the PDF toolkit, or pdftk for
short. This tool will allow you to mix and match PDFs, combine pages
from different documents, remove pages, encrypt/decrypt, add water-
marks, fill out forms, and so on.

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Table4: Installing pdftk “server” (command line

PDF tool)

OS Installation method

Windows choco install pdftk

Linux apt install pdftk
macOS Go to official download page10 and get Mac ver-
sion

To try it out, let’s add a cover page to a PDF. If you have a cover page
called [Link] and another called [Link] and you’d like to put
the cover page on the document, pdftk can do it with its cat command
(short for concatenate, which means slap together in a certain order):

pdftk A=[Link] B=[Link] cat B A output [Link]

In that command we called [Link] a shorter name, A, and we

called the cover B. Then we invoked the cat command and asked it to
first put all of B and then all of A into a new PDF called [Link]. You
can also make the cover go in as the second page by specifying more
complex concatenation sequence, like this:

pdftk A=[Link] B=[Link] cat A1 B A2-end output [Link]

Want to require viewers to type a password of j4j2jxk4 before they can

read a PDF? That’s just:

pdftk [Link] output [Link] user_pw j4j2jxk4

Many more commands and operations are available, and you can read
all about them in the pdftk manual11 .

Note: You’ll see a whole world of PDF creation from scratch in Pub-
lishing

10
[Link]
11
[Link]

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While we’re looking at PDFs, you may sometimes happen up on a PDF

where you can’t highlight or search through the text. Many tools can
remedy the situation by scanning over the file, recognizing characters,
and embedding the text into the file. My favorite utility for doing this
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is OCRmyPDF12 , which is a simple
and powerful interface riding on top of some cutting edge OCR libraries.

Table5: Installing ocrmypdf (command line PDF

OCR tool)

OS Installation method

Windows A see instructions online13

Linux apt install ocrmypdf
macOS brew install ocrmypdf

To use, just run:

ocrmypdf [Link] [Link]

The [Link] file generated will have a OCR layer and be in the PDF/A
format. I use this all the time.

Ultimate find and replace (regular expres-

sions)

Brace yourself, you’re about to learn about regular expressions (REs),

perhaps the most powerful but poorly-named superpower yet. REs are
expressive ways to describe a pattern that you want to find and/or
change. They are famous both for looking very opaque and for sav-
ing thousands upon thousands of hours of painfully tedious work while
causing rapid promotions. There’s even a webcomic14 about REs being
a superpower.
12
[Link]
13
[Link]
installing-on-windows
14
[Link]

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Imagine you have a thousand phone numbers formatted like so:

(509) 123-4567

But your boss is trying to be more international and has asked you to
convert them all to the format:

+15091234567

You could go through one by one and do them, but that’d be tedious, inef-
ficient, and frustrating. Worse, what if you had ten thousand to modify?
You can’t use regular-old find and replace for this because each phone
number is slightly different. This is exactly the kind of thing regular
expression are made to handle!
REs have special symbols to match different classes of characters. For
instance, \d represents any single number. So the following regular
expression matches all phone numbers in the format above:

\(\d\d\d\) \d\d\d-\d\d\d\d

We used \( and \) on the parentheses because parentheses without

backslashes are used to group things. We can use the + shortcut which
means “match one or more” to write the same RE as:

\(\d+) \d+-\d+,

which will still match the phone numbers, and would also match pat-
terns that have 20-digit long area codes (if that were a thing for some
reason). See? They look scary but aren’t that bad!
Here are some RE identifiers and their interpretations:

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Table6: A small subsection of RE identifiers

Character Interpretation

\d Any digit (0-9)

\s Any whitespace (space, tab, etc.)
\S Any non-whitespace (letters, numbers, punctua-
tion)
+ One or more of previous pattern
* Zero or more of previous pattern
\w Any alphanumeric character, or underscore
. Any single character of any kind
(...) Define a new group matching whatever pattern
is inside

If you want to match an actual plus sign or an actual parenthesis, you

have to precede it with a backslash, like \+. This gets tricky because you
can have expressions with both + and \+ which mean totally different
things (one or more vs. actual +).
Now for the superpower of RE find/replace. Let’s define 3 groups, one
for the area code, one for the prefix, and another for the number by
using parentheses:

\((\d+)\) (\d+)-(\d+)

All we did was put non-backslashed parentheses around each group of

numbers. In doing this we defined three groups: Group 1, Group 2, and
Group 3. Group 1 is the area code, Group 2 is the prefix, and Group 3
is the last four numbers.
When we’re telling a RE find/replace system what to replace our
matches with, we can refer to those groups by number using \1 for
Group 1, \2 for Group 2, and so on. This allows us to mix and match the
groups and even change their order.
For our example, we want to replace each match with +1, followed by
the area code (\1), then immediately the prefix (\2) and then the rest
(\3) so our replace pattern looks like this:

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+1\1\2\3

Note that we used non-backslashed + because in the replace pattern,

we don’t have to worry about the special meaning; that only matters in
the match pattern.
There are lots of programs that can perform RE find/replacements for
us. One simple option is to use Perl, which is available in your package
managers15 . Yes, it’s an entire programming language, but it’s pretty
small, and we’re only going to use one tiny feature of it. To install, use
one of these:

Table7: Installing Perl

OS Installation method

Windows choco install strawberryperl

Linux apt install perl
macOS brew install perl

The syntax we need to have perl swap one pattern for another is weird
looking, but straightforward. It starts with the program name (perl)
then some options -pe which tell it to run an in-line program and print
the output, then the s/ command (for substitute), then the MATCH PAT-
TERN, then a / separator, then the REPLACEMENT PATTERN, then a / to
close out the replacement pattern, then a g for global (meaning change
all occurrences on a line, not just the first), and then finally the file-
name to operate upon. So it’s going to substitute the match with the
replacement on each line and print the results. Explicitly:

perl -pe 's/MATCH PATTERN/REPLACEMENT PATTERN/g' filename

Let’s try it out. Make a file called [Link] in a folder somewhere:

(509) 123-4567
(123) 555-4567
(continues on next page)
15
Arguably, sed is the simplest program to do line-by-line RE find/replace. However,
it uses a more basic (and in my opinion uglier) RE format instead of the Perl-style REs.

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(continued from previous page)

(000) 509-1234
(555) 551-0000

Now run this command in your command line (filling in MATCH PATTERN
and REPLACEMENT PATTERN from above):

perl -pe 's/\((\d+)\) (\d+)-(\d+)/+1\1\2\3/g' [Link]

This should produce the following output:

+15091234567
+11235554567
+10005091234
+15555510000

Wow! To further illustrate, let’s leave the match pattern the same and
make a more complex replacement pattern, changing the order of the
groups and everything:

perl -pe 's/\((\d+)\) (\d+)-(\d+)/Prefix: \2 Num: \3 Area: \1/g'␣

,→[Link]

This gives:

Prefix: 123 Num: 4567 Area: 509

Prefix: 555 Num: 4567 Area: 123
Prefix: 509 Num: 1234 Area: 000
Prefix: 551 Num: 0000 Area: 555

Tip: If you want to create a new file with that output, redirect it to a
file by adding the following to the end of the command:

> [Link]

This is a fairly universal way to save command line output as a file rather
than printing it on the screen.
Or even better, if you want to find and replace inside the file itself, use
the in-place option of perl with perl -i -pe followed by the rest of the

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replacement command.

Let’s do one more example with something other than just numbers.
Imagine your input looks as follows:

Dr. Michelle Obama

Dr. Newt Gingrich
Dr. Peter Pan
Dr. Jane Eyre
Dr. Winston Churchill
Dr. Herodotus Johnson

Further imagine that we want to get rid of the Dr., add Mc to their last
name, and add M.D., Ph.D. at the end. The grouped match pattern
would be:

(Dr\.) (\w+) (\w+)

The replacement would be:

\2 Mc\3, M.D. Ph.D.

Notice that we never referred to Group 1 in the replacement, so the Dr.

will be dropped entirely. See if you can figure out the command required
to get this output:

Michelle McObama, M.D. Ph.D.

Newt McGingrich, M.D. Ph.D.
Peter McPan, M.D. Ph.D.
Jane McEyre, M.D. Ph.D.
Winston McChurchill, M.D. Ph.D.
Herodotus McJohnson, M.D. Ph.D.

Now that’s a superpower!

If you prefer to not use the command line for this, things like Notepad++
can do these kinds of operations with graphics. Even MS Word has some
RE capabilities these days. Check out RegExOne16 for a great resource
to interactively learn more RE syntax.
16
[Link]

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Tip: Useful related searches to explore:

• regex find replace **program name**
• regular expression to match e-mail address

Encrypted communications

We talked about how to keep the bits on your hard drive safe in File
Encryption and how to browse the web with encryption in The Onion
Router and the dark web, so now let’s talk about how to securely commu-
nicate directly with our friends and business associates over networks.

Encrypted text messaging, photos, and voice

For text messaging and encrypted voice calling over the internet, there’s
really no good reason to not use Open Whisper System’s Signal17 app
on your phone and computer. This is an open-source, user-friendly app
(with a Desktop version) that does it all without any complications. The
encrypted voice sound quality is far superior to normal, and the messag-
ing is very straightforward. If that doesn’t convince you, it was made
by a dreadlocked anarchist hacker sailor named Moxie Marlinspike and
is funded through privacy-oriented donations to its foundation. There is
no profit motive to this organization to snoop on you or build a profile of
you. Also, Edward Snowden uses it. Go to [Link]
to get it on any phone or computer. I like having it on my computer for
longer text conversations because I can type faster there.
17
[Link]

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How to send, receive, and verify info securely over the

public internet

We’ve all needed to send some confidential document to our associate in

Ecuador, but we often don’t trust anyone between here and there. How
do we do it? Basic e-mail is a no-go because e-mails bounce around from
server to server between users and can easily be intercepted. If we had
arranged a shared password in advance, we could have used it to hide
the document, at least once, but we didn’t (though Signal could help
with this).
Your computer has the ability to use an incredible technology called
public-key cryptography to solve this problem. It’s useful in every-
day business between contractors, suppliers, employees, friends, and
lovers.
Each individual in an asymmetric cryptography system needs two
mathematically-related digital keys (actually they’re just large numbers)
that can be used to encrypt, decrypt, and sign messages. One will be
held secret, and is called the private key. The other is called the public
key, and is widely distributed in the open to everyone we want to be
able to send secure messages to use or verify that we sent messages
they receive from us. Together, they’re called a key pair.
The details behind this math have a fairly straightforward analogy. If you
think of a lock on a box, the public key turns the lock one way, and the
private key turns it the other way. So if my colleague puts a document
in the box and locks it with my public key, the only possible way anyone
can get the document back out is to have my private key, and the only
one who has it is me.
As it turns out, we all have immediate and full access to this wonderful
and powerful technology. An open-source implementation has emerged
18
as the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG). Its most commonly-cited inade-
quacy is “Poor understanding by the public”. The situation is such that
people in regulated industries are buying super-expensive secure por-
tals to transfer e-mails and files between business partners. All for want
18
[Link]

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of a good user interface. No longer!19

Let’s drop down into the command line and see how easy it really is to
send someone a truly secret message. There are GUI tools for this too,
but the command line is fun, powerful, and easy.
First, install GnuPG:

Table8: Installing the gnupg encryption tool

OS Installation method

Windows choco install gpg4win (includes GUI) or just

choco install gnupg-modern
Linux apt install gnupg
macOS brew install gnupg

Now we can do some cryptography.

Generating your own private/public key pair

Run the following command to generate a cryptographic key pair:

gpg --gen-key

You will encounter a series of prompts that you should fill in with your
name and e-mail address. When it prompts you with Change (N)ame,
(E)mail, or (O)kay/(Q)uit?, choose O if all looks good and press
Enter. Now it will ask for a password that you’ll need to type every
time you access your Private key. If all goes well, there will be a short
delay while it generates good random numbers, and you should see text
along these lines:

gpg: key 999B22A1FD07D5CD marked as ultimately trusted

gpg: revocation certificate stored as '/home/nick/[Link]'
public and secret key created and signed.
(continues on next page)
19
Granted, some commercial secure portals offer features that plain GnuPG may not
have, such as a master key for an IT administrator to unlock secret messages if an em-
ployee is fired or forgets their password, which is sometimes a business requirement.

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(continued from previous page)

pub rsa3072 2018-12-26 [SC] [expires: 2020-12-25]

7C32B1F5C7124D4D5607EC04999B22A1FD07D5CD
uid Nicholas William Touran <encryption-
,→demo@[Link]>

sub rsa3072 2018-12-26 [E] [expires: 2020-12-25]

You’re doing some pretty fancy computer work now!

Encrypting a file

Make or choose a file to try encrypting. I’ll make a little text file called
[Link]:

all my secrets are in this file.

Secret 1
Secret 2

To encrypt it, run the encryption command with the armor option (to put
it in a nice format) and the recipient option (-r), filling in your e-mail
address followed by the file name we wish to encrypt:

gpg --encrypt --armor -r encryption-demo@[Link]␣

,→[Link]

Note: As is typical on the command line, you can type gpg --help to
see a list of available commands and short descriptions.

In the same folder, you’ll now see a file called [Link] which
will look something like this:

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Figure2: A very strongly encrypted message that really beats the heck
out of Pig Latin.

If you encrypted that with one of your friend’s or co-worker’s public

keys, you would not be able to decrypt it; only they could (that’s why
public-key encryption is also called asymmetric). But in this case, you
sent it to yourself so you should be able to decrypt it with your private
key.

Decrypting a file encrypted against your public key

You can decrypt any file encrypted against your public key with your
private key. If in the previous step you entered your own e-mail as the
recipient then you can try this out:
gpg --decrypt [Link]

It will prompt you for the password you made while generating your key
pair. If you enter it correctly, you will see something like:
gpg: encrypted with 3072-bit RSA key, ID 477C7591734F478E,␣
,→created 2018-12-26

"Nicholas William Touran <encryption-

,→demo@[Link]>"

all my secrets are in this file.

(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

Secret 1
Secret 2

It’s working! If you want to make a decrypted file rather than just print-
ing to the screen (useful for any non-text file like a zip or pdf), just add
the -o output_name option right after the --decrypt flag.

Exchanging public keys with friends

For this to be useful we have to make sure our friends know our public
keys so they can encrypt stuff to us, and vice-versa. To write your public
key to a file, run (with your e-mail, not mine):

gpg --export --armor -o [Link] encryption-

,→demo@[Link]

Now e-mail the [Link] to your friends. When you re-

ceive a key from a friend called [Link] you can
import it into your system by running:

gpg --import [Link]

Easy! Once you have your public key, spread it widely. You can even put
it on your Facebook profile in the Contact Information section.

Exercise
Convince a friend also generate a key pair and have them send you their
public key (e-mail is reasonable to start). Import their key and encrypt
a message to them. See if they can receive it. Have them send you one
back.

Warning: You have to make sure your friend’s public key is the one
you got. Check the fingerprint that’s printed out upon import and
verify it over another channel (like Signal!) or in person. Once you
trust that the public key you got is indeed from your friend, the rest

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of the system should be rock solid. Don’t forget to keep your private
key private too.

Signing information with our keys

This technology also enables the incredible operation of electronically

signing documents such that anyone with your public key can verify that
you signed it and that it hasn’t been modified since. This is much more
powerful than just slapping a scan of your physical signature on the
bottom of a document; that’s easy to forge by everyone who works at
a restaurant where you signed the receipt before, and offers almost no
protection against people modifying the document after you signed it.
The one-way key analogy from above works here too, as long as you can
imagine that the locked box has two locked positions and one unlocked
position between them (i.e. it’s locked in the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock po-
sitions, but unlocked in the 12 o’clock position). To sign a document, I’d
put it in the box and then lock it to the 3 o’clock position with my private
key (which can only turn the lock clockwise). Anyone and everyone with
my public key can open it, thus proving that it was indeed I who put the
document in the box.
Let’s try signing a document. Make a new document and call it
[Link]:

I hereby declare that Little Johnny is sick

with fever and needs the day off. The fact
that there's a spelling test today is merely a
coincidence.

Sign it with the following command:

gpg --detach-sign --armor [Link]

You will have to type your password to unlock your private key. If
you have more than one private key, you can choose one with the
-u encryption-demo@[Link] command (with your
e-mail address, of course). Now you’ll find a file called declaration.
[Link] alongside the original file. This is the signature! Send it along

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with the file to your contacts or associates, or post it online. Given the
file, the signature, and your public key, anyone (including yourself) can
verify the signature on the receiving end. Here’s how:

gpg --verify [Link]

You should see a message indicating success that looks like:

gpg: assuming signed data in '[Link]'

gpg: Signature made Fri 11 Jan 2019 06:42:32 PM EST
gpg: using RSA key␣
,→7C32B1F5C7124D4D5607EC04999B22A1FD07D5CD

gpg: issuer "encryption-demo@digitalsuperpowers.

,→com"

gpg: Good signature from "Nicholas William Touran <encryption-

,→demo@[Link]>" [ultimate]

Exercise
Try modifying the [Link] after signing it and see what the veri-
fication step does.

Encrypting with GUIs

Admittedly, not everything is best in the command line. There are ways
to integrate this into e-mail. For instance, the e-mail client, Thunder-
bird20 , works great with any kind of e-mail account and has built-in sup-
port of GPG encryption. Since most people are using web-based mail,
it’s also worth highlighting FlowCrypt21 , which is a Chrome extension
that puts these features on top of a Gmail account. Some people elec-
tronically sign all their outgoing e-mail for good measure automatically
with these tools.
For drag-and-drop file encryption/decryption that you can then e-mail
around without any special extension, Windows users can look at the
20
[Link]
21
[Link]

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GUIs that come with Gpg4win, and other OS users will find similar tools
for their system with brief web searches.

