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aimai-ronri · 3 years

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Reworking the Fuzzy Gaming Quest

This is the first time I've ever blogged publicly about something like this. I usually talk to friends about it, but I just as often don't say anything, because when I talk about video-games I get hyperfocused and sometimes the conversation takes a long time, so I often feel like it's a bit rude to get people wrapped up in it. But I remembered I have a tumblr now and people actually blog on here sometimes, so: prepare to suffer.

To set up why I'm so weird about games allow me to explain: first of all, I'm obviously not neurotypical in some way I don't know but one day would like to figure out. SECOND, I've been playing video-games literally since I can remember. My first real memories of cognition are watching my dad put cartridges in the NES, and climbing on the bed to put our Thai bootleg cart in there myself so I could play weird sprite hacks of Super Mario Bros. So anyway, gaming has factored heavily in my life since the beginning.

Anyway long story short, this has led to, for a long time, me wanting to leave some kind of legacy behind me in the form of a trail of beaten-up old video-games. Often this takes the form of just wanting to curate out a collection (physical or unholy--I mean digital) that I can leave behind in some state of completion, but on top of that it comes as me wanting to sit down and truly spend time with the games that are most important to my history over the course of my lifetime.

This has led to me making innumerable 'systems' for approaching the task of having a humongous backlog of video-games (some might say longer than is completable than anyone in a life time, and I recognize this) and often these systems get replaced or revised for being inadequate in some way. The latest no-thought system on my part was the Fuzzy Gaming Quest, in which the goal was basically to play through games starting from the beginning of time and blasting through at hyper-speed, with the intention of covering as much ground in order to induce familiarity as fast as possible with arcade games from an era I've rarely played (but longed for in my old man's soul).

This was working but I quickly ran into a snag (after recording about 250 videos 😥): I wasn't spending as much time with individual games as I'd like by any means. On one hand, I was backlogging games I was enjoying just to get them out of the way and continue the progress. On the other, sometimes I wasn't sure how much time you'd even spend with a game to consider yourself familiarized enough to rank it in some way, without necessarily having to beat everything (who has the time?). Not to mention arcade games that have no viable ending for the regular player (Pac-Man, Galaga, etc).

So anyway all this is leading up to me explaining the next iteration of the Fuzzy Gaming Quest. Here's a picture!

What you're looking at is essentially a 7 day scoreboard for various games that I selected out as important during my previous pass through the 70s and most of the 80s. These are all games I wanted to play more of or possibly log in a list.

7 days is my naive answer to how long I think would be good to spend on a game, in order to get competent enough at it to get a decent score and/or feel you've experienced your average game enough to go ahead and put it somewhere in a list. It might seem like overkill for a simple arcade game (though I'd argue you need to play repeatedly and give your brain time to absorb it to get the true experience), and it may seem like underkill for an RPG (though I'd argue that most RPGs probably aren't changing much more if you've been playing for 7 days already, but this doesn't forbid from continuing to play if I choose to), but this is my naive and probably flawed answer, anyway.

This is meant to serve the purpose of: - Progressing reasonably fast (notice this is a list of basically banger games everyone has heard of, I will probably only include a few games here or there that are lesser known that I just happen to like--I'll also be avoiding some consoles intentionally that I don't particularly like (like the Odyssey 2, sorry, it's my list though--convince me otherwise if you like)) - Filtering into some kind of "best of" list (if I don't even want to play it for 7 days (in brief sessions), it must not be very good after all and doesn't deserve to be on any best of list I would leave behind me--games that I do get through the 7 days I should understand enough to rank competently enough to make myself happy) - Giving me an excuse to spend more time on the games that really matter to me, today, in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow - Giving me a target for when I'm able to comfortably say I've experienced a game enough and don't need to feel bad about moving on if I want to but still haven't "beat it," and also leaving room for playing more if I like (I can sort it, take it off the board, but finish it anyway on the DL) (Also, if I do beat it, I can stop there with the board) - Satisfying whatever kind of ADHD thing I have going on by allowing me to keep a variety of games on rotation for some amount of time and not just getting stuck behind one game at a time - Breaking game experiences down over multiple days to allow a longer time to think about them and grow accustomed to them, also to allow me to fit them into my busy schedule by playing Space Invaders on the toilet for ~10 minutes - To leave behind a journal of high scores or information about how far I got in various games as I plod on

So, you may (rightly) ask: What's the point of all this? Why can't I just play games that I like and call it a day?

