Seems like this one finally decided to jump from my window sill to the bird feeder. Impressive.

Sorry for the bad photo - had to make do with a grab shot from my iPhone through a window.

Watch out for this - it is quite obvious but if you are in desperate need for cash, do not fall for it. I just received an SMS message:

First warning: Canadians do not write the $ sign after the amount. CRA will never send Interact payments to you personally - they send cheques. Then there is the URL.

Joke aside, I recently had to respond to some comments about password strength checkers and revisited an old blog entry I made back in 2012. What interested me, was that in 2012 my relatively high end rig managed an average of 925 million hashes per second:

Speed........: 924.0M c/s Real, 929.7M c/s GPU

That meant I could brute force any 6 character password within 13 minutes. On my latest rig I checked again and what a difference 5 years made (not that my system is optimised for password cracking):

I have been using Apple computers for much more than a decade now, and with that the natural choice for a keyboard is the Apple Wired Keyboard. I have been typing on this keyboard since it came out as version A, on to version B. During the many years of using it I have grown extremely accustomed to its low profile keys and form factor.

Recently I have grown increasingly frustrated with the quality of the unit. Specifically, I tend to take exactly 2 years to break the right shift key - I literally punch a hole through the key cap. The key itself starts not typing accurately, and so too does some of the other keys like spacebar. So I have been buying new keyboards every 2 years - I think I am on keyboard #5 since the first one 10 years ago.