Note: Estonia actually went all-in on this kind of thing and put cryp-
tographic key pairs on their national IDs. They had a hiccup in that the
system used to generate the keys was weak and then it was hard to re-
place them, but I think they’re absolutely on the right track. This kind of
thing can make our lives more efficient and secure in many ways. Our
social security numbers are significantly weaker than those Estonian
keys. If people learn about these capabilities and realize that they can
use them right away on their computers, I hope we can improve process
efficiencies and security. Data is important and it’s important for us to
become more comfortable with encryption.

Making flowcharts

Flowcharts come in handy for communicating process as well as mind-

mapping complex situations. Three open-source tools capable of making
good flowcharts are Graphviz22 , MermaidJS23 , and dia24 . Graphviz and
Mermaid are unique in that the nodes and connections are expressed
in text, and the system generates the actual flowchart. This is favor-
able when you aren’t interested in the precise layout of the flowchart
(it’s determined algorithmically). It can be useful for making charts by
hand, but especially shines for data manipulators who need to generate
flowcharts dynamically, based on some data set or user interaction.
Here is what a graphviz flowchart looks like:
22
[Link]
23
[Link]
24
[Link]

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Start

Point and
click?

No Yes

graphviz dia

Profit

Figure3: Choosing a flowchart

The source to make that flowchart is:

digraph fig {
// First we'll define a few nodes
Start [shape=circle,style=filled,color=green]; // single node
node [shape=box]; graphviz, dia, Profit; // node list
decision [shape=diamond,style=filled,color=lightgrey, label=
,→"Point and\n click?"];

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(continued from previous page)

// Then we define the connections

Start -> decision;
decision -> dia [label="Yes"];
decision -> graphviz [label="No"];
{dia, graphviz} -> Profit;
}

To do such a thing, you first install graphviz:

Table9: Installing the graphviz tool

OS Installation method

Windows choco install graphviz

Linux apt install graphviz
macOS brew install graphviz

and then build the flowchart with a command like this:

dot -Tpng [Link] > [Link]

(Hey! There’s that output redirection that we saw earlier. Don’t forget
it or else you’ll see what a text representation of a binary png image file
looks like.)
The downside is that it’s hard to get the flowchart looking just how you
want it. That’s where dia comes in, allowing you to just draw out your
own in detail. If you do want to use declarative text to create flowcharts
with precise layouts, the more advanced library that can do this is called
Tikz25 .
25
[Link]

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The GNU utilities

An exceedingly useful set of small, free utilities is often packaged to-

gether as The GNU utilities. A few of them are obscure but absolutely
worth trying out.

Table10: Installing the GNU utilities. Many,

but not all, of these are pre-installed on
Linux/macOS. Here, we show an example of in-
stalling one that isn’t pre-installed. Others are
similar. On Windows, the installation can take
10 minutes.

OS Installation method

Windows choco install gnuwin (a bit outdated but will

work, I also had to press Spacebar when this in-
stallation hung…)
Linux apt install units
macOS brew install gnu-units

Unit conversion

Perhaps my favorite utility here is units, which converts units from one
system to another. It can be run interactively or with one-offs. Let’s
show it interactively first. Type units and press Enter. Type 10 cups
at the prompt and press Enter. Then type tablespoons and press Enter
again. Behold! It tells you that there are 160 tablespoons in 10 cups:

You have: 10 cups

You want: tablespoons
* 160
/ 0.00625
You have:

That’s not even getting started. Press Control-C to quit. Now let’s try
it in one-liner mode. You just say units "what you have" what you

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want. For the previous example, that’d be:

units "10 cups" tablespoons

This thing has over 3000 units in it. Here are some more to try:
• units "2 dozen feet" meters gives 7.3152
• units "2 bakersdozen feet" meters gives 7.9248
• units "2 dozen bakersdozen feet" meters gives 95.0976
• units "1.7 meters" "feet;in" gives 5 feet + 6.9291339 in
(Woah! It split those out!)
• units "tempC(32)" tempF gives 89.626
• units "1 googol femtobarns" "teraparsecs^2" gives, astound-
ingly, 1.050265 (that’s an obscure nuclear unit of area converted
to square astronomical units of distance made famous by the Mil-
lennium Falcon’s Kessel Run)
Read more about it at [Link]

Pattern matching with grep

The grep utility gets a regular expression and then prints it. This is end-
lessly useful when dealing with large datasets, especially when chained
together with other utilities. For the next few examples let’s assume
we’re maintaining a website for our company and it involves a deeply
nested folder structure with thousands upon thousands of text files in
it (HTML, CSS, etc.). At the bottom of each page is a footer that says
something like Copyright © 2025 My Company, LLC. Say we want to
just find and print all of those for any year. We can use grep with the
-R(ecursive) and -P(erl mode) options to do this:

$ grep -RP 'Copyright © \d\d\d\d My Company' *.html

And you’ll see:

26
This special syntax is to differentiate absolute temperatures from the different
sizes of the temperature units.

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Copyright © 2025 My Company, LLC

Copyright © 2025 My Company, LLC
Copyright © 2024 My Company, LLC
Copyright © 2023 My Company, LLC
...

Extracting a column with awk

The last command printed out every line. But what if we only want to
grab the year out of that because we’re going to put it in a spreadsheet
and do something with it. The awk tool can be chained to grep to process
each line that grep prints. There’s a whole world of awk commands, but
one to know is the print command, which can print the first, second,
third, or nth column in an output stream. In the example above, the year
is the third column (space-delimited) so we would use this (| can be
typed with Shift - \):

$ grep -RP 'Copyright' *.html | awk '{ print $3 }'

Giving:

2025
2025
2024
2023

Tip: Throw a | clip on the end of that last command and the re-
sults will be in your system clipboard. Now you can paste into another
program, like a spreadsheet.

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Multi-file find/replace

You’ve seen how we can find matches in multiple files and even down-
select things in the lines we want to see. Earlier, you saw how to do RE
find/replace with perl. For the grand slam, we need to find and replace
in all those files. In our example, we will update all © years to 2026.
Here’s the command if all the files were in one directory:

perl -i -pe 's/Copyright © \d\d\d\d/Copyright © 2026/g' *.html

When files are in multiple directories, we can chain commands together.

First, we’ll find all the files we want to cover in all directories, then we’ll
send each one to the above perl command to do the actual in-place mod-
ifications. In the command-line philosophy alluded to in The command
line, having small tools that can be chained together is the best way to
provide power, simplicity/maintainability, and flexibility. Here, we will
use the find command to find all files recursively that match a pattern,
then we’ll use the xargs command to translate that list of files into input
for the perl find/replace command.
We need the names of all the files in our scope. In this example, it’s any
.html file in this or any child folders. To list those, we can use the GNU
find command:

find . -iregex '.+\.html'

Try it out and you’ll see all html files in a folder (put some there if you
need to build this example up). That command is looking in the current
folder (called .) for any files matching the regular expression listed,
which, as you learned above, is anything ending in .html.

Warning: On Windows, a built-in find command will conflict with

the GNU one we are using here, so you may have to type the full path,
like:
C:\GnuWin\bin\[Link] . -iregex '.+\.html'

To pass the results of the find command on to another command, we

use xargs as follows (first we’ll just re-print the file names):

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find . -iregex '.+\.html' | xargs echo 'Found files: '

As you can see, all files found have been passed as one long chain of
arguments to the echo command. Now we can substitute our perl com-
mand in and let the magic happen:

find . -iregex ".+\.html" | xargs perl -i -pe "s/Copyright © \d\

,→d\d\d/Copyright © 2026/g"

Behold: You now have the multi-file, multi-directory, regular-expression

find and replace superpower! Remember, with great power comes great
responsibility. Consider testing out a sweeping command like this (here
by leaving out the -i in-place argument) before actually changing all
the files.

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76 Chapter 4. Around the Office

 Art Studio
5
Computers are integral to the workflows of photographers, cartoonists,
videographers, graphics designers, musicians, podcasters, and many
other artists. They’re also a primary medium through which art is ex-
perienced by patrons. In this chapter, we’ll explore some superpowers
related to art and other creative activities. Even if you’re not an artist,
you’ll find uses of these powers in your work, home, and hobbies.

Basic image manipulation

You will often want to crop an image, rotate it, add some text, touch
it up slightly, or make significant modifications. Adobe Photoshop has
held the crown for professionals in this regard for many years. One
high-quality and open-source program that also excels in doing these
things is GIMP1 . We will go through a few basic examples of how to use
it here.
1
[Link]

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Table1: Installing GIMP

OS Installation method

Windows choco install gimp

Linux apt install gimp
macOS brew install --cask gimp

Once you open an image in GIMP, you will find many options, including
these useful and basic ones:
• Image → Scale Image → Change image size by pixels or percentage
• Image → Transform → Rotate → Rotate or flip image
The toolbar on the left has lots of tools for cropping and selecting while
the tools on the right deal with layers.

The clone stamp tool

The clone stamp tool is a wonderful superpower. This tool effectively

lets you erase things from images, or duplicate things. You have to try
it to believe it.
Here’s a photo of a classic watch. On the left is the original, and on the
right is a version that has been clone stamped a lot.

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Figure1: The photo on the left is the original, and the one on the right
has been clone stamped.

Is it magic? Nope! It just allows you to clone parts of the image onto
another location. So it didn’t see under the digits; that’s impossible.
Instead, the space between digits was carefully cloned over the digits.
Less obviously (and more usefully), the smudge over the CASIO logo
has been removed, and some scratches were removed on the band just
below the face. Here’s how to do it in GIMP.
• Load up your first image and choose the clone stamp tool (hover
your mouse over all the tools in the toolbar until you find it; it kind
of looks like a stamp). Your cursor will now be a dotted circle.
Adjust the size by changing the Size slider in the left-hand toolbar.
• Find the area you want to clone from and put the mouse over it.

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Press and hold the Ctrl key (it may be Command in macOS) and
click once with the left mouse button to mark the clone-from area.
In my example above, this was the empty space between digits.
• Zoom in as much as you need (try Ctrl with Mouse Wheel)
• Now move the mouse to where you want to clone to. Click with
the left mouse button and paint over it carefully. You will see an
indicator in the clone-from area moving in sync with your cursor.
If/when you mess up, press Control-Z to undo.
• Adjust the clone-from area a few times to make it look extra realis-
tic (by repeating the second step).

Exercise
Try the clone stamp tool out on one of your photos. See if you can add or
remove someone from a family portrait, or do something else fun. Note
that you can load two photos at once and clone from one to the other.

Note: Speaking of panoramics, the hugin tool is a very powerful

panoramic stitcher. Yes, cell-phones often have this built it these days,
but the feature is still pretty useful in certain cases, and gives you as
much or as little control as you’d like.

Image manipulations from the terminal

Editing images from the command line may sound odd, but its utility
comes up surprisingly often. You can modify images dynamically as part
of a bigger system (like an interactive website that applies filters to im-
ages that people upload, for instance, hint hint), do something complex
without a bunch of clicks, and apply the same modification to a whole
set of images.
For example, if you set your camera out all night with an intervalome-
ter and star-tracking camera mount to capture a new astrophotography
time-lapse (or any other kind of time-lapse), you may want to crop them
all the same, add some text, put a border around them, etc. Or maybe

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you have a bunch of still images from a simulation and you want to make
them into a movie but need to shrink them all down first. A delightfully
powerful suite of tools called ImageMagick2 can do all sorts of things
like this.

Table2: Installing ImageMagick

OS Installation method

Windows choco install imagemagick

Linux apt install imagemagick
macOS brew install imagemagick

The simplest thing it’s good at is converting image formats. To convert

a JPG to a PNG, just run:

convert [Link] [Link]

You can convert them to pdf or bmp or many other things. If you have a
bunch of files, use mogrify instead of convert:

mogrify -format png *.jpg

What if you want to make a bunch of thumbnails for all the JPGs in a
folder, while rotating them 45° and making them black-and-white? We
got you:

mkdir thumbnail
mogrify -path thumbnail -thumbnail 100x100 -rotate 45 -
,→colorspace Gray *.jpg

Imagine having to do that on 100 images, or 1000, by hand!

Another fun one is the montage command (also part of ImageMagick).
You give it some images and it slaps them together in a montage of what-
ever shape and size you want. I had some nice pictures of the August
2017 Eclipse, and made a montage with each individual square being
reduced to 960x960 pixels and with 10-pixel margins in each direction
with this:
2
[Link]

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montage IMG*.jpg -geometry 960x960+10+10 [Link]

Which resulted in this:

Figure2: A beautiful Eclipse montage from Malheur National Forest,

OR. By the way, I highly recommend seeing a total eclipse someday if
you get the chance.

You can add the -tile 4x1 option for a row montage and boost the
margins a bit:

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montage IMG*.jpg -geometry 960x960+20+20 -tile 4x1 eclipse-row.

,→jpg

Figure3: The same eclipse photos but montaged as a row.

Exercise
Try it yourself with some images of your own but stack them vertically
like a photo booth.

Sure you could do that kind of thing by clicking and dragging and per-
fecting this and that, but that’d take a really long time. This command
line option is nearly instantaneous and can be repeated trivially on dif-
ferent images.
This utility is also excellent for adding Copyright © messages to images
in bulk.
See hundreds of more examples at the Usage manual3 . Another must-
see resource on this topic is Fred’s ImageMagick Scripts4 , which has
hundreds of examples of kind of crazy and amazing things you can do
with this tool. It’s not the prettiest presentation, nor the most discov-
erable, but if you click through some of those you’ll get a real taste of
what this can do. The wheels of creation in your head are going to al-
most red-line.
3
[Link]
4
[Link]

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Computer graphics

Making graphics from scratch on a computer for fun and profit is an-
other computer superpower. You can design your own logo, make signs
for your neighbors, make diagrams for your research or web page, make
your own comic strip, draw, trace, animate, and so on. It’s a whole won-
derful world. This is another one of those areas where full 4-year+ col-
lege programs exist to teach people how to do it well. But that doesn’t
mean you can’t get started right away. I’ve used these tools in many
technical publications as well as for public communications.

Vector graphics

Fundamentally, images can be represented on a computer in two ways:

Bitmaps
Bitmaps are images made of an explicit list of which colored pixel
is at each location in a grid. These are ideal for complex images
and photographs. If you zoom too far in, they become pixelated
and blurry. File types include BMP, JPG, TIFF, PNG, etc.
Vector images
Vector images are made up of mathematical descriptions of shapes,
such as “line from (x1,y1) to (x2,y2)”. These require fewer bits for
simple line-art graphics, and you can zoom in on them infinitely
without losing any sharpness. Files types include svg, pdf, and
others.

Note: Different bitmap formats have pros and cons too. JPG uses lossy
compression and can give small file sizes, but you have to be careful as
the quality can degrade significantly. PNG uses lossless compression, so
quality remains high, but file sizes can be larger.

GIMP deals with bitmaps. Other programs, such as Adobe Illustra-

tor and Inkscape5 (open-source) deal with vector graphics. Inkscape is
absolutely essential, so let’s get it.
5
[Link]

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Table3: Installing Inkscape

OS Installation method

Windows choco install inkscape

Linux apt install inkscape
macOS brew install inkscape

Here is a vector graphic made in Inkscape using the Rectangle tool, the
Pen tool, and the Circle tool:

Figure4: An icon of a nuclear reactor

Let’s make a cool sailboat logo with it.

Step 1: Making a sail

• After opening Inkscape, hover the mouse over the icons along the
left panel until the tooltip tells you that you’ve reached the Draw
Bézier curves and straight lines tool. Click it.
• On the canvas, click once somewhere in the middle to start (we’re
drawing a sail/triangle)
• While holding Control but no mouse buttons, move the mouse to
the right a bit and click again. Holding the key constrains you to a
perfectly horizontal line.

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• Now move up and to the left until you’re over the first point. Click
once again. If you hold Control here it will constrain you to one of
a few particular angles.
• Now go back to the starting point of this curve. It will turn into
a red square (indicating that clicking will close and terminate the
path). This time, click and hold the mouse button. While holding
it, drag down and slightly to the right. This will make the previous
line a bit curved, like a sail. Let go when you’re happy with it.
It should look like this:

Figure5: My sail

Step 2: More detail

• Repeat the sail process but draw a boat structure under it (be cre-
ative)
• Click the sail (you have to hit one of the lines because the inside is
currently empty). Now click one of the colors from the bottom (it
scrolls) to color it how you like.
• Do the same with the boat.
• Click the Text tool on the left (big letter A) and draw a text box with
it under the sailboat. Write “SAIL LIFE” or something else in it.
• Click the circle tool and click/drag to make a circle around the boat.
Hold Control to constrain it to a perfect circle.

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• If it’s solid, click the X in the far left of the color bar to make it
clear/empty.
• Find the Fill and Stroke dialog (on the right-hand side). It has
three tabs in it: Fill, Stroke paint, and Stroke style. In the
Stroke style tab, increase the Width. You’ll see the circle getting
larger.
• Choose a stroke color from the Stroke paint section to color it,
(or Shift-Click a color in the color selector at the bottom of the
screen).
• Save it as an SVG (native vector format).
• Export it as a png by going to the Export PNG Image option (on
the right), choosing a file name in the Export As field and then
pressing Export.

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This just barely scratches the surface of this tool and others like it, so
explore around and, as usual, check out more serious tutorials for the
real magic if this strikes your interest. I suggest looking into the bitmap
tracing capability for your next superpower (it converts bitmap graphics
into vector graphics).
Another serious open-source graphics tool out there is Krita6 , known
mostly for concept art, illustrations, and comics. A lot of people use
digital pen hardware with this program like a Wacom tablet.
For current or aspiring cartoonists, a truly professional tool used by Stu-
dio Ghibli and others called OpenToonz7 was made open-source in 2016.
It has been used in the production of Futurama, Anastasia, and Balto. An
older version is currently available in chocolatey for Windows. There
is a snap for Ubuntu Linux. Mac users can get it directly from the link
above.