Well my first answer would be, "shut up I know you're right I just can't, my brain is broken," but my second answer, the one I would say aloud, might be that I really have always wanted to take a targeted approach to going through all of game history and that's what this is in service of.

I have no false expectations about getting all the way through game history up to now in one lifetime, at least not without sacrificing a lot of games in the process. I definitely won't ever get to the point where I'm always keeping up with contemporary games. It's lucky for me that I mostly fell out of favor with games around 2011 for various reasons, but really it had been a steady decline of interest since about 2005 or so. I have a shorter-hand target, but if I were to ever reach it, I'd like to keep going on, even if it means playing PS4 games in 2061 when I'm almost as old as my dad is now.

Anyway, your second question (and wow, if you made it this far) might be: "so what does this mean for your tumblr, which I care about intimately after seeing 20 posts, and was gutted when you temporarily took a break, and have been looking for meaning in my life ever since?"

Well, true believer, if you want I might post my 7 day high-score for various arcade games or something along with some pictures or videos of high points of the game (when I get to games complicated enough to have cool art). I haven't decided yet. I'm open to suggestions! I'd love to see people try to (and succeed!) at beating my scores (I'd feel like I influenced someone into maybe playing some old, great game they wouldn't have before deciding to just then).

If nothing else I hope it was interesting to see my thought process about this stuff.

If that's not true, I hope you were entertained by a write up of someone's journey ever deeper into video-game delirium.

And yes, I will get frustrated with the system and change it again in approximately a month.

#long post #fuzzy-gaming-quest #spreadsheet #video games #retro games #rambles #crazy guy talks about video games

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spicynbachili1 · 5 years

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A chat with Sega’s first lady of RPGs, Rieko Kodama

Phoenix Power

In an industry that does basically nothing to preserve the past, Sega has been an outlier. On basically any platform imaginable, you can obtain a decent chunk of Sega’s first-party output from the Genesis and a few select games from other platforms. It seems like every time a new console generation rolls around, a new Sega compilation is in the works.

Nintendo’s popular Switch is no exception. The Switch is receiving not just the Sega Genesis Classics collection, but downloadable eShop releases of select Genesis games in the form of the Sega AGES series. Differing from the all-in-one package, these releases add features to Sega’s classic games while also providing regional variants and some light online functionality. Some might balk at the hefty price tag, but AGES could be considered the definitive releases of each title.

Around the time when Sonic the Hedgehog and Lightening Force were hitting the Switch, I was given a chance to ask Sega’s Rieko Kodama about her work on Sega AGES and her history with Sega. For those unaware, Kodama-san is recognized as one of the first successful woman game designers in the industry. She is known for her work as a graphic designer on Alex Kidd and Sonic the Hedgehog and as the main artist for Phantasy Star on the Master System. She now is the lead producer on the Sega AGES releases for Switch.

There are many stories around the internet of how Kodama-san got into the games industry. Seeing as how I didn’t want to repeat previously known information, I figured I would take a different path with my questions. To start off, I asked what piqued her interest in video games, in general. She told me:

“I was still in grade school, and I would play the arcade games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Xevious. At the time, my family ran a kissaten [a tea shop]. Our shop was like a cross between a café and bar, serving alcohol in the evenings. You could say that games were very close to my heart.” She gravitated towards films and literature with sci-fi themes, which also spilled over into her choice of games.

During her time in high school, she found an interest in advertising. She had envisioned designing marketing material for products, which fueled her desire for art. In her college years, she initially was stuck between pursuing graphic design and archaeology (she had a fondness for Egyptology). This led to her flunking out of college but quickly deciding to fully go into her passion for art. After enrolling in a trade school, she soon discovered she enjoyed graphic design and saw the burgeoning video game industry as a chance to push her talents.

Through connections with one of her colleagues, she was hired by Sega in 1984. While there, she learned how to create sprite work under Yoshiki Kawasaki, the sprite artist on Sega’s Flicky. After a few years, she got the chance to work on Alex Kidd Miracle World and the original Phantasy Star. This kick-started her career to eventually becoming a director and producer on future Sega titles.

