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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • It’s not really “the only way”. A similar problem to think about would be: what if your primary email account got compromised?

    It makes sense to set up alternative means for recovering any account (or changing the associated email address), for example via second mail address, phone number, one-time-passwords, snail mail or similar. Many account providers use a recovery question system - here, I’d suggest using irregular answers, e.g. for “what is your favorite colour”, I would’t use a colour at all to make it harder to guess.

    Compartmentalizing would be another approach: use different providers in a mix so that when one goes the way of the dodo, parts of your registered accounts remain useable. Ideally, for “critical” stuff like bank accounts, you’d split them up between different email addresses. But then again, for this kind of account, I’d really expect the bank to provide some other ways of backup access/restoration.



















  • My first programming related memory is of the QBasic interpreter.

    I had written some code I was quite happy with, but not saved it yet. As part of a subroutine for sound output, I quickly wrote a loop from 20 to 20000 to output a test signal over 1 second each with that frequency via the PC speaker and hit execute.

    Realizing my mistake, It being MS-DOS and thus single-threaded, I couldn’t Ctrl+C out of it without killing QBasic altogether and losing my code. I couldn’t turn town the PC speaker.

    I ended up closing various doors between the PC and me and waiting it out.