Color lifehack

One neat way to get a bunch of colors that look borderline good to-
gether is to choose them in the Hue-Saturation-Lightness (HSL) space
instead of the more typical Red-Green-Blue (RGB) space. Pick one color
anywhere in HSL and then choose all others by adjusting the Hue only
(keeping saturation and lightness constant). These always end up look-
ing like they belong together. All graphics programs allow you to choose
colors in HSL these days. Of course, color wheels can also help you fig-
ure out complementary colors.
Here’s what a few boxes made with this trick in Inkscape look like:

Figure7: Some nice colors that go together with the same S and L val-
ues. (Sorry B&W readers, this also looks better when viewed in color)
6
[Link]
7
[Link]

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Websites like [Link] can do this too.

3-D Modeling with Blender

8
Blender is a 3-D modeling program. It is considered one of the best
open-source programs ever made. With it, you can create objects for
3-D printing, animated characters for games, and even entire animated
scenes with physics modeling such as a swinging ball-and-chain smash-
ing into a pile of little boxes that go flying all over the place. You can
get it the usual way:

Table4: Installing Blender

OS Installation method

Windows choco install blender

Linux apt install blender
macOS brew install --cask blender

It’s a professional-grade program which could make one’s entire career.

With its graphical nature, the best way to get started is to watch the
Blender Fundamentals9 YouTube playlist, which at press time has 41
introductory video walkthroughs. Once you get used to the mouse and
keyboard controls and see how to rapidly sculpt the progeny of your
imagination into being, the world will be at your fingertips!
Once a 3-D object is built, the process of rendering it applies textures
and lighting to turn it into a realistic-looking object. The technology
of ray-tracing allows renders to take on a photorealistic quality, but
requires serious computation. This method creates computer simula-
tions of rays (kind of like virtual photons), transporting them through
the scene. As they experience reflection, refraction, and blockage, they
8
[Link]
9
[Link]

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get recorded in a virtual camera looking at the scene10 . In effect, this

allows the creation of scenes that are indiscernible from real life. One
of my favorite examples of this method was created way back in 2006
using another great tool called POV-Ray (not Blender). Here it is:

Figure8: A ray-traced render of some glasses created by Gilles Tran with

POV-Ray 3.6. You can find the POV-Ray code for this, remove a glass,
and then re-render it to convince yourself that it’s totally computer-
generated.

10
Ray tracing actually transports virtual photons backwards from the camera to
the light source. This ensures that the computer only spends time on light that will
actually be seen rather than wasting computer cycles on light that goes way off into
the distance.

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Computer-Aided Design (CAD)

While Blender can be used to design physical objects, it’s more special-
ized for making visual scenes intended to be viewed on a screen. The
field of Computer-aided Design (CAD) covers programs that are special-
ized for making real objects like machine parts, structures, skyscrapers,
sculptures, and so on. Many mechanical and structural engineers live
and breathe by a commercial tool called SolidWorks11 . It is extremely
expensive, but when you’re making a $30M part, it’s worth it. This class
of tool includes sophisticated physics and material modeling so that as
you adjust the shape and composition of your object you can also subject
it to various conditions (like wind, temperature gradients, earthquakes)
and make sure it survives or otherwise performs as required. You can
also make sure the part is fabricable with the process you plan to build
it with. Welcome to mechanical and civil/structural engineering.
For around the home, studio, and small shop, you can get started learn-
ing concepts of CAD and designing real things with an open-source
parametric CAD system called FreeCAD12 . It’s not as sophisticated as
the commercial tools, but it can still do an incredible amount. Many
CAD experts have given it mediocre-to-poor reviews over the years but
a growing excitement surrounds its recent releases and potential. Try
it out right now via your package manager:

Table5: Installing FreeCAD

OS Installation method

Windows choco install freecad

Linux apt install freecad
macOS brew install --cask freecad

As with most valuable and powerful skills, CAD is non-trivial to pick up,
requiring dedication to achieve expertise.
Notably, a Building Information Modeling (BIM) Workbench plug-in13 to
11
[Link]
12
[Link]
13
[Link]

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FreeCAD has been under very active development and is something to

watch for designing buildings more seriously. It could come in handy
for that addition to your home or that new shed you’ve been thinking
about.
The wide availability of FreeCAD combined with its scripting and para-
metric capabilities (meaning the when you adjust the height of a part, all
interrelated parts will update automatically to fit) make it an intriguing
candidate for distributed open-source hardware and structural projects,
should such a thing ever be conceived. I envision a glorious future full
of this kind of collaboration, such as in open-source international power
plant design.
OpenSCAD is another excellent and available CAD tool that could be
interesting to compare and contrast with FreeCAD as you’re starting
out. Yet another is SALOME14 , which comes out of the French nuclear
industry, where it’s used to make CAD models as well as to interface
between many different numerical physics solvers.
Autodesk’s commercial Fusion 360 has a free license for hobbyists and
other non-professionals. This offers a pathway to learn a powerful com-
mercial tool at low initial cost. Philosophically, the availability of this
likely and unfortunately pulled some focus away from the development
of the open-source tools.

Note: Speaking of science and engineering, OpenFOAM15 is another

stunning multi-platform open-source system made to perform compu-
tational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations. If you’ve ever seen those
animations showing high-color super-detailed airflow over an airplane
wing or car, that’s what CFD does. We use CFD all the time in the nu-
clear industry.

14
[Link]
15
[Link]

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The digital darkroom

In the olden days, photography (”writing with light”) had two artistic
phases: going out into the field and making beautiful compositions on
film and then deciding how to expose and crop them to a print in the
darkroom. Digital photography has been revolutionary, largely elimi-
nating the darkroom step for most of us.
It’s worth noting, however, that we do have digital darkrooms now in
each of our computers, and the opportunities for artistic expression
within are staggering. While anyone can take beautiful snapshots with
their phone, those who are interested can go deeper and unlock the
really fun and rewarding world of digital darkrooming.

The RAW advantage

When you take a digital picture, light comes through a lens and excites
a bunch of little electric light buckets in a grid called a digital sensor.
Each light bucket records how bright either the reds, greens, or blues
are in each point on the grid (different colored filters are overlayed on
the grid in a pattern, often as a Bayer filter). The size of the grid deter-
mines the resolution of the image you get, and that is often proportional
to sharpness. Thus, more is considered better. You’ve heard these mea-
sured in megapixels (“millions of picture elements”). A 25-megapixel
image may record one 14-bit number per pixel, so the total size of the
file would be:

25e6 × 14 bits = 43.75 megabytes

That’s a lot of megabytes (MB). But if you look at the size of a picture
from your phone, it’s closer to 10 MB. BUT HOW? The answer is that
the bits from the sensor get sent to a microprocessor in the camera
that compresses them mathematically to smaller sizes using the JPEG
algorithm. Conceptually, if an image has 500 zeros in a row, the RAW file
has 500 repeated numbers whereas a compressed file just has a few bits
that say: “500 zeros in a row”. The compression used is lossy, meaning
information is lost when you compress a RAW image to a JPG. Worse
still, JPEG images only have 8-bits of information per pixel instead of

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the full 12- or 14-bits your camera collected. More bits means more
possible brightness values for each individual pixel.
To make a long story short, professional photographers shoot in RAW
mode to skip this compression because they will process the image in
their computer’s digital darkroom. When you work in RAW you can do
incredible things, like pull details out of underexposed shadows, change
the white balance, reconstruct overexposed highlights, denoise, and
much more. If you didn’t have the exposure settings quite right on an
incredible shot, RAW is very forgiving and will help you get the print
just right.
If you want to try out the digital darkroom, set your camera to save files
in RAW format (note that you won’t be able to store as many on one
memory card, but I’m not even worried because you can still fit a lot of
RAW files on a 128 GB card).
Here is an example. First, an image as taken right out of the camera:

And the same photo after a bit of time in the digital darkroom:

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Look at all that detail that was effectively black in the first one that was
brought out!

How to get started in the digital darkroom

Most professional photographers use the proprietary and expensive pro-

grams from Adobe called Lightroom and Photoshop as their digital dark-
room. These are considered the best and do everything you’ll need.
Open-source alternatives can get you 98% of the way there, and you
can start with them right now. In particular, darktable16 is an absolutely
phenomenal RAW digital darkroom program that was until recently only
available in Linux. Here’s how to get it:
16
[Link]

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Table6: Installing darktable

OS Installation method

Windows choco install darktable

Linux apt install darktable
macOS brew install --cask darktable

Darktable is a powerful program that takes some orientation to get

started with. Fortunately, well-produced tutorial videos on YouTube will
walk you through various development workflows step by step. Harry
Durgin is my favorite. He talks you through exactly what he’s doing and
why, while crickets chip in the background at his Hawai’i-based studio.
His darktable edit playlist17 at press time has 42 wonderful videos. This
is the best way to see what the various tools are capable of doing.
The basic workflow is roughly as follows:
• Import photos into the light table view and rank them 1-5 by press-
ing the 1-5 buttons on your keyboard.
• Choose your favorite and double-click it to enter the dark room
view where you’ll edit a single photo.
• Try out a few basic plug-ins to get started, including:
– Denoise (profiled) — This uses data generated by other
users who have your same camera model to remove digital
noise, smoothing our your picture, especially in low-light
areas.
– Lens correction — If your lens is in the database, this ap-
plies corrections to geometric distortions, chromatic aber-
rations, and vignetting.
– Crop and rotate — Adjusts the crop of the photo to best tell
the desired story. Remember the rule of thirds and other
composition guidelines. Note that you can right-click/drag
in this view and trace along a line that you intend to be
17
[Link]
g7P6ZAsYVqTltmXyBjl

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either vertical or horizontal and it will rotate the photo to

make it so.
– Tone curve — Adjusts the exposure to get the lighting just
right. You can make the curve steeper to get more contrast.
– Shadows and highlights — Brings the brights down and the
shadows up, evening out the exposure a bit.
– Color correction — Changes the overall colors in the image.
– Levels — Brings the black point up so the blacks are really
black.
• Press the L key to go back to the light table. Now click export
selected near the bottom right to write out the final image as a
developed Instagram-ready JPG.
• If desired, open the image in GIMP for final modifications and
touch-ups.
• Repeat for however many photos you like.
If you have a few plug-ins you always activate, you can have them auto-
matically turn on.
Darktable comes with some extremely powerful features. One impres-
sive one is parametric masks, which allow you to apply various opera-
tions only to certain sections of the photo as defined by ranges of bright-
ness or color. You can combine these with drawn masks to fine-tune the
look you want. So if you want to brighten or adjust the reds, but not the
greens, you have full elaborate control of doing so. The artistic flexibil-
ity will give you many new ways to express yourself. You really have to
watch some of Harry’s tutorial videos to see this in action.

Making podcasts, music, and sound effects

There’s this great track on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories where
Italian electronic dance music pioneer, Giorgio, explains how he got
started making music with synthesizers. At the end of his monologue
there’s a perfect pause and then these epic synth arpeggios hit and it’s
just amazing. In Giorgio’s pioneering days, the synthesizers were all

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analog circuits, but way back in the 1980s, digital synthesizers became
widespread. Today your own personal computer can churn out synth
beats and sounds like you wouldn’t believe.

The excitement of sound

In about 1992 Sound Cards were an exciting accessory you could add to
home computers. I vividly remember our family getting a Sound Blaster
Pro card and installing it in our DOS-powered CompuAdd computer. At
the time it seemed that the possibilities were endless. This hardware to
synthesize sound came with demo programs including18 :
• A talking parrot that would repeat anything you said in the micro-
phone in a high pitch.
• A talking psychiatrist program (Dr. SBAITSO) who would psycho-
analyze you in a robot voice.
• An organ you could play that would auto-accompany you as you
pressed buttons.
• A sound recording program where you could pitch-shift, reverse,
and otherwise edit things you said into the microphone.
This was really exciting, fun, and inspiring. Even though computers
making sound seems a bit mundane at first glance, it still can be awe-
some. Tools and processes have just gotten better with time. Most peo-
ple don’t look at their laptop and consider the possibilities as a sound
studio. Maybe you will from now on.

Recording and processing audio samples

Recording and digitizing real sounds through a microphone is funda-

mental to audio on computers. So let’s try it out. Audacity19 is a popular
and widely-available audio program that can do this well. Here’s how
to get it:
18
There’s a great video demo of how exciting the SBPro card was and all the little
included goodies at [Link]
19
[Link]

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Table7: Installing audacity audio software

OS Installation method

Windows choco install audacity

Linux apt install audacity
macOS brew install --cask audacity

Fire it up and press the big red circle Record button and just speak your
name. You should see some audio waveforms showing up. Then press
stop. (If you just flatline then you may have to hunt for your Sound
Settings and select your microphone from the input section; just use a
web search if you have trouble). You will see something similar to this:

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Figure9: A screenshot of Audacity with waveform after recording a sam-

ple.

Try playing it back (by pressing the green Play button). Now for the fun
part. Select the whole waveform by clicking/dragging over it. In the
menu, select Effect → Reverse. Play it back again and you’ll hear your
name reversed. Reverse it again to get back to normal.

Exercise
Now that you have heard your name spoken backwards, try recording
yourself mimicking how it sounds backwards. Reverse it with the com-
puter to see how you did. This is a decidedly fun party trick.

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It’s fun to try other effects as well, especially the Change Pitch one,
creating laughs for days. As you dig into computer audio you’ll also
find ways to do live processing of what you say in the mic or play with
an instrument. Beyond the hilarity of live pitch-shifting, your computer
can be an entire post-recording or live effects system.

Recording for a podcast or radio show

If you want to make a podcast or radio show, Audacity is enough to get

you started. You can chop up the recording, crop out parts you don’t
want, and add in a soundtrack. You can even remove background noise,
which has an excellent effect on the listening quality. To do so you first
have to profile the room tone by taking a recording of just it. Try this:
• Start a new recording in Audacity.
• For the first 10 seconds just sit there in silence, collecting ambient
noise.
• Now say something useful (i.e. for your podcast) for at least an-
other 10 seconds.
• In the waveform editor, select the portion that’s just noise.
• Go to Effect → Noise Reduction and click Get Noise Profile.
• Now select the whole recording and go to Effect → Noise Reduc-
tion again.
• Click Preview to see how it will do and adjust the sliders if it doesn’t
yet meet your fancy.
• Click OK and behold your noise-free high-quality audio recording.
You’ll note that the waveform image shows much less noise in the
gaps between your words.
The Compressor effect is also useful along these lines. It makes the
volume more consistent so your listeners don’t have to constantly futz
with the volume level to hear you.
When you have the recording just right, choose File → Export and save
the final result.

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For complex projects with many tracks, a Digital Audio Workstation

(DAW) such as Ardour becomes useful.

Synthesizers and music

There are lots of pieces involved in producing music on computers, so

let’s go through a few:

Table8: Components of a computerized music

studio

Compo- Purpose
nent

Samples Bring real-world sound into the computer by recording

voices, acoustic instruments, sound effects, etc.
Synthe- Generates sound waves digitally based on keyboard (as in
sizer piano keyboard) input or programming
Drum Special synthesizer that makes drum beats in loops
machine
Digital Records multiple tracks from synthesizers and/or micro-
Audio phones and allows you to move them around and modify
Work- them with various plug-ins to get them sounding just right.
station Often fully integrated with syths, drums, and plugins
(DAW)
VST Add-ons that you can hook to your DAW to modify the sound
Plug-ins of an instrument
VSTi Synthesizer instruments that come packaged in the VST
Plug-ins standard (making them easy to plug into any DAW that sup-
ports the VST standard)

Professional musicians invariably use professional audio software, and

for good reason; it’s quite polished. Ableton is only a few hundred dol-
lars to get started with and, most musicians will tell you that it’s hard
to compete with.
That said, there’s no harm in trying out the open-source offerings. Start-
ing with drums, Hydrogen is multi-platform enough that we can all try it

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out. It’s not in the Windows or macOS package managers, so download

it from here20 . You can just start clicking where you want the various
instruments to hit. Try matching my beat here (I changed the RES from
8 to 16 so I could put in 16th notes):

Figure10: Screenshot of a cool drum beat I whipped up in Hydrogen.

Try it to hear it.

Press the little play/pause button to hear it. You can build dozens or
hundreds of measures like this and use the grid above to schedule how
they evolve with time. For instance, you can do 4 repeats of an intro-
ductory rhythm and then start activating more layers that build upon it.
Fire up Audacity to record and plug in a microphone so you can make
your first rap.

Exercise
Record your first rap using Hydrogen and Audacity.

We’ll need to use a synth to put down a melody and bass line. Soft-
ware synthesizers can be explored with a computer keyboard or even
a mouse, but musicians will find this inadequate and want an older
20
[Link]

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kind of keyboard: that of a piano. MIDI keyboards are perfect for this.
They have a piano keyboard but don’t make any sound on their own;
they’re just a musical input device for your computer. They often in-
clude pressure-sensitive pads you can tap on for drums or other controls,
a bunch of sliders, and dial controls. These can all be tied to whatever
you want in the software synth. For instance, you can hook one of the
sliders to something that changes some quality of the waveform and
then control it during recording or a live show. There are specific MIDI
ports on some sound cards, but many modern MIDI keyboards just use
USB.
There are not many multi-platform open-source synthesizer sys-
tems/DAWs, but LMMS21 has emerged as a high-quality, easy-to-get-
started, and powerful system.