During that time period, employees at Sega weren’t allowed to use their actual names during a game’s credits. As such, she went by the pseudonym of “Phoenix Rie.” While I still haven’t uncovered the true secret of the name, she did tell me, “It’s based on the name of a manga character I liked at the time.” In other interviews, she has stated she is too embarrassed to divulge anything more, so we’re a little bit closer to understanding the true meaning.

As for how involved she was with Sonic the Hedgehog, arguably Sega’s most famous creation, she said, “Mr. Ohshima [lead character designer] designed everything, from the setting to the concept art. I helped express his designs as pixel art.” Her work was more influential in Phantasy Star, which is why she would eventually go on to direct Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium.

That would end up being the last game she directed, though. After the release of that title, she transitioned into the role of producer for such titles as Skies of Arcadia and 7th Dragon. As Kodama-san put it, “I was a director on Magic Knight Rayearth, and I also started working as a producer around that time. I was involved with all aspects of the title, from marketing to sales, so it was a very valuable learning experience.” It seems she was more curious in tackling other aspects of game design instead of locking herself into a single role.

Even with her stepping away from the director’s chair, she doesn’t seem to have given up thinking about more traditional game development. Since she had experience with Sega’s previous mascot, Alex Kidd, I was curious how she would approach a theoretical reboot of the series. She explained, “It’s difficult to come up with a character design, but I think a 3D Alex who freely races around in helicopters or on motorcycles would be appealing. However, modern players may not really take to boss fights where you battle via rock-paper-scissors.”

She even still has Skies of Arcadia on her mind, though more with how pleased she was with the end result. “After the Dreamcast version, we released a GameCube version with additional story and characters, places to explore, and even bug fixes,” Kodama-san recalls. “I feel like we made the game we wanted to make. However, if I had to say one thing, it’s that the two combat systems were somewhat complex, so I do wonder if we couldn’t make that part easier to play.”

With the Sega AGES line, Skies of Arcadia may eventually see a release on Switch. Sega has stated it claims to make a wide selection of its classic titles available on the eShop and she echoed that sentiment. “We want to continue providing retro SEGA titles for the latest hardware,” she described.

“We’ve chosen the Switch, which can be played on a stationary TV set or as a handheld system, because we believe it to be the appropriate console for our retro game archive. It can even be played in a vertical orientation, allowing us to recreate the experience of vertically oriented arcade games such as Gain Ground. I think the different ways players can use the Joy-Con is also an interesting experiment.”

That last bit got me really thinking. I was curious what her thoughts were on Sega’s exit from the hardware business. It may have happened close to 20 years ago, but she had provided work for some of the biggest mascots the company has ever had. “I have precious memories of every platform. I personally don’t feel sad that SEGA is no longer producing hardware,” she stressed, “but I know that there are players who have been asking us to make new hardware. I feel honored and extremely grateful that fans would say that.”

As for now, Kodama-san will continue her work on the Sega AGES line with the next release being Phantasy Star on December 13, 2018, in Japan. Eight more titles have been confirmed for the collection, though there are no release dates lined up. Sega has teased the possibility of Saturn and Dreamcast games, so we could end up seeing a lot of her work get resurrected.

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jennellqgwhittemorekf29insu-blog · 5 years

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washington insurance washington nc

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stepphase · 4 years

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How To Search On Google Effectively With Tips and Tricks

How To Search On Google Effectively? Well, Google is big and has lots of features that you have no idea about it. We use it only for simple search but there's a lot of interesting google search techniques and tips and tricks which will be very helpful for you and you should know about it. So here I present you most 20 useful Google Tips & Trick you must know.

Numbers to Words Converter

Many times happen when there's is number, for example, 98964551554. It's made it difficult to convert into word, So here is the simple trick of Numbers to Words Converter

Just go to google.com and search 98964551554=english

Movie Search for Stream & Download

When we are searching for movies on internet, many websites has spam link and popup ads which make difficult to find the correct link. With Google Search's simple trick you can find the movie on google drive if someone has uploaded it.

Just go to google.com and search for example, Joker Movie Google Drive

Experience Windows 93

You can experience the old Windows 93 operating system to understand the earlier windows version online.

Just go to google.com and search Windows 93 and open the first site windows93.net

Google Mirror Search

ElgooG (Google spelled backward) is a mirrored website of Google Search with horizontally flipped search results, also known as a "Google mirror". On this website whatever you search it will be shown in the mirror style, it's a fun trick to use.

