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Sunriver Resort is just south of Bend, OR and offers multiple accommodation options. We stayed at the Sunriver Lodge Village Accommodations for a couple of nights as part of a trip to Crater Lake.

Our room was fine – WiFi was fast, the (gas) fireplace was nice, the bed comfy. No minibar but there was a fridge and a Keurig coffee/tea maker.

The resort has everything you might want for a relaxing trip – pool, spa, on-site dining options, and an assortment of shops, restaurants and cafes nearby. We checked out the spa – use of the steam room and hot tubs (which are gender-separated, as is typical for spas) was included.

The food at the on-site restaurants was good and the service friendly – the vegetarian options on the menu were a bit limited, but the staff were accommodating.

The common areas offer beautiful views and large windows. There’s also a golf course, and in combination with a very manicured and consistent look and a quiet atmosphere, you get the sense that this is a place popular for corporate retreats and the like. It was a nice place to stay at for a couple of nights but we probably won’t have reason to return.

CC-BY-SA 2.5 CA

CC-BY-SA 2.5 CA

CC-BY-SA 2.5 CA

In 1994, Peter Salus summarized the Unix philosophy as follows:

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
• Write programs to work together.
• Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

The small utility xclip should be viewed with that philosophy in mind. All it does is handle clipboard contents for you on the command line. You can output the contents of your clipboard(s), or put text in the clipboard. It’s in combination with other Unix-style utilities and input/output streams that this can become a very useful tool.

Say you have a bunch of text on a webpage and want to search/replace some terms. If you already have a terminal open, just pipe it through xclip. Or you have a large textfile you want to paste into an email. Again, no need to load the file or select anything manually – just cat filename | xclip will do the job. This is not a huge deal but one of those small things that make using Unix-like systems enjoyable. In the last 15 years, I’ve probably used xclip a few thousand times.

Note that by default, xclip uses the “primary” clipboard, the contents of which you can access with the middle mouse button. You can use the Windows-style Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V clipboard by specifying -selection clipboard (or creating an alias to that effect).

This Arch-based distribution has all the goodies and flaws you’d expect from Arch, except in this case, all proprietary software is removed, and you can be sure that you’ll never accidentally get software from the repos that does not respect your user freedoms.

The main advantage over Trisquel in my opinion is the constant updates, which make it continually fresh. Also, I’ve had pretty much no stability problems during these two years of continual usage. The main setback, for new users, is that you need the Arch wiki to do the most basic of things that come out of the box in Trisquel. But both are pretty great, depending on your needs.

This is a medium-sized Mexican restaurant with two locations in Portland, one at Division in SE Portland, and another in Chinatown. We came to the Division location on a Sunday evening at about 6PM. You order at the counter and take a number.

They serve mainly guisados (stews) with tortillas. We had the Butternut Squash in Mole Poblano, the Mushrooms in Mole Amarillo and the Rajas con Crema, all vegetarian, as well as horchatas. The service was quick and friendly, though you’ll have to get in line again if you need anything extra.

The food was very filling, delicious and not too spicy. I’ve had some pretty bad horchatas – watery and bland. These were refreshing and flavorful. A bit more variety on the menu would be nice but overall this was a very nice dinner.

I’ve been using IRC since I was a teenager, and in spite of proprietary tools like Slack and Gitter or open alternatives like Mattermost, I keep returning to it. For one thing, a large part of the open source community still uses it for chatter and support, and networks like FreeNode are filled with wonderful and smart people.

My first IRC client was mIRC for Windows, and I still prefer graphical clients over text-mode interfaces. Simply put, if an interface is complex enough that it requires tabs, lists, and so on, I find that a graphical interface often offers advantages. (Radical, I know!) Hence, for a long time, I used XChat on Linux, and it definitely got the job done.

But XChat is no longer actively maintained. Fortunately, when this happens to a popular open source project, there’s a good chance it will get picked up by someone else. That’s why there is HexChat. It’s still basically the same software, with a few important updates like support for more encryption methods and Lua scripting. As of August 2016, the last release was in May.

The Hexchat/XChat user interface is very basic – you’ve got your channel list, your chat window, your user list, and your server list. You can configure pings if your name is mentioned, add your own custom scripts, transfer files, and so on. The UI is reasonably configurable (e.g., vertical vs. horizontal tabs). Parts of it are a bit clunky in ordinary ways (e.g., finding the right preferences in sections like “Chatting-General”, “Chatting-Advanced” can be tricky, and there’s almost no context-sensitive help).

But the most important part for me is that the client gets out of the way – it just works. I give it 3.5 stars, rounded up because of the effort to keep the tool alive under a new name. My only recommendation is to set up a bouncer like ZNC along with it. A bouncer will log messages for you even while you’re away, and keep you connected to an IRC network – eliminating much of the hassle compared with a web-based tool like Slack.

Whether you administer your own server or VPS or occasionally log into someone else’s, Mosh is a tool that’s so useful it’s surprising that it’s not included by default in all distributions. In a nutshell, Mosh logs you into your server using SSH as you’re used to, but then opens a connection using the UDP protocol that lets you keep your session open indefinitely – even if your connection drops or your IP address changes. This is extremely useful for a variety of purposes, e.g., to quickly fire up a long-running process and keep its output visible, or to keep a remote session open for debugging purposes while writing code.

Of course, keeping a highly privileged session open indefinitely creates security risks if your device gets compromised, so use your own best judgment. Mosh also doesn’t have built-in scrollback, so you may have to pipe commands into tools like less. That said, I’ve found it an indispensable tool, well worth the initial setup effort on the remote server where it’s used. There is even an Android client, which lets you take full advantage of the ability to keep your session open with intermittent connectivity.

Matt Damon was born to play Jason Bourne, a hypercompetent and nearly invincible former assassin eluding the dark and powerful forces that created him. But this movie is a formulaic mess with a script that revisits every trope of the genre.

Cybercrime is a big theme this time around, and of course the movie is replete with silly tech-nonsense, from unlimited image enhancement to firewall-hacking progress bars and magical cell phones that can be remote-activated to delete data on nearby laptops. One needn’t set the bar as high as Mr. Robot to find more persuasive depictions of hacking and, well, computers.

The film tries hard to respond to current themes like the Snowden revelations and the FBI/Apple encryption controversy – but it’s like filtering reality through the brain of an idiot with access to unlimited special effects.

At one point, the sentence “This could be worse than Snowden” must of course be uttered. Why not go all the way and use a Snowden scale? “Is this half a Snowden?” “This could be 2 Snowdens. Maybe 3.” “It’s a Snowdenpocalpyse! Sharknado with Snowdens!”

If this movie brings an end to the Damon/Bourne franchise, it may be for the best. It will be hard to revive it from this one. To be sure, there are some fun moments that remind us of what could have been – and picking Vegas as the target for the movie’s climax was a nice touch.

But those moments are too few, and the cringeworthy script too dominant. As usual, Moby sings “Extreme Ways” as the credits roll: “I would stand in line for this.” Don’t.