Table9: Installing LMMS

OS Installation method

Windows choco install lmms

Linux apt install lmms
macOS brew install --cask lmms

It’s the kind of program that will have you playing the Mission Impossi-
ble theme in exciting glory within a half hour (it’s in 5/4 time, FYI). The
documentation is good, and this tutorial22 will have you rocking out. Try
it out, it will absolutely bring a smile to your face and get your creative,
expressive wheels turning into overdrive.
21
[Link]
22
[Link]

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Figure11: A screenshot from making the Mission Impossible theme in

LMMS

DJing a party or show

DJing a good party or show requires a lot of work to set the mood and
shift it through emotional highs and lows all while keeping a coherent,
continuous story or pace going. To produce such a show requires either
two turntables that you swap between, or a laptop. If you go the laptop
route, you will find some excellent software tools that can get you up
and MCing in no time.
We’ll highlight the cross-platform open source Mixxx23 program here.
It’s available in your package manager and is designed to help you get
started even if you’ve never DJed before.
23
[Link]

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Table10: Installing Mixxx

OS Installation method

Windows choco install mixxx

Linux apt install mixxx
macOS brew install --cask mixxx

This program will scan your music library and present you with the list
of songs. You can drag one to the player on the left and another to the
player on the right. There’s a left/right cross-fader control in the middle
that will let you switch volume from one side to the other gradually.
Here’s the idea:
• Load a song in the left player and drag the cross-fader all the way
to the left. Press the play button under the CUE icon. You should
hear it start playing, and the waveform on top will start moving.
• Try clicking/dragging the moving waveform back and forth jerkily
a little (trust me).
• Load up the next song in the right player and drag it to where you
want it to start from. If you want, you can rig this up with dual
soundcards so you can preview what you’ll play next in your head-
phones while still playing over the main room system (this is why
DJs always are holding up headphones to their ears and bobbing
their heads).
• Adjust the tempo if needed, or press SYNC to match the same tempo
as the currently playing song.
• Press the play button on the right to get it rolling (it’s still silent
due to the cross-fader).
• When the time is right, drag the cross-fader right until the song on
the right is the only one heard.
• Repeat this process, but this time going from right to left.
• Do not stop until either the world ends or the sun comes up.
You can do this live or use something like Audacity to record your show
in advance if you’re putting out a mash-up album or whatever.

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It looks like this:

Figure12: A screenshot of Mixxx playing a fairly eclectic show

Movies

The movie industry is large and lucrative. Software is absolutely key as

the green screen has taken over. As such, professional software tools in
all elements of movie production are in fierce competition. All the best
tools are commercial, so if you want to go into professional movie pro-
duction, you will likely need to learn tools like Adobe Premiere, DaVinci
Resolve, Lightworks, Autodesk Maya, Flowbox, ZBrush, etc.
That said, a few accessible superpower tools do exist for people outside
the movie production industry.

Format conversion, trimming, and time-lapses

The most universal command-line video tool is called ffmpeg24 . It’s use-
ful for recording, converting, and streaming video (and audio).
24
[Link]

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Table11: Installing ffmpeg video utility

OS Installation method

Windows choco install ffmpeg

Linux apt install ffmpeg
macOS brew install ffmpeg

ffmpeg can slice and dice videos. For example, if you have a long video
(input.mp4) that you only want a two-minute clip from (between 12:21
and 14:21, for example), you can use a command along the lines of:

ffmpeg -ss 00:12:21 -t 00:14:21 -i input.mp4 -acodec copy \

-vcodec copy -async 1 section.mp4

This will create a new video called section.mp4.

Note: If the video doesn’t end up cutting right, then there probably
is no keyframe at the time you cut it. To get around this you have to
re-encode the video by omitting the acodec and vcodec option, which
will take some processing time.

To convert from one video format to another, you specify the video codec
(-c:v) and/or audio codec (-c:a). The commands are like:

ffmpeg -i [Link] -c:v libx264 -preset ultrafast movie.mp4

ffmpeg can make time-lapse videos from image sequences. This is useful
in research environments (e.g. stitching together stills from a simula-
tion) or in hobby or art spaces just the same (e.g. combining a year’s
worth of security camera stills into a year-in-review project). The input
options to ffmpeg are very versatile, but also complex and frequently
changing. Thus, it’s best to use web searches to find the best command
for what you want to do. For instance, if you search something like
ffmpeg stitch photos into time-lapse you may find something like:

ffmpeg -framerate 9 -pattern_type glob -i 'ice-move/shed-*.jpg' \

-vcodec libx264 -crf 15 -filter "minterpolate='fps=30':
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

,→ 'mi_mode=blend'"\
-pix_fmt yuv420p ice-move.mp4

This will take all files called shed-[anything].jpg in the ice-move

folder and combine them into a new time-lapse movie called ice-move.
mp4. This actually does interpolation between frames, giving a really
smooth-looking time-lapse.
You can even make high-quality animated GIFs for posting on the inter-
net. With ffmpeg, web searches and StackOverflow are your friends.
All the options are described in elaborate detail at [Link]
[Link].

Video editing

When you’re going to produce a movie from video you shot around town
for whatever reason, you need graphical video editing software to ar-
range the clips how you want them, to add smooth transitions (fade,
blur, etc.), to add rolling credits at the end, and to insert a soundtrack.
There really is no universal standard multi-platform video editing soft-
25
ware. Each OS has its favorites. OpenShot is one open source option
available on all platforms that is well-worth trying out. It’s user-friendly,
and has most of the features you’ll want for video editing. It’s a bit slow,
and I got frustrated with how frequently it crashed a few years back, but
they’ve been working hard on stability since then. There’s absolutely a
strong potential.

Table12: Installing OpenShot video editor

OS Installation method

Windows choco install openshot

Linux apt install openshot
macOS Go to [Link] and
run the installer

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26
If you’re on Linux, KdenLive is also worth a look. It seems significantly
faster. Blender actually has full-featured video editing capabilities as
well, and is quite stable. The user interface may take extra work and
training to get used to, but it may actually be the most stable multi-
platform experience. Tutorial playlists like Mikeycal Meyers’27 can get
you operational fairly quickly.
Other than that, Windows Movie Maker on Windows and iMovie on Mac
are very polished and usable. The real point is to get that phone camera
out and try to make little movie productions. As much as we have video
cameras in our pockets these days, it’s a bit uncommon to see someone
put a film together. You have all you need at your fingertips already,
so making a movie could be a fun activity for some rainy day. At least
personally, I really cherish the old home videos I have from my childhood
a lot more than the photos.

Making games

In the 1990s I was hoping to learn how to make video games. I got a
book about doing it in the C programming language and it started with
putting the graphics card into VGA mode 13h and writing pixels to the
double-buffer one at a time. In other words, it was a bit inaccessible for
me at the time, and I never got very far.
With the advent of widely available game engines, things have changed
dramatically. These are software systems that make games. They come
with so many features that you can make simple games without writing
any code whatsoever. Of course, for advanced games and logic, code
will eventually be needed.
Unity3D28 is such a game engine that makes games for phones, com-
puters, and game consoles. A free beginner version lets you try it out
(though you do have to pay once your games start making over $100k
on app stores). The free version is more than sufficient to start going
26
[Link]
27
[Link]
28
[Link]

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through some of the training material. The tutorials29 will walk you
through the basics and whet your appetite so you can see if you want to
keep going with it or not.
This high-level game programming is a fun way to start. That said, you’ll
still gain much in going under the hood to learn what’s really going on.
The world will always need low-level developers to keep the lights on
for the rest of us. For that, you’ll need the chapter on Programming.

From cropping photos to DJing parties, I hope you’ve enjoyed this taste
of what kind of creative things you can do on your computer. We’ll con-
tinue along these lines in the next chapter as we learn about getting the
written word out there.

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[Link]

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 Publishing
6
I once had the pleasure of visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in
Antwerp, Belgium. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site that used to be a
16th -century printing facility. Before visiting, I didn’t realize how diffi-
cult it was to publish the written word and sheet music. A punchcutter
started by carving each letter on the end of a hard steel punch, often
after softening it in a flame. These punches were then pounded into
softer metal like copper to create an imprint. The imprint was then
placed in a hand mould, where still softer metal was poured in, cooled,
and then taken out. This seemingly round-about process was designed
to mass-produce many exact copies of what the punchcutter had labori-
ously carved.
These pieces of type were organized in cases, with the case of larger
letters placed on the compositor’s upper rack and the case of smaller
letters placed on the lower rack (hence “upper case” and “lower case”
letters). Once numerous copies of each letter in different sizes and vari-
ants were cast, they’d be painstakingly arranged by compositors and
placed into a string-bound type galley, proof-read, placed in the press,
inked, and pressed onto many copies of paper. Then there was the bind-
ing and transportation. Woo-eee!
Advances in printing did occur between Gutenberg and the digital age,
but the advent of computers and the internet was by far the most revo-
lutionary change the industry has experienced.

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Publishing online

The internet is an amazing, almost magical publishing venue. Anyone

with a phone can type something in and it will be available instantly to
people all around the world. The vastness introduces dual problems.
Authors need to ensure people around the world want to and can find
their material. Meanwhile, readers need to filter through an increasing
amount of noise to find what they are interested in.
In the following sections, we will explore a few options for publishing
online.

Sign up for a web publishing service

Aside from posting on Facebook, the easiest and fastest way to get your
words online is to sign up with a service provider who offers publishing.
Wordpress1 is a famous example of such a service that is used to make
some large fraction of the world’s web pages. Medium2 is another. Wix
is another. These are polished services that will guide you through ev-
erything you need to get your words out there. You will be able to type
your content in a nice web-based form that has all the formatting op-
tions you’re used to from a word processor. If you get a free account,
they may show advertisements to people who visit your page.

Getting your own web address

If you want the [Link] domain name, you have to pay some-
one a modest fee (typically around $10/year) to register the name. The
Domain Name System (DNS) behind this works much like a phonebook
for the internet. I have used Namecheap3 to buy my domain names
for decades and have never had a complaint. Countless others exist as
well. When you go to these services (called domain registrars), they
1
[Link]
2
[Link]
3
[Link]

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will present you with a search form. You type in the name you are seek-
ing and it will tell you whether it’s available, and how much it will cost.
Many names are taken, but if you do find one that’s really catchy, they
may charge you a premium. If [Link] is not available, you may
be able to get [Link] or even [Link], among many other
top-level domains, as these suffixes are called.
Once you find a name and buy it, you configure it by pointing the name to
your server, or by telling anyone who goes to your name to forward the
lookup request to some other name server. You can generally point your
own domain name to any of the polished web services mentioned above.
On Wordpress, for example, you will point your domain’s lookup servers
to [Link] and Wordpress will make sure to forward people
on to your page. Behind the scenes, something like this will happen:

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Customer goes
to [Link]

DNS looks up name,

Handled by registrar
returns delegate
(e.g. Namecheap)
nameserver

Nameserver points
Handled by host
to web server
(e.g. Wordpress)
IP address

Your web server

sends web page

Figure1: Behind the scenes with domain names

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Make your own web page

If you want more control and flexibility, and are willing to learn more to
get it, you can always make your own web page. Do this if you either
want to make a hobby of web development, or you are interested in
going professional someday in tech. You need two things:
• An internet-accessible place to put your content (a web server)
• The ability to make web-browsable content that displays in a web
browser
Web hosting companies will allow you to put files and content manage-
ment systems on their servers for a modest fee. PC Magazine ranked
HostGator, Dreamhost, and Hostwinds highest in 2019. Once you have
your server space, you point your domain name to it. Some people even
use their home computers as servers and leave them on all the time for
this, but many internet service providers frown upon this.
Now you have to put content up. You may create the content on your
local computer and then upload it to the web server using a secure file
transfer program such as SSH or WinSCP.

Writing a web page from scratch

Web browsers read a markup language called HyperText Markup Lan-

guage (HTML). The most rudimentary way to make a web page is to
write HTML by hand in a text editor. It looks like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>My neat web page</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="green">
<h1>Welcome to my web page</h1>
<hr />
<p>I am a business consultant and you can hire me.␣
,→Please contact me at <a

href="[Link] email address</a>.

</body>
</html>

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You can save this to a file called bad_webpage.html and load it in your
browser (by double-clicking the file, usually). It looks like this:

Figure2: A terrible yet nostalgic web page

Exercise
Write a similar web page in a text editor and open it up in your web
browser.

If you upload this to your web server, you will have your own web page,
written from scratch by you.
In reality, very few people do it this way anymore. It’s just too hard to
update hundreds of pages that may get broken links. Or if you want to
change the look and feel of the site, you can’t be expected to change
each page individually. There is, however, value in knowing the basics
of HTML because the syntax and features are often used in other tools.

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Using a Content Management System

Wordpress is an example of a content management system (CMS) that

accommodates the management of web pages. Besides signing up with
[Link] as discussed above, you can also install the open-source
Wordpress application on your own server and publish through it. Lit-
erally hundreds of other self-hosted CMSs like Joomla offer a balance
between control and ease. Many web hosts provide single-click instal-
lations of a variety of CMSs so you can try a few out as a learning pro-
cess, and then choose one to deploy for your next business, fan-club, or
project.

Static site generators

As CMSs got more complicated and heavier-weight, another approach

emerged: the path of the static site generator. Where Wordpress re-
quires a resource-intensive and sometimes-slow database system, static
site generators target the convenience and power of a CMS without
needing a central database.
These make even more sense today due to the prevalence of cloud com-
puting platforms. If your website gets featured on a popular news ag-
gregator, the traffic spike can bring your little server to a halt. With
static sites, you can just ramp up and down how many duplicate servers
you’re using willy-nilly and toss in a load-balancer that distributes read-
ers to each server equally, and you’ll handle the traffic just fine. One
excellent example of a static site generator is called Jekyll4 .
These systems are non-trivial to set up and get going with, but they are
quite nice. We’re using Jekyll for [Link] for exam-
ple.
4
[Link]

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Other Topics

This just scratches the surface of web publishing. There’s a whole world
of front-end design and development covering things like JavaScript and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allow you to tweak and polish every
aspect of what the web user sees. Entire back end systems make web
pages interactive. You’ll read more about that in Programming.

Publishing PDFs

Web pages aren’t for every kind of document. Reports, articles, and
books are often better suited for documents that come across the in-
ternet as PDFs and look great when printed. Here we’ll learn how to
efficiently build beautiful PDF documents.
This is particularly interesting to all you scientists out there. Here we’ll
learn about some systems that make it easy to get journal manuscripts
into the right format, with all the cross-references just right and all the
citations in the right format. It’s not your job to get a bibliography for-
matted correctly; that’s the computer’s job.
The systems we’ll learn about also excel at generating stunning, elegant,
and unique resumes.

Introduction to LaTeX

In this section, we’ll learn about LaTeX, a publishing system infamous

for having ardent followers while being considered too annoying to deal
with by most people. We’ll show what it can do, explain why some people
love it, show you some recent advances in potential workflows, and give
you enough information to make informed decisions about using it or
not.

Note: The TeX in LaTeX is related to a Greek root that means both
art and technology. It’s pronounced roughly like “teck”. The La part is

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pronounced “lah” or “lay”, you get to choose which one you prefer.

LaTeX and related technologies essentially build documents from a de-

scriptive pure-text language, similar in concept to the raw HTML file
seen in Writing a web page from scratch. This enables some efficien-
cies, including:
• Table, Figure, Reference, and Section numbering is totally auto-
matic. Cross-references are updated for you, so you never have to
re-number anything if you add a new table.
• The format of the bibliography is auto-generated. Various publish-
ers give out bibliography style definition files so you can seamlessly
switch between them.
• Text-based source can be version-controlled in detail for the ability
to rewind in time and collaborate with others (see Using git).
• Equations are typeset beautifully. LaTeX is particularly popular in
math journals.
• The layout of the document and letter spacing is handled for you.
• Documents can be assembled from multiple places, so the cover
page manager can define the cover page and it will automatically
be used in any documents that pull it in.
• Documents or reports can be automatically generated or updated
by a program (more useful for updating engineering reports based
on simulations than for traditional publishing).
LaTeX has notable downsides:
• The syntax of LaTeX source has a learning curve that most people
are not willing to climb given how easy well-known alternatives are
(though recent advances in lightweight markup languages and doc-
ument conversion with pandoc are alleviating this, as you’ll soon
see).
• It can be difficult to get a document to render exactly to your liking.
Inserting images can be a pain compared to point-and-click solu-
tions (fortunately, point-and-click LaTeX editors exist these days).
• Most people don’t know how to install LaTeX or run it (we will solve
this problem momentarily).

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How to run LaTeX

Let’s go through a basic LaTeX workflow.

Table1: Installing LaTeX (warning: it’s huge

and this may take a while)

OS Installation method

Windows choco install miktex

Linux apt install texlive-latex-extra
macOS brew install --cask mactex

Make a text file called [Link] and put something along these lines
in it:
\documentclass{article}

\title{On the writing of \LaTeX{} and building of a PDF}

\author{Your name here}
\date{July 2035}

\begin{document}

\maketitle
\section{Writing the source file}
\label{sec:writing}
Writing the source may look odd at first, but once you start, it
,→'s not so

bad. Also, there are WYSIWYG\footnote{What you see is what you␣

,→get} editors that make

it easier.

One thing that's really nice about \LaTeX{} is math. Here is an␣
,→equation:

\begin{displaymath}
R = \sum_{g=0}^{G-1} N_i \phi_g \sigma_g
\end{displaymath}

(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

\section{Another section}
As you saw in Section~\ref{sec:writing}, you can make equations\
,→cite{brown2018endf}.