Pac Man Doodle Google Game

If you get bored while working on your machine and want to do some time pass, You can play doodle games on Google, one of the oldest game Pac Man which is fun to play. You can also find more games in the related section.

Just go to google.com and search Pac-Man doodle

Google Reverse Image Search

With this Google Reverse Image Search feature you can search with a picture using Google's search by image.

Just go to Google Images website

Click on Camera Icon

You can search by image URL or by uploading an image.

After uploading the image you will start getting the results.

Search Keywords by Google Autocomplete

If you are a blogger or SEO enthusiast, You can find the keywords like what users search the most on the internet with the help of Google Autocomplete. For Example, If start typing "How to make the computer" then you can get the next word like "faster", "virus", "hang free".

With this autocomplete feature you can create article or video on it for your audience.

Google Flights Search Anywhere

You can find the status of your flight instantly on Google, by just entering the flight number. You will start getting details like Scheduled departure time, Scheduled arrival time, Terminal, and Gate Number in realtime.

Google Underwater Search

You can use Google to search and explore the underwater space. Google Underwater Search is one of the best April Fool's Days jokes.

Just go to google.com and Search Google Underwater Search open the first website which is elgoog.im/underwater/

Find Related Websites

You can find related website you want just search. For example, related:youtube.com then you will start getting list of video sharing platform websites.

URL Calculator

You can instantly calculate any number without opening calculator app in your machine or app. Just right in your Google Chrome browser's address bar, you can do calculations

Google Find My Device

If you lost your device or forgot where you placed in home, with this simple search you can track your device. Just go to google.com and Search Find My Device

You can click on Ring & your mobile phone will start ringing. If you have lost your device you can lock the device or delete the whole data from your mobile. You just need to be logged in your google account to do so.

Find Past & Upcoming Festivals or Events Date & Day

If you don't know when will be the Diwali or any other festival or event , By simply searching. For example, Diwali 2020 you will get the date and day.

Check Weather of Any City

You can check the weather in any city by just a simple search. For example, in Mumbai weather, you will get the Temperature, Precipitation, Humidity, and Wind details.

Instant Translate

You can instantly translate and get the meaning of a word easily by simple search directly from Google Chrome's address bar. For example

how means in Japanese

Kaise ho in English

Search by Extensions

If you searching any thing on Google and want thing in specific file format. For example, Software Engineering books pdf you will start getting result of pdf based articles.

You can search for anything like .exe, .mp4, .docx, .xlsx behind the word of your search.

Thank You

You can contact us to let us know if we are missing any google search techniques. And I hope you like it. Thank you for your visit.

#Stepphase #technologies #technology #tech #technews #techworld #techtrends #smartphone #apple #techupdates #futuretechnology #newtech #techgeek #technologynews #technologythesedays #smarttechnology #technologylover #technologytrends #technologyblog #gadgets #smartphone #gadget #marketing #digital #india #technologyisawesome #amazing #repost

#Google

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josidel · 6 years

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Browsing Without a VPN

Network environments are growing increasingly hostile. Freedoms of speech, religion, and press are being diminished. The right to privacy is challenged globally on multiple fronts. For these and other reasons, you may find it valuable to add an extra layer of security and privacy to your Internet connection.

This is typically done using VPNs, SSH tunnels, or just regular ol’ HTTP proxies. However, they each have their problems:

VPN: When used primarily for anonymized/proxied browsing, VPNs are less than ideal. VPN traffic is fairly obvious on the wire, especially with deep packet inspection, which is why governments are able to block (most) VPNs if they try to. VPN providers often advertise anonymity and protection while running sketchy operations that log your activity or don’t properly secure your traffic. To make matters worse, setting up your own VPN correctly can be difficult. Conflicting, incompatible protocols sometimes require installing extra software depending on the VPN you connect to.SSH tunnel: SSH is available on most Linux machines (and Macs), but like VPNs, SSH traffic is pretty easy to identify — mostly because it runs on port 22. Running services on a different port is not always an option because of firewall restrictions. Even if you multiplex multiple protocols on the same port, SSH traffic looks different from HTTPS. Also, SSH is known for being unreliable when the network drops out (“broken pipe” anyone?), and slow every other time. But at least SSH tunnels are much simpler to create than setting up a VPN.HTTP proxy: The obvious requirement here is for HTTPS at the very least, but unless you properly automate a Let’s Encrypt certificate, you have to go to some work to maintain the HTTPS server. Pretty much all HTTP proxies these days do not support HTTP/2, and it’s pretty easy to tell (from the client-side) if a server is acting as a forward proxy. I should not even have to mention that trusting random HTTP proxies on the Internet isn’t a great idea.

