keybase is a website that allows you to prove that a given account or website is owned by you. to explain how this works, we’ll need to briefly cover public key cryptography. there are many ways to encrypt a file. one such way involves using a password to encrypt the… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What’s Keybase?
when you access a website in your browser, its URL (Universal Resource Location) will almost always start with either https:// or http://. this is known as the schema, and tells the browser what type of connection it’s going to be using, and how it needs to talk to the server.… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What do all the parts of a URL or hyperlink mean?
a web browser is a program that displays a HTML document, in the same way that a text editor is a program that displays a txt file, or a video player displays MP4s, AVIs, etc. HTML has been around for a while, first appearing around 1990. HTML alone is enough… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: Why are there so few web browsers?
“defrag” is short for “defragment”. when a file is saved to a hard drive, it is physically written to the device by a needle. when you need to read the file, the needle moves along the portion of the disk that contains the data to read it. let’s say you… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What’s “defragging”?
an operating system (OS), such as windows or macOS, handles a lot of low-level stuff. this means that developers don’t have to worry about details like “how to scroll a page” or “how to read text from a file”, because the OS handles it for you. a computer can’t do… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: why don’t windows programs work on a mac, and vice versa?
the “analogue loophole” (or the analog loophole) refers to the idea that no matter how hard you try to make sure nobody can make illegal copies of videos, music, or text, there’s always a “hole” in the protection that occurs when it’s no longer digital. digital content can be protected… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: what is the “analogue loophole”?
after downloading the image, OCRbot uses tesseract-ocr to extract the text. this is a free (as in libre and gratis) program that uses neural networks to do the job. it’s been trained on a massive dataset of text and has “learned” what letters usually look like. it knows that a… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: How does OCRbot work?
the ebooks bots (the ones i using the code i made, anyway) use something called markov chains. markov chains are a mathematical concept, and in computer science (computers are the only thing i know about), they are generally used for predictive text. when you type “how are” on your phone… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: How do mstdn-ebooks bots work?
Let’s use twitter and mastodon for our examples.Twitter is centralised, while Mastodon is not. This means that it’s possible for Twitter to disappear at any time – the CEO could (theoretically) shut it down and delete anything at a moment’s notice. The company behind twitter has complete control over everything… Read More »Lynne Teaches Tech: What does “decentralised” mean?