\bibliography{myrefs}
\bibliographystyle{ieeetr}

\end{document}

Also, make a separate text file for the references called [Link].
This file can be built with a reference manager (like Zotero5 with the
Better BibTeX plugin6 or JabRef7 ) but for starters let’s fill it manually.
You can find citations in the proper format through Google Scholar8 .
Find the reference you want, click the little " icon, and then click the
BibTeX link at the bottom. It will present you with text that you can copy
and paste directly into [Link]. Choose your own journal citation
to use, or if you want to type one in yourself, it looks like this:

@article{brown2018endf,
title={ENDF/B-VIII. 0: The 8 th Major Release of the Nuclear␣
,→Reaction Data Library with CIELO-project Cross Sections, New␣

,→Standards and Thermal Scattering Data},

author={Brown, David A and Chadwick, MB and Capote, R and␣

,→Kahler, AC and Trkov, A and Herman, MW and Sonzogni, AA and␣

,→Danon, Y and Carlson, AD and Dunn, M and others},

journal={Nuclear Data Sheets},

volume={148},
pages={1--142},
year={2018},
publisher={Elsevier}
}

Note how that article name (brown2018endf) is the thing we referred to

in the citation in section 2 of our source file.
Let’s build the document. From the command line in the folder where
5
[Link]
6
[Link]
7
[Link]
8
[Link]

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we made our two files, run:

latexmk -pdf mypub

Now you should see [Link] in that directory, which looks like this:

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. Figure3: A beautifully-rendered
Publishing PDFs document with automatic references
125
and citations.
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Official LaTeX templates

Most major journal publishers give out LaTeX style files to authors.
These put the formatting completely in their control; you just write your
content. For example, Science Magazine offers their template here9 .
Universities also typically have these for dissertations.

Using LaTeX from a GUI

Modern GUIs for editing LaTeX files are quite good. They let you lever-
age most of the ease of a word processor with the added power of LaTeX.
They’ll automatically insert section labels and offer dialogs to help you
build tables, insert figures, provide spell-checking, give integrated PDF
previews, and so on. TeXstudio10 is the most popular GUI TeX editor. It
is available in your package manager if you’d like to try it out.

Table2: Trying out TeXstudio

OS Installation method

Windows choco install texstudio

Linux apt install texstudio
macOS brew install --cask texstudio

Another option is to use LyX11 , which actually keeps the TeX code behind
the scenes for the most part. It is the closest thing to a word processor
that uses LaTeX. I wrote my dissertation with LyX.
For web-based collaboration, ShareLaTeX12 is the cutting edge.
See also: Wikipedia’s comparison of TeX editors13 .
9
[Link]
10
[Link]
11
[Link]
12
[Link]
13
[Link]

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Easier workflows with lightweight markup languages

Even though it’s very powerful, I cannot deny that writing in pure La-
TeX can be tedious. Nor is it overly versatile; it directly produces PDF
documents but not web pages or other commonly-desired formats from
a single source. The concept of lightweight markup languages (LMLs),
also known as humane markup languages, can help get the powers of
LaTeX without as much pain.
Two popular LMLs are Markdown and reStructuredText (RST). Mark-
down is particularly simple, while RST is slightly more complicated (but
also significantly more featureful). It’s becoming more common for
people to write technical documentation, reports, web pages (often for
static site generators), and even books in LMLs.
RST is usually associated with a tool called Sphinx14 which was origi-
nally created to help write documentation for the Python programming
language. It includes facilities for cross-references, indices, code snip-
pets, glossaries, and citations, plus it can output to HTML, LaTeX, ePub,
and more. As it turns out, this system is useful for more than just tech-
nical documentation and finds wide usage in other things. Indeed, this
book itself was written in RST and processed through Sphinx to ePub,
PDF, and HTML formats!
Pandoc15 is an outstanding tool that simply converts various document
formats between one and the other. It’s a good way to go from an LML to
HTML for the web, LaTeX for print or PDFs, ePub for e-books, or even
MS Word (and vice versa). You can try making a diary in Markdown
and render it to a beautiful PDF with pandoc on demand. It does an
incredible job and continues to just surprise me by working so well.
Let’s convert that LaTeX sample from above to a Word docx file.
14
[Link]
15
[Link]

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Table3: Installing pandoc document converter

OS Installation method

Windows choco install pandoc

Linux apt install pandoc
macOS brew install pandoc

Then run the following in the command line (in the same folder as
[Link] from above):
pandoc -s [Link] -t docx -o [Link]

The options are -s for source, -t for to, and -o for output file name.
Open this up in Word or LibreOffice and voila! Baffling, isn’t it?
Best of all, these kinds of workflows can be revision-controlled and col-
laborated upon using git, which you’ll read about soon.
It must be stated that Microsoft Word has improved mightily through
the years in terms of section numbering, cross-referencing, and cita-
tions. It integrates with many powerful reference management tools
like EndNote and really isn’t all that bad. For the data-centric world
of the near future, where information presentation must come from di-
verse sources and come together elegantly and collaboratively, the tools
we’ve discussed here unlock many superpowers.

Publishing eBooks (and books)

The advances in publishing since the days of punchcutting have brought

us to a situation where it’s quite straightforward to publish an entire
book digitally and in paperback. Even a few years ago, it could require
significant investments to publish a book, whereas now digital deliv-
ery costs nearly nothing and print-on-demand services will print only as
many books as are ordered. You still have to invest in writing, obviously,
and possibly cover design, advertising, editing, and so on.
Self-publishing a book rather than getting a publishing company to do
it is an exciting venture. You get to maintain full creative and financial

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control, but you’re on the hook for making sure everything is good, and
for advertising/promoting the book. If nothing else, it’s fairly low-risk
if you don’t invest too much on artists, editors, advertisements, or your
book tour. The exciting point is that, with a computer in hand, you have
everything you need to self-publish your first book.
E-readers use a variety of formats, many of which are locked down with
special encryption called Digital Rights Management (DRM) that pre-
vents people from copying books left and right. Before getting con-
verted to a locked-down file, manuscripts often pass through the ePub
format, which is similar to HTML and has the benefit over the PDF for-
mat of being reflowable (so it works with different font and screen sizes).
Many authors write manuscripts for eBooks in a word processor and
use services to convert them into the ePub and/or the DRM-friendly for-
mats. For example, Kindle Direct Publishing16 offers tools that can con-
vert .docx files from MS Word into the format necessary for publishing
Kindle eBooks and printed-on-demand paperbacks. They’ve automated
much of the work, and provide great tutorials and videos to walk people
through all steps. They even have a Cover Creator tool, but I bet you
can do a great job on your own with Inkscape for your first book. If you
plan to sell a lot of copies, engaging a professional cover artist will run
between $300-$1200. Besides KDP, Lulu.com17 offers similar services
in case you’d like to shop around.
Barring those services, the LaTeX system discussed previously is per-
fectly capable of creating ready-for-print physical books, but it won’t be
very useful for getting something onto an e-reader (PDFs generally look
bad on e-readers specifically because they are not reflowable). Perhaps
surprisingly, the Sphinx system and the ReStructuredText LML are a
fairly powerful combination for self-publishing. It’s advanced enough
to let you add metadata that will generate the entire book including an
index, a table of contents, cross-references, footnotes, images, hyper-
links, and a glossary in ePub (for e-readers), PDF (for print), and HTML
(for the web). Once you have an ePub file, Amazon provides something
called KindleGen on Windows, macOS, and Linux that will convert it to
a mobi format appropriate for uploading to Amazon/KDP.
For example, to have an index point to the proper page numbers for
16
[Link]
17
[Link]

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some keywords, you simply list them before the paragraph that they
appear in, like this:

.. index::
single: Horses

The joy of horses

-----------------
Horses are fine and majestic animals.
They have four legs and love oats.

Very rich indices can be generated by populating a manuscript with this

kind of metadata.
Getting the formatting exactly right is non-trivial. Neither is grammar
checking (though check out LanguageTool). Thus, I do not recommend
this approach to anyone who is not keenly interested in “going it alone”
and having full control with an open-source stack. It’s certainly possible.

This concludes the chapter on publishing. You’ve learned many new and
interesting ways to get the written word out to the public. I hope the
opportunity arises for you to exercise these tools.

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 Programming
7
The real power of computers, of course, comes from programming them.
Knowing how to program even a little bit unlocks untold opportunities to
make the computer work better for you in the most personal of ways. Be-
sides, programming skills also unlock very well-paying jobs. The advent
of Machine Learning-assisted programming is clearly going to make an
impact on the art of programming in general, but in order to be ML/AI-
assisted, you’ll want to have a solid foundation in the basics regardless.
In this chapter, you’ll try a version control system called git, write a
few simple Python programs, find resources on machine learning, and
be introduced to a web app framework called Django.

Tracking changes of anything

Even if you never program, you will benefit from knowing about version
control systems (VCS). A VCS allows you to create a rewindable timeline
of anything you’re working on. Think of it like the “Track Changes”
feature of a word processor, but more powerful and for more than just
documents.
VCSs are generally associated with programmers because they really
benefit from having a rewindable timeline of their software. This comes
in handy often, such as when a program that used to work no longer
works. Programmers look at the timeline of the source code changes,

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rewind it, and play it back, all the while running their program to find
out where the bug was introduced.
Some people keep their résumé in a VCS. They want to see it progress,
and also “branch” it to make slightly different versions for various job
applications.
A VCS is also wonderful for collaboration. You know
how people e-mail around versions of documents like
Proposal_FINAL_final_nt_jrc2_draft.docx? A VCS can make
that kind of operation much better. Everyone can work on their own
copy of a document and then these can be merged together. One
hiccup with this approach is that VCS works best with pure text files so
if you want to go this route, consider a lightweight markup language
like ReST or Markdown (see Publishing).
Some notable VCSs include git1 , mercurial2 , subversion3 , and Perforce4 .
Git is a fairly universal favorite. It’s the eponym of the famous GitHub,
which Microsoft acquired in 2018 for several billion dollars.

Using git

Git has a slight reputation of being hard to learn. Fear not, it’s not that
bad. Git is made for the command line, but can be used graphically if
you prefer. For the most common uses, you only need to know a few
commands. Here they are:
1
[Link]
2
[Link]
3
[Link]
4
[Link]

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Table1: Some key git commands

Command Purpose

git init Initialize a new git repository in the current

folder
git clone Make a local copy of a remote repository (e.g.
from GitHub or your team)
git add Mark one or more files to be part of a new com-
mit that is in process
git commit Take all marked changes and package them as a
discrete “change” to be remembered forever.
git pull Update the local repository with any changes
someone else made on the remote server.
git push Send all our local commits to the remote server
(for collaboration)
git log View all changes you or anyone else has made
git checkout Check out a previous commit or separate branch
(for going back in time or trying alternate paths)

The best way to learn is to try it out and experiment.

Table2: Installing git

OS Command

Windows choco install git

Linux apt install git
macOS brew install git

In a new empty folder, run git init to start a new repository. Create
a new text file called [Link] in the folder using your text editor and
write a few lines in of your choosing. For example:
Uncle Dave: Married to Rose; likes putt-putt
Aunt Malia: Went to University of Michigan
Cousin Jingjing: From Hawai'i
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

Third-cousin Pete: Enjoys cooking

Stage it with:

git add [Link]

Commit it with:

git commit -m "Initial commit of relatives"

Make some changes to the file. Delete a line or add a new one. View
the differences from the last commit by running:

git diff

Stage and commit the new changes (by repeating the steps above). Now
let’s say you want to go back to the initial version of the file by rewinding
it to the first commit. First, you need to find out what the commit’s
“address” is, which is a long string of letters and numbers. Run:

git log

to get a list of commits. Copy the first 8 or so letters/numbers from the

first commit’s address and fill them in for your version of the following
command (your address will be different):

git checkout a3e2b54

Now look at the file and you’ll see that it’s at its original commit. Go
back to the latest commit with:

git checkout master

There, you’ve used most of the primary git operations now. Undoubt-
edly some of these commands will feel a bit mysterious still. There’s a
whole free book on it on the official git web page called Pro Git5 and
countless tutorials on the internet. We’ll do a similar example but on a
collaborative repository in the next section.
5
[Link]

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Besides working on text files, there is also an extension called Git Large
File Storage6 (LFS) that can be used to store big binary assets efficiently
in a git repository (graphics design files, science files, etc.). Git-annex7 ,
as alluded to in Backups, can track information about large sets of files
without storing the files themselves in the git repository. This was origi-
nally built for managing metadata and synchronization of photo and mu-
sic libraries. It’s finding uses in advanced areas like big-data research
as well.

Fixing something in a GitHub repository

GitHub8 is a website (now owned by Microsoft) that stores thousands

of projects’ git repositories. You can clone, pull from, and push to it
to collaborate on building software. As an exercise let’s see if we can
contribute to an open-source project.
First, you’ll need a GitHub account (use your password manager to make
your password!). Next, find a repository to send a pull request too.
You can either make your own repository and use it, or actually make a
contribution to another team’s. One really easy one to try would be to
search GitHub for common misspellings of a word and then just make a
change to correct it. It’s best to find misspellings in comments so you
don’t risk messing up the code. Even better, add some clarification to
the documentation of a project you’ve been using a little.

Note: Make sure the repository has recent activity or else the main-
tainer may not ever respond to your pull request.

6
[Link]
7
[Link]
8
[Link]

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Table3: Workflow for collaborating with people

on GitHub

Operation Description

Fork the tar- Choose a repository to update and navigate to it.

get repository Click the “Fork” button in the GitHub web page. This
will make a copy of the repository on your own ac-
count.
Clone your From the command line, run git clone https://
copy of the [Link]/user/[Link] filling in your username
repository to and [Link] according to your fork (you can get this
your machine address easily by clicking the green “clone” button in
GitHub)
Make the Navigate to the file(s) you want to change, change it,
modifications and save it.
to the source
code on your
computer
Stage and Run git add -u to stage all changed files and then
commit your run git commit -m "Updated spelling" (use an
changes to appropriately descriptive commit message).
your local
repository
Push the Run git push origin. Now your change is live on
changes up to GitHub but only on your fork of the original project.
your personal You may have to type your GitHub password at this
fork of the stage10 .
repository on
GitHub
Create a pull There should be a button on your GitHub now that
request to says “Pull Request”. Click it and fill in the form with
communicate details of what you changed and why. This will now
with the origi- enter into a review/approval process with the original
nal team team. If they accept it, your change will go live.

10
You can alternatively set up SSH keys to avoid typing in passwords all the time.
There are many tutorials on this available.

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That’s it. As usual, this is just scratching the surface, but these are the
fundamentals. If you can do this, you are basically ready to participate
in collaborative development or publishing using git. And with that, let’s
get to the actual programming.

Why program?

Programming is the Holy Grail of digital superpowers. Things like Ma-

chine Learning, gaming, business process, social networking, and so on
are rooted in programming. Of course, it is an entire discipline that can
take years or even decades to truly master, but you can do meaningful
things very readily, and go from there as suits your situation. If you
want, you can make an entire well-paid career out of it. Or you can just
dink around.
I’m fairly convinced that programming should be a fundamental topic in
middle schools all the way up, possibly even displacing some required
math curriculum that very few people end up using. I say this as a
Ph.D. hard-science engineer: I have never ever had to do long division
of polynomials and I never will. But boy have I seen people in all walks
of life struggle with things where a bit of programming exposure would
have helped.
The single best way to learn how to program is to recognize that you
have a problem you want to be solved, and that a program could help
you solve it. For example, a friend of mine who is now an applied math-
ematics professor at Harvard gave me his favorite math riddle once:
Given two 8’s and two 3’s, combine them with the four ba-
sic math operations (+, −, ÷, ×) to get 24. You have to use
each. For example, 8+8+3+3 is a valid guess, but it’s wrong
because that equals 22, not 24. Similarly, 8×3=24 is invalid
because you only used one 8 and one 3.
I struggled for a while and decided that a program guessing all the po-
tential options would be useful. In the end, it worked!
More practically, a friend was doing some medical research using
a large dataset of pharmacy refill data and was going through this

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painstaking and error-prone process in a spreadsheet to quantify po-

tential medication gaps. She explained her process in detail and then I
helped her whip up a little program that did what she was doing. Thus,
she was liberated to tweak and debug her process. She ran the program
dozens of times, analyzing the algorithm she was using and coming up
with interesting conclusions.
Personally, I’ve spent many years writing programs that help simulate
nuclear reactors. Once we have a virtual nuclear reactor we can adjust
its design and perform “experiments” that would cost billions of dollars
to run in the real world until we think our design is optimal. We have to
put a lot of effort into making sure the models match reality (e.g. by sim-
ulating things that really operated and comparing results to measure-
ments). The synergy between physical models, numerical simulations,
and experiments is a real work-horse in science and engineering across
the board.
Then, of course, professional programmers build and maintain all the
massive software systems behind a large fraction of our everyday expe-
riences.

Programming languages

Hundreds of programming languages exist. Each of them has the goal

of translating (or compiling) human input (source code) into electrical
operations the computer can perform. Their differences arise from dif-
ferent trade-offs their creators were aiming for:
• Is it better to have a really fast-running program that can crash
without saying why, or one that runs slowly but tells you in detail
where it was when something went wrong to help with debugging?
• Should the same source code run on many types of computers, or
should the programmer have to maintain different versions for dif-
ferent machines?
• Should the programmer have to wait 10 minutes between chang-
ing the source code and running the program so the compiler can
optimize aggressively, or should it be instantaneous?