This article will show you how to secure your Internet connection in a way that overcomes these weaknesses. You will learn how to set up the Caddy web server as a secure forward proxy using the http.forwardproxy plugin, which has these advantages:

HTTPS enabled by default. All certificate maintenance is automated. It just works!Full-duplex HTTP/2. This proxy speaks HTTP/2 both ways, which gives you faster page load times.End-to-end encryption. For sites that use HTTPS, your connection to the origin is E2E encrypted. Even the proxy server cannot decrypt your connection between your computer and the origin site. Once the HTTPS tunnel is established with the proxy, it simply shuttles bytes in a two-way stream. Underlying TLS connections remain intact. (Even a nefarious proxy can’t read the content of your underlying HTTPS traffic, but you should still only use proxies you trust. There’s more to traffic than its contents.)Probe resistance (experimental).This feature hides the proxy behavior of the server from everyone except to those who already know how to access it and are authorized to use it. Only a secret link specified by you (the server operator) exposes the authentication prompt.Innocuous traffic patterns. Since this proxy is not a VPN or SSH tunnel, it blends in better with the rest of HTTPS traffic.Standard ports. Where VPN ports and SSH port 22 are blocked by firewalls, port 443 is almost always allowed because accessing the Web is so standard for most use cases. (But you can still customize the port.)Hides your IP address. With just one line of config, this proxy will not add the user’s IP to the HTTP “Forwarded” header. (Note that there are ways around this out of the proxy’s control, like WebRTC in browsers.)Access controls. You can specify users and passwords to restrict access to the proxy, as well as a port whitelist for the proxy.Easy to set up! Best of all, this proxy is easy to get running and hard to get wrong because of sane defaults and automatic HTTPS. Caddy is designed to be easy to use to reduce the potential error surface of misconfigurations.

In particular, we’re interested in exploring how helpful this software software could be in circumventing censorship. It definitely needs more careful vetting (read on) but we hope people will try it out in low-or-no-risk scenarios.

This plugin was developed by Sergey Frolov while interning at Google and the source is available on GitHub.

Presented “As-Is”

I make no guarantees; use this tutorial and the server software at your own risk. There are a number of edge cases that ultimately depend on your client and your threat model; see especially the warning in the client configuration section below.

This technique is still fairly new. We want to make it even safer. So we do not recommend using it in high-risk situations. If you find a way to improve it, though, please contribute your feedback, issues, and pull requests!

Setting up the Server

First, you’ll need a machine that is accessible with a public IP address. Home servers can work if you forward the port(s) properly. You can also rent a cloud instance from any reputable cloud provider for a few dollars per month. Once you have such a machine, here’s what to do:

Download Caddy with the http.forwardproxy plugin included. To do that, make sure you select it in the plugins list on the download page!

Install Caddy; this is as easy as extracting the archive and putting the binary in your PATH, or using the one-line auto-installer script shown at the bottom of the download page after you select the plugins you want.

Make a file called Caddyfile that looks like this:

example.comroot /path/to/your/site forwardproxy { basicauth user pass probe_resistance secret.localhost hide_ip }

You must replace:

example.com with the actual domain name pointed at your machine/path/to/your/site with the actual path to the root of your site (or an empty or decoy folder if you have no site)user pass with a username and password of your choice (otherwise anyone could use your server!)secret.localhost with a custom, secret hostname to enable probe resistance; strongly recommended to end with “.localhost”

Then run caddy in the same folder as your Caddyfile. After a few seconds, your probe-resistant, IP-hiding, full-duplex, HTTP/2 proxy will be running with a fully-managed TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt!

The default port is 443 (the HTTPS port) unless you specify otherwise. Read more about the Caddyfile if you want to customize further.

Setting up the Client

Now how do you use your proxy server? With a client, of course!