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Very low-level programming languages like assembly run extremely

quickly, but require customizations for every model of CPU and are chal-
lenging to write. Conversely, high-level languages like JavaScript are
pleasant to read but generally slow. One of the more recent and very
popular languages, Rust, attempts to let programmers write very “safe”
code (if it compiles it will have fewer bugs than usual) while still running
extremely quickly, and in parallel.
Among the data science, automation, web, and engineering industries
(and many others!), the Python language has been doing very well in
the past decade or two. It’s a high-level interpreted language that runs
slowly on its own. But it’s so popular that people have interfaced it
nicely with some lower-level screaming-fast math, graphics, and ma-
chine learning libraries, rendering it a pretty good workhorse. There’s
also a vibrant collection of other modules people have made that do all
sorts of things like statistical analysis, graph creation, and web apps.
Here, we’re going to try out Python. Depending on your end goal, an-
other language may be better.

Writing Python programs

Before writing a Python program, we need to download the Python in-

terpreter. It’s what translates Python code into actual operations your
computer can perform.

Note: You can skip this step if you already have Python installed. Find
out by running python -V in your command line and seeing if it throws
an error.

Table4: Installing Python

OS Command

Windows choco install python.

Linux It’s almost definitely already installed
macOS It’s almost definitely already installed

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Run python -V to make sure it works. If you just execute python at the
command line, you’ll be presented with a Python prompt that looks like
>>>. Typing exit() will exit out when you’re done. You can type Python
commands here, and they will execute one after the other. For example,
we can use it as a calculator. First just with numbers:

>>> 2+2
4

All programming languages have variables where you can store the re-
sult of some operation in a name like x or number_of_customers:

>>> x=2
>>> y=5
>>> x+y
7

You can also define sequences and then repeat an operation on all ele-
ments in the sequence in a loop:

>>> names = ["Ford", "Honda", "Jeep", "Chevy"]

>>> for name in names:
print([Link]())
FORD
HONDA
JEEP
CHEVY

Built-in libraries provide the ability to do useful things like sample ran-
dom numbers. When you run these, you will see different numbers.

>>> import random

>>> [Link]()
0.8254737295983463
>>> [Link]()
0.2630839054490208
>>> [Link](1,100)
88
>>> [Link](['Pizza','Ramen','Eggs','Pho'])
'Eggs'

Random numbers are fundamental to things like games and cryptogra-

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phy. That last line is basically a universal 8-ball, which is useful if you
need help deciding what’s for dinner.

Note: At this point, you’re well poised to run through the official Python
tutorial11 . It mostly targets people who have programmed a little before,
but even if you haven’t, it’s easy to follow along and get some exposure
to the syntax and possibilities.

Running commands line-by-line in the Python prompt is useful for ex-

ploring and simple tasks, but real programs are written as sets of com-
mands in text files. See Text editors and extensions to make sure you
have an appropriate program for creating source code.

A program to approximate π

Let’s make a real program that does something neat: approximates π

with the Monte Carlo method. This leverages the fact that computers
cannot get bored to approximate a fundamental constant of nature ba-
sically by throwing darts.
Imagine you are blindfolded and throwing darts at a perfectly square
board with a side length of 1 m and with a circle drawn on it that just
touches the edges. If you throw randomly, the number of darts that land
inside the circle will be proportional to the area of the circle, while the
number of darts that land anywhere on the board will be proportional
to the area of the square. If you throw millions upon millions of darts,
these approximations will become pretty good, and your counts will tell
you what π is.
11
[Link]

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0
0 1 2

Figure1: The dartboard

Square Area = s2
( s )2
Circle Area = π
2
Dividing those equations gives:

Square Area 4
=
Circle Area π

or

Circle Area
π =4×
Square Area

Instead of throwing the darts ourselves, we can write a program to sim-

ulate the dart tosses and approximate the area ratio. To do so, we put
the following in a new text file called [Link]. Note that all lines be-
ginning with # are just comments and are not executed (so you don’t
have to type them).

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import random

RADIUS = 1.0 # define a constant

num_in_circle = 0 # initialize our count

# ask user how many darts to toss

num_darts = int(input('Number of darts: '))

for _individual_dart in range(num_darts):

# for each dart toss, grab two random
# numbers between 0 and 1.
x = [Link]()
y = [Link]()

# Anyone remember the distance formula?

# We can skip sqrt here because sqrt(1) = 1
d = x**2 + y**2
if d < RADIUS:
# increment count in circle
num_in_circle = num_in_circle + 1

pi = 4*num_in_circle/float(num_darts)
print('Pi is approximately: {}'.format(pi))

Run the program with $ python [Link] at the normal command

prompt, not the Python one. If you still see >>> at your command line,
run exit(). It should give:

$ python [Link]
Enter the number of darts: 100000
Pi is approximately: 3.14504

Pretty close! The correct answer is 3.1415926.... If you only run a

few darts, the answer will be much more wrong (try it!). Ah, the central
limit theorem in action!
My computer only takes a second to do 1 million dart tosses, but don’t do
too many, it may take too long! Remember: Ctrl-C will abort a running
program if you get stuck.
The program only samples numbers between 0 and 1, so we’re really

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only operating in the first quadrant of the dartboard (top left). This is
OK because the dartboard is symmetrical.
What if we want to plot our results? We’ll need some third-party libraries
to do that (things that are part of the Python community but not included
in Python itself). To get them, use the Python package manager, which
is called pip. It’s very similar to the system package managers we’ve
been using, but it just pulls in Python modules. We need two things to
have plotting:
pip install --user numpy
pip install --user matplotlib

We have to modify the program to keep track of the (x, y) coordinates

and then plot them in the end. So we’ll make lists to store each coordi-
nate. Here goes (this time as darts_plot.py):

import random

import [Link] as plt

RADIUS = 1.0

coords_inside = []
coords_outside = []

num_darts = int(input('Number of darts: '))

if num_darts > 1000000:

# error checking
raise RuntimeError('Too many particles.')

for _individual_dart in range(num_darts):

x = [Link]()
y = [Link]()

d = x**2 + y**2
if d < RADIUS:
# add to the list of coords inside circle
coords_inside.append((x,y))
else:
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

# also track outsiders for plotting
coords_outside.append((x,y))
pi = 4*len(coords_inside)/float(num_darts)
print('Pi is approximately: {}'.format(pi))

# Make plot
# unpack x's and y's into their own lists
xinside, yinside = zip(*coords_inside)
[Link](xinside, yinside, 'b.',label='Inside')

xoutside, youtside = zip(*coords_outside)

[Link](xoutside, youtside, 'gx',label='Outside')
[Link]()
[Link]()
[Link]('Approximation of $\pi$')
[Link]('x (m)')
[Link]('y (m)')
[Link]()
# uncomment to save as file
#[Link]('[Link]', dpi=200)

Warning: For this version, you better not try running too many
darts or else your machine really might crash.

And here is the result:

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Figure2: Plot of 10,000 darts hitting or missing.

Pretty fancy! This is admittedly a very inefficient method to approximate

π. The fundamental method of generating random numbers and running
computerized trials, however, is extremely powerful and valuable. First
used to model thermonuclear weapons on the original mainframes in
the 1950s, these methods are used all over science, engineering, risk
management, insurance, and finance. Now you’re well on your way to
becoming a high-powered quant mega-millionaire on Wall Street.
For more inspiration about what kind of plots you can make with Python
(as well as example code to learn how to do it), check out the matplotlib
gallery12 and plotly13 .
12
[Link]
13
[Link]

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A linear regression

Python is great for stats. This is often useful for your research teams
and around the house (I once used regressions to estimate what time the
furnace had to turn itself on to get up to the desired temperature given
the outdoor temperature each morning during the Michigan winter).
Let’s do a simple example of reading data in directly from Excel. The
pandas14 library provides high-level data analysis capabilities, but we’re
just going to use it for reading from Excel:

pip install --user pandas

pip install --user xlrd

We need some data to process. Open up your favorite spreadsheet pro-

gram (Excel or Open Office Calc will work fine, for instance) and let’s
generate some noisy data. Let’s use a line from this formula:

y = mx + b + ϵ

where:
m = 3.5
b = 2.3
ϵ = Uniform noise from -4 to 4

Note: If you have your own data you want to do a regression on, just
load that up instead!

In a new spreadsheet, label the first two columns X and Y. In the first
column, enter the formula: =RAND()*5 to get random x-values between
0 and 5. Click the little black box in the bottom right corner of the cell
and drag it down 30 or more cells to get lots of random X values. Then
in the Y column enter our line as =3.5*A1 + 2.3 + (RAND()*8-4)15 .
Double-click its little black box to fill down. Save the file as [Link].
It will look like this:
14
[Link]
15
To get our noise from -4 to 4 we do a random number between 0 and 8 and subtract
4 from it.

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Figure3: Example noisy data simulating our line. Yes we could use
Python to make these data but many of us receive data in spreadsheets.

To do the regression:
from scipy import stats
import pandas

# Read data
data = pandas.read_excel('[Link]')

# Grab the columns we want

x = data['X'].values
y = data['Y'].values

# Compute the regression

(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

results = [Link](x,y)

# unpack results into useful names

(slope, intercept, r_val, p_val, std_err) = results

# Display results
print('Slope: {}'.format(slope))
print('Intercept: {}'.format(intercept))
print('R-squared: {}'.format(r_val**2))
print('P-val: {}'.format(p_val))

Here’s the result with my data:

Slope: 3.473511906229649
Intercept: 1.8192562724560553
R-squared: 0.861400909580644
P-val: 1.1563714298035524e-12

That’s all it takes to do a regression! We can plot it too, by adding this

code:
# Make a plot while we're at it.
import [Link] as plt
import numpy
modelX = [Link](0,5,10)
modelY = modelX * slope + intercept
fig = [Link](dpi=300)
[Link](x,y,'o', label='Data')
[Link](modelX, modelY, '--',label='Model')

# Add labels & formatting fluff

[Link]('Beautiful regression')
[Link]('X')
[Link]('Y')
[Link](linestyle='--')
[Link]()
[Link](3.1,3.0,'m={:.3f}'.format(slope))
[Link](3.1,2.0,'b={:.3f}'.format(intercept))

[Link]('[Link]')

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Figure4: The random data plotted with the best linear fit.

Hey, not bad! Note that by defining the plot in code, we can afford
to spend time polishing its look to be very professional because we only
have to do that part once. We can then throw a billion different data sets
at this program and not have to spend a second plotting the results; we
already did it once, the computer’s got it from here.

Exercise
Make the noise go from -1 to 1 and see if your r2 value gets closer to
1.0!

Note: Another great tool for data processing is called R. There’s plenty
of debate about whether Python’s better than it. It’s fair to say that

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Python is sufficiently good at stats for production research and has the
advantage of being very general-purpose, so if you learn it, you get stats
plus anything else it can do, whereas R is more specialized for stats only.

The bridge to machine learning

From self-driving cars to face recognition to the Terminator, machine

learning (ML) is quite a hot topic. The reason it’s gotten so good is that
computer graphics cards have gotten extremely fast at doing matrix-
vector multiplication, largely driven by the gaming industry (where this
math is required for shading as players move around). Combine this
with the universal function (capable of mapping any arbitrarily-complex
input to an arbitrarily-complex output) that is the Convolutional Neural
Network and massive datasets to train them on (e.g. vast quantities of
selfies) and you’ve got yourself a machine learning revolution.
One good way to get your hands dirty in ML is to dedicate yourself to
some [Link] courses16 . These free online courses are cutting-edge, and
require roughly 8-hours per week for two months or so. Not everyone’s
computer is going to be good at training on large datasets (unless you’re
a gamer), but you can try it out (I got my computer working on them).
Better yet, they set up a cloud environment at Amazon Web Services
where you can just log into computers “in the cloud” that are more than
capable of doing the exercises in the class.

Note: Much ML work is done through Python, which interacts with

heavier-weight libraries under the hood. That’s another good reason to
choose Python as a first programming language.

A simpler introduction to computer vision (sort of related to ML) is to

play around with the OpenCV17 library. It has good Python bindings
and you can even get it going on a $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer.
I’ve seen people make license plate readers, recognize family members’
16
[Link]
17
[Link]

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faces, analyze video of experiments to collect data, and lots of other

useful things.
A trivial (non-ML) example usage of it is to get some data out of a movie
file. I had a high-speed video of a light mill and wanted to see how fast
it was spinning by analyzing the video18 . OpenCV is perfect for this. I
figured out which pixel I wanted to watch and then extracted intensity
vs. time with a simple program:

Figure5: Figuring out which pixel to read.

18
There’s a full blog post about this at [Link]
reading-out-a-crookes-radiometer-light-mill-with-python-and-opencv/

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Figure6: Plotting and analyzing the intensity data. Looks like it’s spin-
ning at about 32 vanes per second. These devices, actually called
Crookes radiometers, were originally scientific equipment that could be
combined with a stroboscope to measure the intensity of light.

The (partial) code for reading this looks like this:

import cv2 # bring in the OpenCV library

def measureIntensities(videoFileName, pointOfInterest):

"""Find the intensity of a point of interest in each frame"""
video = [Link](videoFileName)
intensities = []
while [Link]():
_returnCode, frame = [Link]()
if frame is None:
break
(continues on next page)

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(continued from previous page)

pixelValues = frame[pointOfInterest]
[Link]([Link]())
[Link]()
return intensities

If you have video of something and want to quantify some element of it

with a computer, OpenCV is your ticket. Once you are comfortable with
simple things like this, you can try out facial recognition and license-
plate reading with it as well.

Graphical User Interfaces

Making desktop applications GUI with dialogs, buttons, menus, and

forms can make your programs more accessible and user-friendly. Most
programming languages enjoy GUI frameworks that do most of the hard
work of making such interfaces. In Python, we have Kivy, wxPython,
PyQt, Tkinter, and dozens of others. I picked up wxPython first because
of its excellent demo app that lets you try out all its hundreds of widgets
interactively with sample code. Kivy is nice in that it can even run on
cell phones. PyQt is especially polished, though it requires a commer-
cial license if used in commercial software (not that there’s anything
wrong with that).
Perhaps the most universal and modern GUI system is a web browser,
which brings us to the next topic.

Web applications

Almost every web page you go to these days is actually a web appli-
cation, meaning it’s running some program behind the scenes and pre-
senting the results to you through a web browser like Firefox or Chrome.
Almost always, there’s a database sitting on the back end containing the
information. For instance, Facebook is conceptually a web-based view
of user data stored in a database and governed by rules and process.

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The possibilities with web apps are nearly endless. Unfathomable yet-to-
be-created businesses and services will be web apps. A home inventory
could be a web app. Twitter is a web app. Reddit is a web app. The pro-
grams driving web apps are written in many varieties of programming
languages, just like offline applications. Through the years, though, var-
ious frameworks have evolved that contain commonly-needed pieces of
web applications, like user authentication, secure form submission, and
secure database access. Starting with a web framework is a great way
to become productive at making safe and performant web apps rapidly.
The hundreds of web frameworks out there all have distinct pros and
cons. We will highlight only one of them here.
Instagram and the Washington Post are among the thousands of web
apps built upon a web framework called Django19 (“The D is silent”).
Django is surprisingly nice to use. Having come from a Python back-
ground, the fact that it uses Python made it extra easy for me to pick
up. I went through their Writing your first Django app tutorial20 and was
off and running. This was really an exciting moment for me because I
could just feel my mind expanding… “So many new possibilities. I can
make any web app out there with this thing!” It’s the closest thing to
leveling-up I think I’ll ever experience.
Django is extremely well documented and has a fun, engaged commu-
nity. For example, Django Girls21 is a non-profit centered on teaching
Django to girls around the world while building interest in program-
ming.

Note: One mental model that’s often used in these kinds of applica-
tions is the “Model-Viewer-Controller” (MVC) pattern. The model is the
database organized somehow, the viewer is the web page rendered with
the data in it, and the controller is the code running to figure out what to
show when, and what you are and are not allowed to do. By separating
these units out, the code remains easy to maintain. Django is designed
around MVC.

The sheer magnitude of capabilities Django and its add-ons bring is im-
19
[Link]
20
[Link]
21
[Link]

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pressive. Once you get to the point where you’re defining models, a lot
of impressive systems activate automatically. For example, let’s say you
were making a discussion forum where you had made some models that
look like this:

class Post([Link]):
title = [Link](max_length=300)
poster = [Link](User)
posted = [Link]()
votes = [Link](default=0)

class Comment([Link]):
title = [Link](max_length=300)
poster = [Link](User)
post = [Link](Post)
posted = [Link]()
votes = [Link](default=0)

The automatic administration panel would allow you to populate the

database with information. It presents you with web-based widgets that
are appropriate for each data type. The DateTimeField has a calendar
pop-up picker and the ForeignKeys have drop-downs with links to the
other instances. You can build custom forms for your users that auto-
matically get these widgets as well. You can also use the Django REST
framework (an add-on) which will set up an entire system to interact
with this app from other places (other web apps, desktop programs,
phones, etc.). In other words, all the things you typically need to be
done with a web app have built-in or readily available solutions.
I simply cannot emphasize how empowering this is. If you learn it, you’ll
start wanting to automate all sorts of inefficiencies around your office,
research team, warehouse, or wherever you find them. The official doc-
umentation cannot be improved upon and so to get started, simply head
on over to it and begin. Having Python installed from the previous sec-
tion is all you need to get going. I look forward to hearing about the
wonderful things you do with these systems.

Note: Sysadmin skills in running a web server are useful for setting
up production-caliber Django apps, though you can start building apps
right away using the built-in test server that comes with Django.

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And there you have it, the ultimate computer superpower. The skills
you’ve started here can change the world, or simply make your life a
little better. I hope you’ll find some exciting, interesting, and helpful
uses of these technologies.

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8
So far we’ve dealt exclusively in software. Whole new ballparks of fas-
cinating capabilities can be reached by looking to hardware as well.
Hardware can interact physically with us and our environment. And
what a time to be alive in the hardware realm! Of course, to begin
interacting with the physical world, it’s best to start with some user-
friendly hardware. The exploration of hardware in this chapter builds
on the skills introduced in Programming, since some coding is required.
Fortunately, completely novice programming experience is more than
enough to begin the journey. In fact, hardware projects often provide a
thrilling motivation for expanding one’s programming skills.
Smartphones have an astounding number of hardware sensors and in-
put devices on them, but unfortunately there’s no system that I’m aware
of that provides entry-level access to the data, other than the Unity3D
system discussed in Making games. Thus, in order to try out some
hardware-related superpowers, it may be necessary to buy some (rela-
tively inexpensive) hardware systems. This chapter is therefore simply
explanatory.

Warning: Electricity is dangerous and can kill you and/or damage

property. Taking an electronics course is a good way to get started
with the kinds of projects discussed in this chapter if you are inspired
to do so.

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The era of cheap, user-friendly microcon-

trollers

Since the early 2000s, the market has been flooded with circuit boards
containing a low-powered CPU, some memory, digital and analog in-
put/output ports (for interacting with the external world), and network
capabilities. These are basically mini-computers that you can program
with your normal computer and then disconnect to put in a robot, your
garden, an art installation, and so on.
One such product is the Arduino1 , an open-source microcontroller (the
hardware design is open as well as the software) that really started the
cheap-microcontroller revolution. To use, you attach various sensors,
buttons, lights, or other circuits to it and then write a small program
(called a sketch) on the computer. You transfer the program via the
USB port to the Arduino, where it gets stored on the board and be-
gins executing. These sketches are generally written in the C program-
ming language, which is lower-level than Python (C is more powerful
and faster but harder to read and write). Getting started, many users
keep it attached to the computer’s USB port as a power source and/or
to have it interact with the computer while executing. For robots and
other things away from the computer, a battery can be used for power
while the embedded program runs.
1
[Link]

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Figure1: An old Arduino 2009 connected to temperature sensors and

relay controllers that fully automate the temperature of an ancient hot
tub, allowing soakers to send text messages to adjust the temperature
while they’re on their way home. The computer reads the e-mails in a
Python program, reads the current hot tub temperature in the tub, and
turns the heater relay on or off to reach the target temperature.

Large collections of add-on boards (called shields) have been built and
are on the market that add additional features to Arduinos.

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The Raspberry Pi2 is another extremely popular single-board computer.

It has a much more powerful CPU than most Arduinos, an Ethernet port,
a Wi-Fi card, an HDMI video port, an audio output port, and a port for
an optional camera. It can run many of the same programs you use
on your daily PC, like web browsers and word processors. It’s used
for computer science education and has an absolutely huge hobbyist
following. A Pi can even be set up to play collections of old video games
(SNES anyone?). People run their entire home automation systems and
self-hosted cloud drives with them (more on that later). Raspberry Pis
are certainly more complex systems than Arduinos, but the extra power
makes them practical for running higher-level programming languages
(like Python), and the built-in peripherals make it more flexible.

Some basic peripherals

You’ll need some hardware components to fully embrace the hardware

superpowers. Here’s a list of some useful peripherals.
• LEDs — Little lights that you can turn on and off as indicators in a
game, on a control panel, or for thousands of other uses.
• Resistors — fundamental electronic components that resist the
flow of electricity. Often needed to keep too much electricity from
flowing (e.g. often used in series with LEDs). Get a variety pack.
• Prototype board — a board that you can plug circuit components
into to make connections, but that’s easy to tear down as well. Used
for experimenting and learning. Often when a design is finished,
it’s transferred from a proto-board to a custom circuit board with
solder.
• Relay board — A series of electromagnetic switches that can be
flipped on or off by small voltages (i.e. from a microcontroller).
With relays, you can use a microcontroller to switch on and off
something large like a heater or a large light. As always, electricity
is dangerous and can kill you. Do not hook a relay up to some
appliance without appropriate training and safety precautions. You
2
[Link]

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can often hear relays clicking on and off, and you may recognize the
sound from your turn signal relays in your car clicking on and off.
• PIR motion sensor — Passive Infrared motion sensors are those
white plastic motions sensors you see all over. They are cheap and
sensitive. You can build things that respond to motion with them,
like a security system or a Halloween product that yells when peo-
ple walk by.
• Sonar — Sonar uses sound reflections to measure distances. You
can mount sonar peripherals on your projects to see how far away
they are from a wall, or to increase audio pitch as something gets
closer, or whatever.
• Photoresistor — Responds to light. Can be used to build a
flashlight-tag game, respond to darkness, or turn off a light when
the sun comes up.
• Transistors — Fundamental components similar to relays but with
no moving parts and a continuum of responses, rather than just
on and off. These are the basis of digital technology behind all
of computer technology, but can also be useful for sending more
current than a microcontroller can safely provide to a bright LED
or a series of LEDs, among nearly infinite other things. You will
need some for various examples during your training.
• Patch cables — You’ll want a bunch of short multi-colored cables
to connect your hardware pieces together. These are available
with double-male, double-female, and mixed end connectors, and
all three styles come in handy.
• Power supplies — While a lot of fun, small stuff can run on USB
power, you’ll likely want more power supplies for certain projects.
For example, the LED light strips generally require 12V power (not
the 5V that comes out of a USB port) and a lot of amps. If you want
to control LED light strips you’ll need a power supply and a relay
board. These power supplies are exactly what you plug your laptop
and phone in with, but they have different voltages and amp ratings
which can be chosen based on your needs.

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An interactive art installation

I’d like to share an example of what kinds of things become possible with
the superpowers we are discussing. A Sweden-based artist named Mary
Coble happened upon a project I had done using a Raspberry Pi to blink
a laser in Morse code to communicate with light. She had used Morse
code in previous projects and wanted to set a new one up. Patrons would
type protest chants into a form on their phones, and the installation
would beam them out in Morse code across the town. I agreed to help
out, and so began a rewarding and exciting foray into the world of the
art technician.
The project wasn’t simple. Mary had to do all the artistic design and
physical implementation. I provided a shopping list (including a Rasp-
berry Pi, LED lights, and relays), instructions on how to set up the Pi
and wire the lights, and remote software support. Once Mary had the
Pi on her network, I was able to remotely connect and add the software I
had written to receive messages from a web page and switch the relays
on and off accordingly.
In the end, the system had the following schematic:

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Figure2: The various interconnects in the PULSE system backend

It went well, and Mary did an even larger version of the system in her
SHOUT FIRE exhibit at the Röda Sten Konsthall, in Göteborg, Sweden.

Note: For remote installations of any kind, a reverse SSH tunnel can be
useful. Wherever your controller is plugged into a network, it will seek
out and connect to your server. Once it does, you can connect to the
remote device through the tunnel. If you want to change the behavior
of the art installation once it’s installed, this can be a good option for

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doing so.

Working with this artist from across the Atlantic, whom I had never met
in person, in such an engaging and cool project was really just wonder-
ful. It felt like the internet really was bridging gaps in the way people
had dreamed of in the early days. What an experience!3

Even cheaper microcontrollers

One of the more astounding pieces of hardware is the Espressif 8266, or

ESP8266. This is a very tiny board with a processor and onboard Wi-Fi
capabilities. In bulk, it only costs $4! It’s now been succeeded by the
ESP32 which has Bluetooth as well. You can find a single unit of either
in a nice package online for about $10. These are super lower power
and can be put in about anything you can imagine. These little guys
can be the whole brains and communication system behind whatever
Wi-Fi capable little gadget you can dream up if you were interested in
going into the business of building and selling products. Since they’re so
cheap, it’s no problem to dedicate them to seemingly trivial applications.
For example, you can use them:
• To add an internet-controlled thermostat to an old boiler/furnace.
It’s basically a $4 Nest system
• To add a wireless opening sensor to a cabinet (which could be used
to set off an alarm or otherwise keep a child or friend away from
something)
• As a doorbell extender that senses when the doorbell goes off and
plays a recording of the doorbell on the stereo upstairs
• As the brains behind a star-tracking camera mount to keep the cam-
era pointed at the same star for many minutes while the world turns
That last example deserves more explanation…
3
The longer version of this story is available at [Link]
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Figure3: A ESP8266 microcontroller hooked to a set of relays. This

combo allows you to make a Wi-Fi controlled smart switch on a very
tight budget, all while learning a ton and paving the road for even more
creative ideas down the road.

A star-tracking camera mount for astropho-

tography

The Earth rotates 360° every 24 hours, making it difficult to take a long-
exposure photograph of stars with the shutter open more than a few
seconds without getting streaks. A simple solution is to put the camera
on a mount that rotates the same exact speed but in the opposite direc-
tion, canceling out the rotation and keeping the stars deadlocked with
the lens. You can buy a camera mount that does this, or you could make
one yourself using your digital superpowers. One simple mechanism is
to put two boards together with a hinge and have a motor slowly turn a

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screw to push the boards apart. This is called a barn-door mechanism,

and looks schematically like this:

Figure4: A schematic of a barn-door star-tracking camera mount.

If you make the distance L equal to 29 cm, a motor that turns at 1 RPM
will give you very close to the right speed. In that case, this project is
fairly simple and no fancy software is needed. But that rate will only
work for short exposures. If you want very long exposures, the motor
has to speed up as the screw is inserted more. Mathematically, just note
that the long arm of the triangle in the figure gets longer as the screw
slides along the bottom of the upper board to see why.
If you use a stepper motor controlled by a microcontroller (like the
ESP8266), you can precisely control the speed with which the motor
turns, and you can even speed it up as time goes on to do the tangent

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correction (as its called) in software!! This is extremely cool and works
very well.

Note: By the way, the Sun is a star like any other, and this project can
be adapted with larger motors to track it with a solar-panel, increasing
the efficiency of your solar installation. The software is the same!

Detailed pictures, source code, and construction steps for doing this ex-
act project are available under an open-source license at [Link]
com/partofthething/startracker

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Figure5: A photo of a working star-tracking camera mount.

Controlling hardware directly from your lap-

top

If you’d like to interface with some hardware but you don’t want or need
to bother with microcontrollers, you can just use your laptop directly for
many of these activities. You do need a bridge to the hardware world.

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When I first read about Bunny Hwang’s “heirloom laptop” that he added
General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) ports to, I was really jealous and
thought that was a great idea. That would allow you to control relays,
read signals, blink lights, read data from various sensors, and all sorts
of things people do with microcontrollers right on a laptop. It turns out
that you can get a USB device that adds GPIO ports to any computer
quite easily.
4
The Adafruit FT232H breakout is one such device. Most of the demos
you may find online about doing such things with an Arduino or Rasp-
berry Pi can also probably be done with a board like this and software
on your computer.

Figure6: The FT232H breakout board, a general-purpose GPIO system

for your USB port.
4
[Link]

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For example, if you have a simple digital level and you’d like to read the
data in live to support some experiment or other project, this breakout
board is perfect. An example usage would be to precisely measure and
calibrate the rate of change of the angle in a star-tracker like the one
just discussed.

Figure7: Level data with best fit line for calibrating a star-tracker. The
Python code that read these data and made this plot are included in the
star-tracking code referenced in the previous section, in the calibra-
tion folder.

This chapter briefly introduced you to a variety of ways to bridge the

gap between computers and the physical world. I hope these concepts
help bring you an “Ah-ha!” moment regarding something you’ve been
dreaming of starting. Many devices on the shelves of stores can be built

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using combinations of the components you read about here. What new
product can you dream up?

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 Self-Hosting
9
With all the news about this company breaching trust and that company
getting itself breached by hackers, some of us may feel the urge to take
back some control of our data by keeping it on machines we operate
and/or own. This practice is called self-hosting. Fortunately, those who
want to take a deep dive will find plenty of options. This chapter will
explore but a few.
This is a bonus chapter intended for advanced readers who are either
very interested in the hobby elements of computing or who are thinking
of becoming IT professionals and want to get their hands dirty.

Warning: By self-hosting your data you may avoid the prying eyes
of companies out there, but you take on the full responsibility of pro-
tecting what you host. It’s a constantly changing world out there.
New threats come up fairly regularly. It’s often safest to leave host-
ing important data or processes to professionals. But that’s also a lot
less fun and educational.

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Getting your own server

The first step in self-hosting is to get or choose your server (or servers).
Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to pay a Virtual Private Server
(VPS) company money. They’ll spin up a fresh (virtual) server in one of
their data centers and give you login credentials. You can log in from
your terminal and begin immediately. Companies like DigitalOcean1 and
Linode2 will get you up and running in mere minutes starting around
$5/month. The big companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) offer similar
services. In this option, you’re still trusting the VPS host with your data
but you’re much more unique, and there’s at least a little security in
obscurity. This is a very good option for trying things out in any case.
You could get a server going in your own home. This would involve either
configuring an old PC or laptop you have sitting around as a server,
buying something like a Dell PowerEdge entry-level server, or cobbling
one of your own together by choosing components and installing them
in a case. This option is not ideal for hosting things like web pages
and e-mail (your home IP address changes frequently, and many ISPs
don’t allow hosting), but it can be really nice for personal things like file
storage, home automation, ad-blocking, or a VPN.
1
[Link]
2
[Link]

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Figure1: This is what it looks like to buy components of a computer

(minus hard drives) before assembling it. These things effectively snap
together but you should enlist the help of a friend who has done some-
thing similar before for your first time.

You could also buy a rack-mount server and pay a data center to let you
put it in there. That will give you reliable power, cooling, and networking
but will be pretty expensive.
Most hard-core of all is to build your own rack and get a business inter-
net connection from your ISP that does explicitly allow hosting. Do this
if you want to start your own data center or something.
Once you have a server up and running, you have to choose which ser-
vices and programs to run on it and then install/configure them.

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Well-polished self-hosted catch-all

Before mentioning the low-level self-hosting options below you should

know that Nextcloud3 is a very good option to get started in self-hosting.
It can run on your server and will provide personal cloud-based file syn-
chronization (like Dropbox) as well as calendar and contacts. The com-
pany behind it offers Nextcloud support to businesses who want to run
it on their own servers, but anyone can run a copy of it themselves on
their own system, including a Raspberry Pi. Nextcloud was forked from
their now-competitor, OwnCloud4 , which offers similar features. If you
go this route, you’ll find the client programs in your package manager
and can easily install them to start syncing.

Self-hosted home automation and security

Computers can do really wonderful things around the home when

hooked to various sensors and switches. Home automation is a major
industry with major players. I think it’s fair to be skeptical of putting
control and surveillance of our own home in the hands of other people.
Additionally, if some server in Texas goes down for whatever reason,
you don’t want your house to stop being smart only because it’s totally
dependent on the cloud! Fortunately, the world of self-hosting for home
automation is extremely advanced, active, and welcoming.
Home Assistant5 is an incredible open-source home automation driver
system that was at one point among the top active repositories on
GitHub. You can install it on a computer in your home (even on a cheap
little Raspberry Pi) and have it do all kinds of things. All data stays right
at home. Here are just a few examples of what you can configure it to
do:
• Turn your lights on at a certain time and play nice music to help
you wake up
• Turn lights on in the living room when you walk in
3
[Link]
4
[Link]
5
[Link]

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• Alert you if it’s going to be extra rainy today

• Advise you about your commute options
• Play a Common Loon call6 the second the Sun sets every day
• Turn your dumb furnace into a smart furnace, heating up every
morning before you wake
• Arm a security system when all family members’ cell phones have
disconnected from the Wi-Fi network (and also at night when ev-
eryone goes to bed)
• Disarm a security system when any family member reconnects to
the Wi-Fi (so you never have to type a code or anything)
• Trigger an alarm that turns lights on, blares a siren, and e-mails
pictures to you from cameras when a door is opened or motion is
sensed while armed (after a brief warning period)
• Control your TV, stereo, and air conditioner as you desire (e.g. cool
it down when you start your commute on hot days)
• Remind you on certain days of events on your calendar, or when
it’s garbage day
• Provide gentle beep noises whenever any door is opened or closed
when you’re home
• Rig up a motion-activated jump-scare on a TV for a Halloween party
• Dim the lights at night, and play some cricket noises for ambiance
• Remind you randomly to do pushups
• Monitor your household energy usage
• Turn a closet light off 20 minutes after it’s been turned on
• Turn lights on and off randomly when you’re away to confuse
would-be burglars
6
[Link]

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Figure2: A few sensor readings from Home Assistant.

Here are some steps to try out Home Assistant:

• Get a Raspberry Pi kit including a memory card, power supply, and
case. It should run you about $50. This is a full-on Linux computer,
but tiny and cheap. Once you set it up, install it near a stereo and
connect the audio output of the Pi to an audio input of your stereo.
This will allow it to alert you of things audibly.
• Get a USB Z-Wave dongle like the Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5, Z-Wave

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Plus USB. Z-Wave is a wireless technology not unlike Wi-Fi but on

a different radio frequency. It’s designed for low-bandwidth mesh-
networks, meaning a signal can reach the main access point by
relaying from device to device if the access point isn’t in direct
range.
• Get a few Z-Wave door sensors, switches, and motion sensors (as
budget allows). The easiest switches to install are basically things
you plug into the wall and then plug your lamp (or whatever) into
a socket it provides.
• Install Home Assistant. I prefer the “Virtual Environment” instal-
lation method even though the “docker” option may be a little sim-
pler. Set up the configuration for Z-Wave.

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Figure3: A few good Z-Wave sensors and switches. The plug-

in ones are very convenient for adding smart-capabilities to normal
things (like Christmas lights), and the battery-powered door and mo-
tion/temperature/humidity sensors last far longer than one might ex-
pect.

Home Assistant uses text files in the YAML format for configuration. The
best way to get the hang of it is to look through a lot of the example
configurations people have posted online. Then, try to make your own
automation. The best part about the community is that you can ask, and

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they’ll really help guide you through. There’s even a chat room for help.
Here’s one that plays a little beep every time someone opens a door:

shell_command:
door_chime: play -v 0.6 /pool/Systems/AptPi/Videos/beep.mp3

automation:
- alias: Doorbell
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.sliding_door
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.front_door
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_door
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
- platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.porch_door
from: 'off'
to: 'on'
action:
service: shell_command.door_chime

These structured-text input files are yet another example of the utility
of pure text files.