There are several ways to do this. For example, if you want to secure your web browsing in Chrome, you can use an extension like Proxy SwitchyOmega to configure the connection. Firefox has some network options built into its settings. You can also configure your entire OS or mobile phone to use the proxy for all applications (except those that are specifically configured to not use your OS’ proxy settings). However, we found only Chrome+SwitchyOmega to be reliable, which we explain below.

** WARNING! A weakness in any part of the proxy configuration could leak information. Even if your proxy server is secure, your client may not be. Clients which do not honor the proxy settings for all network traffic could put you at risk. This includes major browsers and operating systems. For example, browsers don’t put WebRTC requests through the proxy (by design, sigh). One way to mitigate this risk somewhat is to use a VM that tunnels all traffic across a virtual NIC. This is obviously more involved, so act according to your threat model. If you just need basic public Internet cafe privacy to check your email, maybe the VM is overkill. That’s up to you.

Chrome + SwitchyOmega

This was the most reliable and simple client configuration I tried.

Install SwitchyOmega. It comes with an example proxy profile (on the left) which you can modify, or you can create a new one. In the table, select “HTTPS” for the “Protocol” field and type in your domain name and the port:

Click the lock icon by the port and enter your username and password:

After save your credentials, click the green “Apply Changes” button to the left:

You can turn on the proxy by clicking it from your menu:

Congrats! Now all your Chrome connections are proxied securely through your server.

Firefox

Like Chrome, Firefox also has a SwitchyOmega extension. I would suggest using extension first, since you are likely to have more success than with Firefox’s built-in network settings. The instructions are nearly the same as above.

Using Firefox’s built-in network configuration settings, I was not able to get this working in Firefox (on macOS 10.12.6) for a server with probe_resistance enabled. It appears to be a bug in Firefox. Firefox hangs when loading the page, for several minutes — and spins the CPU at 100%. Even after closing the application, my computer ran sluggish for almost a day until I found the firefox process still running in the background still using 100% of my CPU. Other than using the SwitchyOmega extension, there are two other workarounds on Mac: Use Chrome, or disable probe resistance.

To change Firefox’s built-in network configuration, go to Menu -> Preferences:

Then Network Proxy, and click “Settings…”:

Here you have a few options. You can “Use system proxy settings” which should use your operating system’s proxy settings. You can specify a “Manual proxy configuration” where you enter the hostname and port your proxy is listening on (EDIT: As noted in a comment, this will not utilize TLS-to-proxy. So don’t do this, use the PAC file instead — next sentence). Or, if you use the serve_pacserver setting, you can specify its URL:

Save your settings, and you should be good to go. Maybe. Good luck!

macOS (and/or Safari)

This will change the proxy settings for the entire system. Make sure this is really what you want to do instead of using the proxy only with your web browser!

Unfortunately, I was not able to successfully get macOS’ system-wide proxy configurations to work reliably, even with probe resistance / authentication turned off. I’ve also been told that some previous version(s) of macOS (or OS X) could even kernel panic when using a TLS proxy. (But I was able to get Firefox and Chrome using the proxy successfully, as described above.)

If you want to experiment with getting system-wide proxy config working, open System Preferences and go to Network. Choose your active network interface on the left and click the “Advanced” button in the lower-right. Click the “Proxies” tab. I tried both the “Automatic Proxy Configuration” (where you give the .pac file URL) and the “Secure Web Proxy (HTTPS)” options. Both had different but equally disappointing levels of support in various applications.

Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop)

Good news! Setting Linux’s system-wide proxy settings worked fairly well in my testing.

Open Network preferences and select “Network Proxy”. Choose “Automatic” for the Method, and type the configuration URL of the .pac file. (You’ll have to enable serve_pac on your server configuration inside the forwardproxy directive; choose a secret URL to serve the file on, so it doesn’t defeat your probe resistance). If you don’t want to use a .pac file, you can choose “Manual” for the Method and enter your hostname and port (443 probably) — use it for all protocols.

Since there isn’t a way to configure the system proxy to send credentials, you need to use your secret link to authenticate. Only the secret link will prompt the browser to enter credentials. You may have to do that every time you re-open your browser.

So open your web browser (maybe double-check its network configuration if you’re not sure) and go to your secret link. Enter your credentials, and you’re good to go!

Android

This method works for WiFi networks. I haven’t looked into how to set a proxy for the cell network. It requires using a .pac file. If you haven’t already, enable the serve_pac option within the forwardproxy directive. For probe resistance, I recommend specifying a secret URL to serve it on, rather than the default /proxy.pac.

Go to your WiFi settings and long-tap on the current network. Choose “Modify Network”:

Under Proxy, choose “Proxy Auto-Config” and type the URL to your .pac file:

Save settings. With probe resistance enabled, you’ll have to navigate to your secret link in your browser to expose the authentication prompt. Then you should be good to go. Remember: this doesn’t apply to the cell network.

Windows

These instructions are for Windows 7, but the same basic idea works in more recent versions of Windows. I’m borrowing these instructions from Sergey’s blog (with permission) because I don’t have Windows:

Control Panel → Network and Internet → Internet Options → Connections → LAN settings → Check “Use a proxy server…” and paste your “https://yourserver.com” in Address and “443” in port. Don’t lose “https://” in Address, Windows likes to remove it when you open LAN settings window again.

Image borrowed with permission from Sergey Frolov: http://ift.tt/2A2ZRSL

Conclusion

Caddy’s http.forwardproxy plugin is a promising alternative to using VPNs or SSH tunnels for certain tasks and for certain threat models. We hope this technology will help provide greater access to the Web to more people because of its unique properties and ease of use. However, client support for TLS-to-proxy must improve and become more reliable and predictable. We hope that client support for secure proxying will improve and become more robust in the future.

Thanks to Eric.

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2z9ZI0O

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agathaophoto · 7 years

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The Plainfield Aquaduct Company

A couple of Saturdays ago, a group of intrepid explorers investigated the springs and the route of the pipeline that supplied water to the center of Plainfield from 1816 to 1971. Plainfield being an exceedingly rural sort of a place, we mostly have our own wells, as they did back in the days of settlement. We drill them hundreds of feet down which makes them very reliable. But not around 1800. Then, if you were lucky, you’d have a spring to harness but if you didn’t you dug what’s now called a “shallow well” to ground water, lined it with stones, and hoped it would rain. And you or your dependents would carry water to get it into your house.

Right around the turn of the nineteenth century aqueducts became all the rage. If you’re like me, the word evokes an image of a Roman-built edifice with arches crossing a valley to supply water to the town’s lead pipes – that some say became the downfall of the empire (I have read they actually knew lead could scramble your brain). But what they called an aqueduct in the British/North American World just after the Revolution is really simply a water pipe or water main. So that folks who happened to have a spring that was higher than their house could run an aqueduct, which they ingeniously crafted of wood rather than lead, and have cold running water. Sure beats hauling and carrying. Usually you had to be rich for that.

But not in early nineteenth-century Plainfield, which was an up-and-coming industrial town on a well-used crossroads where down to earth citizens were rather consciously building a socially feasible economy. The crossroads at the center had a couple of blacksmith shops (service stations, really) a store, and even two doctors (!), all of whose houses, shops, and yards with animals abutted each other closely. And no springs just there even though Plainfield is lousy with them otherwise.

The germ theory of disease had not been proven yet, but they did try to separate what goes in from what comes out for man and beast. Which makes shallow wells a problem if you’re also using a privy and you have some horses and other livestock not to mention chickens running all over the place. Add to that the drought of summer and autumn and water evidently became a bit of an issue right there in the thick of things.

When Dr. Barney Torrey, storekeeper John Mack, Isaiah Shaw, Blacksmith Lt. Levi Cook and Dr. Jacob Porter got together and formed the Plainfield Aquaduct (sic) Company in 1816, they did not, like we who are working to get fiber-optic cable to this town, set aside pots of money for construction. From their neighbor Ebenezer Nash they had a deed to a small triangle of land with springs half a mile up the road, they talked about maintenance and repair of the wooden pipe, and they talked about how to divvy up the water. But apparently they’d already installed the pipe. It’s handy to live in a place where people know how to actually make things happen.

Likely 6-8 foot hemlock logs were bored with a long auger, one end hollowed out and the other sharpened with a gigantic pencil sharpener, called a Sheep’s Head in the opinion of some, which I have not been able to corroborate. The logs were then pushed tightly into each other in a ditch carefully routed uphill to the spring. The spring was dug out, a housing erected to contain it, and voila, running water was achieved for the next 150 years.