Set up your own VPN Server

You may have a workplace that lets you connect to their VPN to get
onto the corporate network and access your files. If you’re feeling up
to it, you can actually set up a personal VPN server for yourself in your
home using an open source VPN system called OpenVPN7 . You can get
all the benefits from Using a VPN Service for free while also accessing
7
[Link]

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your home network from wherever you are, and quite securely! Who
can you trust to not snoop on you better than yourself8 ? People who
are into security cameras, home automation, and other advanced home
networking would like this “road warrior” option. You can even install
a VPN server on some of the more powerful home Wi-Fi routers them-
selves (some even come with a VPN server capability out of the box!).
Setting up a VPN server may be cheapest if you install an after-market
firmware system on your home router. This isn’t particularly easy and
can damage your router if you do it wrong, so I can’t recommend it
unless you have a backup to fiddle with, and are willing to struggle a
little while reading forums on advanced troubleshooting. The standout
aftermarket router firmware is called OpenWrt9 . Once you install it on
a supported router, setting up the VPN server functionality requires a
few steps:
• Generating cryptographic keys for the server and all the clients
you wish to connect with (all laptops, phones, etc. you have, and
maybe your friends’ too if you want to charge them).
• Entering the server keys and settings into the router’s configura-
tion (through the router web interface)
• Adjusting the firewall on the router appropriately
• Downloading and installing OpenVPN clients on all your laptops
and phones (use the app called OpenVPN Connect)
• Copying the cryptographic client keys to each device and importing
them into the client
• Keeping track of your home’s public IP address, typically by setting
up something called Dynamic DNS
The tutorials about doing this are very long10 , commiserate with how
complex these systems are. Although that particular one is a bit longer
than it needs to be (no use of the LuCI user-interface!?). It looks like the
internet as a whole is short of a great OpenVPN server tutorial at the
moment. Of course, you can also install OpenVPN on any other server,
8
Of course your ISP can always snoop on your metadata. Unless you use the ulti-
mate in network security: The Onion Router.
9
[Link]
10
[Link]

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including a VPS. That may honestly be the best bet for privacy, but you’ll
miss out on accessing your home devices.

Your own webserver

As discussed in Publishing, putting web pages online requires server

space. Beyond paying someone to configure and run the servers for
you, you can also configure and run your own. The apache and nginx
systems are among the most popular for web servers. If you do end
up going deep with self-hosting, it’s very useful to have one of these
systems operating, even if you don’t have a public web page to host.
Since these systems are the first line of defense for the majority of the
internet against attackers, they are made with security in mind. You can
hide many of the self-hosted applications discussed here behind these
efforts. Something called a reverse proxy comes in handy for this, where
you run your self-hosted application on your server, but only expose it to
the public internet through a specially-guarded pathway going through
apache.
While many self-hosted applications do come with their own web-server
system, it’s a simple fact that no matter which one it is, it’s not as
widespread as apache. Thus, apache has had more eyes on it, so when
vulnerabilities are found, it gets patched very rapidly.

Hosting your own contacts and calendar

One of the major societal advances evident when one loses a phone is
that when you get a new one and sign in, your contacts and calendar
often are still there. This is because they are “in the cloud” or as we
learned earlier “on someone’s server somewhere”. If you have your
own server, you can get the same capability without giving anyone else
your info.
The internet standards governing the exchange of contact and calendar
information are called CardDAV and CalDAV. Most calendar and contact
apps on phones or computers will be able to interact with any server

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that speaks these languages. One great open-source CalDAV/CardDAV

server is called Radicale11 . It’s written in Python and can run on any
kind of machine.
It’s nearly trivial to get it up and running at home in a way that will
only be accessible from your home network. However, it’s even better
to have it running on the public internet so that you can update your
calendar while you’re away from home. To do that requires you to con-
figure a web server and use a reverse proxy as mentioned above. The
details are out of the scope of this book, but I encourage you to look into
it if it’s something you think you’re interested in. Personally, I love that
kind of thing.

Personal cloud for documents and photos

As mentioned above, Nextcloud is the easiest way to get started with

your own cloud file synchronization system.
For all you advanced web server operators out there, Seafile12 is another
excellent option. It has phone and desktop clients for all major systems,
and can auto-upload photos taken on your phone.

Self-hosting your own e-mail

No one recommends self-hosting your own e-mail anymore. In fact, most

corporate IT departments don’t even want to host e-mail; many of them
are migrating to cloud-based services maintained by a few major com-
panies. However, for those of us who really want to achieve the ulti-
mate badge of honor in self-hosting (and the associated inability to get
your e-mails through to a bunch of people), just know that it is cer-
tainly possible. Dovecot and postfix are the server components, and
spamassassin with Bayesian filtering is surprisingly effective against
spam. As you configure your server, send a test e-mail to services such
as [Link] which will analyse it and produce a report
11
[Link]
12
[Link]

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telling you of any server configuration issues you still have to work out.
Once you get a 10/10 score, you’re good to go.

That wraps up this bonus chapter. I hope this brief tour will inspire
the brave and curious among you to investigate the fascinating world of
self-hosting.

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 Conclusion
10
From slinging PDFs to DJing a dance to making the next great web app,
the tools and practices you’ve now experienced are true digital super-
powers. You have completed the first step to becoming a digital super-
hero (or mastermind, or wizard, or whatever form of expert you aspire
to become). While you now know some of these tools as well as you ever
will need, mastery in all of them is readily attainable through additional
practice and effort. You will find that mastery will come naturally as
you reach for these tools again and again. You’ll start out using one
little feature (perhaps the one you learned in this book), and you’ll won-
der if there’s a tweak that gives you a slightly different behavior. You’ll
build skill upon skill this way, personally crafting your superpowers to
meet your specific needs, interests, and dreams.
Go forth and fulfill those dreams! Good luck.

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190 Chapter 10. Conclusion

 11
Glossary

2-factor authentication
2FA is a means for a computer user to identify themself and au-
thenticate using both something they know (usually a password)
with something they have (often a phone or keychain with chang-
ing digits on it).
Bit
A single one or zero; the fundamental digit in the binary number
system.
Byte
Eight bits together, representing a number between 0 and 28 − 1 or
255
Bitmap
Computer graphics represented as a connected grid of pixels of
different colors that make up an image. Used often to represent
photographs on computers.
Cascading Style Sheets
A system of text files that define the look and feel of a web page
separately from the files and/or data that make up the content of
the page.
CMS
A content management system is Web-based software that assists
in building and maintaining websites in user-friendly ways.

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Cloud
Always-available computer servers running on the internet. Often
used as an alternate place to store files or e-mails rather than on a
local hard disk drive.
Command line
The interface on many computer systems that allows the user to
enter text commands to be processed. Infamous for looking hacky
but actually being extremely expressive and useful.
Central Processing Unit
The CPU is the “brain” of a computer, it’s a microprocessor that
crunches all the numbers. Made of billions and billions of little
transistors etched onto a silicon wafer.
Dark web
Any part of the internet that isn’t readily available for browsing
by the public. Technically includes your friends’ e-mails since not
everyone is authorized to see them. Typically used in practice to
refer to the black market networks running alongside more legiti-
mate services in The Onion Router.
Database
A computer system designed to receive, store, and retrieve large
amounts of information from multiple concurrent other computer
systems.
DNS
The Domain Name System is a “phonebook” for computer networks
that maps readable names like [Link] to computer-
usable IP addresses like [Link].
EFF
Electronic Frontier Foundation1 is a nonprofit defending digital pri-
vacy, free speech, and innovation.
Encryption
The process of hiding information from prying eyes on network or
elsewhere using math. Can also validate that information was sent
unchanged from a particular individual.
GNU
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Gnu’s Not Unix (GNU) (recursive acronym) is a free-software col-

laboration project that started in 1983 and continues to this day.
Many free, open-source tools are developed under the GNU um-
brella.
GUI
A Graphical User Interface uses a monitor and a mouse or touch-
screen to provide a visual-based experience in using a computer
program rather than a purely text-driven environment. Windows
and macOS are GUI OSs, while DOS was not (if you recall DOS).
Hard drive
The device in a computer that stores information like documents,
photos, programs, and so on for long periods of time. Contrast with
RAM (see Memory).
IP address
An Internet Protocol address defines where a computer is on a com-
puter network, similar to a street address in real life. It is numer-
ical, either four numbers between 0 and 255 separated by peri-
ods (IPv4) or eight groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by
colons (IPv6). All domain names and other human-readable net-
work locations are mapped to IP addresses via DNS.
ISP
An Internet Service Provider is a company you pay to deliver a con-
nection to the public internet. Examples include Comcast, Centu-
ryLink, Charter, etc.
LaTeX
A document typesetting and publishing system that separates con-
tent from presentation.
Lightweight markup language
A markup language with an intentionally-simple syntax, often to
accommodate rapid creation by a human writer.
Linear regression
The process of finding the equation of a line that best fits a given
set of data points.
Linux
An open-source operating system that powers many servers that
make up the internet, all Android smart-phones, all of the top 500

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largest supercomputers on Earth, and a small but growing number

of PCs.
macOS
A proprietary operating system made by Apple and used on Apple
computers and iPhones.
Markup language
A way to express something to a computer using a text file with
special text-based annotations. For instance, while italics cannot
be represented directly in a pure text file, a word could be indicated
as italicized by surrounding it in in <i> tags. Markup languages are
used often for rich data exchange (e.g. HTML and XML).
Memory
Hardware that can store large chunks of information on a com-
puter for some period of time. Memory is typically used for Ran-
dom Access Memory (RAM), which is a short-lived fast-acting mem-
ory. There’s also hard-drive memory which is slower, larger, and
cheaper.
Network Attached Storage
A NAS is a bank of large hard drives that are made available on a
network, often used for backups of photos and videos.
Noise
Random information present on any analog signal such as the hiss
on the radio or the snow on old TVs
Onion router
A web-browsing technology that offers increased anonymity and se-
curity over normal browsing. It hides the web pages you’re brows-
ing from the infrastructure and hides your place of origin from the
web pages you browse.
Operating system
An OS is a set of software that runs a computer. It interacts with all
hardware and provides the environment in which other programs
run. Examples are Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Package manager
A program that can go out on the internet and find a different pro-
gram, download it, install it, configure it, and (later, if desired)

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uninstall it. These pre-date app stores but are very similar in con-
cept. These allow for easy program management, often though
at least nominally more secure channels than random downloads.
Each OS has its own package managers.
Password manager
A program or service that stores various passwords for various ser-
vices in one place. It also has facilities for generating random pass-
words to avoid the problems of password-reuse.
Programming
Writing a sequence of operations for a computer to perform. The
process of creating software.
Regular expressions
A general pattern representing some combination of letters, num-
bers, punctuation, and other characters that is used for advanced
searching and replacing in text and data processing.
Router
A network component that receives packets and forwards them to a
client or other network that it knows about but perhaps the sender
does not (and vice versa).
Secure Shell (SSH)
A means for accessing the command line of a computer that’s con-
nected to you by a network that maintains strong security along the
network as commands and responses are passed back and forth.
Static site generator
A program or system that converts lightweight markdown lan-
guage code and images into a full HTML website. It’s effectively a
lightweight CMS.
Text editor
A program that views and modifies text files.
Text file
A universal file that only contains sequences of characters without
any embedded information about font, style, etc. These are very
useful and fundamental as an interface file between various steps
of data processing, publishing, programming, etc.
Top-level domain

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A TLD is the suffix of a domain name like .com or .edu or even

.horse.
Vector graphics
Computer graphics defined by mathematical equations rather than
grids of pixels. For certain types of images (e.g. icons, logos) they
are nice because they use very few bits but can be zoomed in on
infinitely. Contrast with Bitmaps.
Virtual machine
A computer program that emulates the hardware of a different
computer system.
VPN
A Virtual Private Network is a technology that securely connects
through the public internet to servers you are specially authorized
on. Used frequently for businesses, allowing employees to connect
to corporate intranet resources like shared drives while away on
travel. Also offered as a commercial service to help add network
security and privacy for consumers.
VST
Virtual Studio Technology2 is a specification that defines how a
large set of software plugins work together while composing music
on a computerized studio.
Windows
A proprietary operating system made by Microsoft that runs on
most consumer and office PCs.

2
[Link]

196 Chapter 11. Glossary

 Index

Non-alphabetical Column edit, 50

2-factor authentication, 191 Command line, 12, 192
3-D modeling, 89 Compiling, 138
Compression, 93
A Computer vision, 151
Concentration, 46
Adblockers, 35 Cross-references, 120
Adobe Acrobat, 52
Amazon, 128
Amazon Web Services, 11
D
Arduino, 159 Dark web, 40, 192
Audacity, 98 Darktable, 95
Audio processing, 97 Database, 192
Diceware, 19
B Digital darkroom, 92
Django, 154
Backups, 8 DJing, 105
BibTeX, 122 DNS, 31, 114, 192
Bit, 191 Docker, 32
Bitmap, 84, 191 Domain name, 114
Blender, 89, 109 DOS, 34
Byte, 191 DOSBox, 34
Dropbox, 11
C Drum machine, 102
C, 159 DuckDuckGo, 25
CAD, 90
Cascading Style Sheets, 119, 191 E
Central Processing Unit, 192 eBooks, 128
Clone stamp, 78 EFF, 192
Cloud, 11, 192 Encryption, 10, 192
Cloudflare, 31 Bitlocker, 10
CMS, 118, 191

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E-mail, 60 IP address, 193

File, 10 ISP, 193
Messaging, 60
Public-key cryptography, 60 J
Text messages, 60 Jekyll, 119
ePub, 128 JPEG, 93
ESP8266, 166

F K
KdenLive, 109
ffmpeg, 107 Key pair, 60
File extensions, 48 Keyboard shortcuts, 25
Files, 7 Kindle, 128
Find and replace, 54, 73 Krita, 85
Firefox, 35
Firewall, 31
Flowcharts, 68
L
Folders, 7 LaTeX, 120, 193
Fraud, 21 LEDs, 162
FreeCAD, 90 Lightweight markup language, 126,
Fusion 360, 90 193
Linear regression, 193
G Linux, 193
Logos, 85
Game engine, 110 Logseq, 46
GIMP, 77 LyX, 126
git, 131
GNU, 192
GNU utilities, 70
M
GnuPG, 60 Machine learning, 151
Gpg4win, 67 macOS, 194
Graphviz, 68 Making thumbnails, 80
Grep, 72 Markdown, 126
GUI, 193 Markup language, 194
Medium, 114
H Memory, 194
Mixxx, 105
Hard drive, 193
mogrify, 80
HSL, 88
Montages, 80
HTML, 117
Movies, 107
Hydrogen, 102
Music, 97, 102
[Link], 46
I
iCloud, 11
Image conversion, 80
N
Name server, 114
Image manipulation, 77
Network Attached Storage, 194
ImageMagick, 80
Network attached storage, 9
Index, 128
Noise, 194
Inkscape, 84
Noise generator, 46
Install, see Package managers

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Notes, 46 Prototype board, 162

Publishing online, 114
O Python, 159
Obsidian, 46
Office suites, 45 Q
OneDrive, 11 QR code, 29
Onion router, 194
Onion routing, 40 R
OpenCV, 151 Rainbow tables, 29
OpenSCAD, 90 Ransomware, 21
OpenShot, 109 Raspberry Pi, 35, 159
OpenToonz, 85 RAW, 93
Operating system, 6, 194 Ray-tracing, 89
Linux, 6 Reference management, 120
macOS, 6 Regular expressions, 54, 195
Windows, 6 Relays, 162
Resitors, 162
P ReStructuredText, 126
Package manager, 194 robocopy, 8
Package managers, 14 Router, 28, 195
Apt, 14 rsync, 8
Chocolatey, 14
Homebrew, 14 S
Pandoc, 126
Save As, 7
Password, 29
Scams, 21
Password manager, 17, 195
Screenshots, 47
1Password, 17
Secure Shell (SSH), 195
Keepassxc, 17
Security, 36
Lastpass, 17
Signal, 60
Passwords, 19
Snipping tool, 47
Pattern matching, 54, 72
Sonar, 162
PDFs, 52
Sound card, 98
pdftk, 52
Source code, 138
Perl, 54, 72
Sphinx, 126, 128
Phishing, 21
Spreadsheets, 45
Photography, 92
Static site generator, 119, 195
Photoresistor, 162
Synthesizers, 102
Pihole, 35
Pitch modification, 98
Podcasts, 97 T
Port forwarding, 31 Tab completion, 12
POV-Ray, 89 Terminal, see Command line
Powershell, see Command line TeXstudio, 126
Print screen, 47 Text editor, 195
Printers, 27 Text editors, 48
Programming, 130, 195 gedit, 48
Programming languages, 138 sublime, 48

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vim, 48
Text file, 195
Tikz, 68
Time-lapse, 80, 107
Top-level domain, 195
Top-level domain, 114
Tor, see Onion routing
Track changes, 131
Transistor, 162

U
Uninstall, see Package managers
Unit conversion, 71
Unity3D, 110

V
Vector graphics, 84, 196
Version control system, 131
Video conversion, 107
Video editing, 109
Video games, 110
Virtual machine, 32, 196
Virtualbox, 32
VPN, 36, 196
VST, 196

W
Wardriving, 29
Web application, 154
Web page, 114, 116
Web server, 116
Wi-Fi, 29
Windows, 196
Wix, 114
Wordpress, 114, 118

200 Index