Sort of. It took of course a lot of doing to keep it going. They were a small group of households that slowly expanded as the population density of the center increased over the next 40 years. They met every year, they paid various people to do maintenance and repair, they increasingly worked on divvying the water up exactly. Periodically they made new contracts, with the “Gentlemen” as they identified themselves on deeds, generally paying and taking about twice as much as the “Yeomen” and Blacksmiths. They had a large cistern at the center of town that was fire protection for everyone and water for the horses that came around. It was an excellent case of the kind of enlightened self-interest and can-do Americanism that people say made this country work.

(I should note that 1816, the year in which the PAC was created, the Town Meeting also decided to auction off the maintenance of the poor to the lowest bidder and was working to “bind out” an orphan girl. That was also part of making the country work)

—

And that was the last time Plainfield had an independent utility. From there on, the Town Meeting was careful to ‘”invite” or “permit” companies to lay railroad (1848) or much later set up telephone poles (1905-7), provided they paid for the set-up, maintenance, and running of the system. But the railroad never came and the town did not end up expanding and the Aquaduct Company kept supplying a small number of closely-spaced households in a tiny backwater.

In addition to laying pipe, the men and women (yes, women were members as well) of the Plainfield Aquaduct Company knew how to have meetings and create contracts and talk until they come to some kind of agreement – and they were definitely concerned with not spending too much money, which probably could be said for most of Yankeedom.

By the early part of the twentieth century, they haggled for some years with the town over how to pay together for a new (third generation) cistern. The second one they’d put in themselves. It never happened and in time the decrepit cistern was used as a collecting station for milk cans, which they wanted to protest but couldn’t because it really was on town land, and in the nineteen-fifties, when it was no longer necessary because automobiles drink much less water than horses, they petitioned the town to take it away.

What stands out to me is that these were civic-minded folks who were trying to make things work. And also that they became small-minded and fearful from years and years of pinching pennies. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Plainfield was the first town in Western Massachusetts to clear all the hurdles for a new adventure in communications utilities called Wired West that is going to bring us the fiber-optic cable that in turn is going to salvage us and our rural lifestyle in the 21st century. Verizon et. al. were not interested in our permitting or inviting them to exploit us, so we’re creating a utility that hearkens back to the Plainfield Aquaduct Company in its “can-do” tackling of the needs of an expanding region.

I’d like to think that the various votes that were taken, 160-3-1 at the Town Meeting and 134-10 on debt exclusion, are about an enlightened sense of where we can go in the future if we work together, and not about streaming TV, but I suppose I’ll it anyway so long as it carries the water to everyone’s house.

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But that was after I told a group of intrepid explorers about the Plainfield Aquaduct Company talk and we took our brochures to go in search of the bubbling of springs, a spring box, rusty pipes lying around rusting some more, seeing how the pipe ran along stone walls not on the side of maples, sighting (newer) wells along the straight line where the pipe once ran, and seeing the ditch where, one of the former road bosses reports, he dug up the pipe after ’71. Along the way we ran into another former road boss raking in the cemetery, and he told us he plowed up the pipe in the field one spring (there were cows on the field this time). Yup, rocky ledge so close to the surface brings the springs, but also makes it tough to bury a pipe deeper than 10 inches. Drilled wells are not such a bad idea even though they take electricity to operate. And then we need to somehow get together to make the electricity happen. We’re doing that too now via solar contracts. I’m upbeat about where we’re going with this. Do more together and you can rely more on each other and vice versa. No woman is an island.

Sources

Excerpts from the Records of the Plainfield Aquaduct Company, books I-IV (1816-1975), transcribed by Arvilla L. Dyer. The originals were not recognized for what they were and discarded. Property of Plainfield Historical Society.

Town Meeting Notes, Records of the Town Clerk of Plainfield, MA, Book 1-5.

Note: Photos for illustration. We’re not talking journalism or art here. Some of the photos were taken on an earlier PAC walk, and some on a scouting trip.

Springs

Cistern

LArge diameter pipe probably ran here early on probably ran

Rusty pipe….

Along the wall and across the field

Route of the future Kinder Morgan Pipeline, not if we can help it.

Cows graze where water once ran under the field….

Carry Water The Plainfield Aquaduct Company A couple of Saturdays ago, a group of intrepid explorers investigated the springs and the route of the pipeline that supplied water to the center of Plainfield from 1816 to 1971.

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