I usually listen to a fairly small set of music, but today i found some sweet new music to repeat!

This is the first post of the new weekly format.

I have not finished any anime or movies since last time, but I have gotten a lot of minor things done.

For one, I have downloaded an icon set and started to use it on the WP-site to get rid of more of the default content.

In the same vein I have started using font-awesome for my social media icons. Facebook and twitter were thrown out in favor of mail and ftp. This goes both for the banner and for the footer.

I’ve never been a huge fan of social media. Essentially just a big ball of “don’t need it”. But I have nevertheless registered for a few such services.

Linkedin was a nigh mandatory signup. But its professional purpose makes it a forgivable sin.

Google on the other hand is mandatory and unavoidable if you want to use Youtube or Hangouts. So I have perhaps the most anemic, non-zero G+ presence in the world. Whereas Youtube is just a vector for video uploads and nothing more.

Deviantart is an old service from the phase in my life where I though it could become a good illustrator. While I still impress myself, I recognize that I am not going to illustrate professionally anytime soon. It has served as a repository for hosting images before Dropbox took that role. Now I am thinking about dropping Dropbox as well for my own solution.

In all other news. I did a thought experiment: How many different configurations are there for the standard rubiks cube? It would be trivial to say that there are 3x3x3 pieces and 3x3x3 positions, so 27! configurations right?

Wrong.

It is not so complex and at the same time it is much more so. Rather, there are three types of pieces that do not mix. There are for instance eight corner pieces, these can only be located on the corners so that’s eight positions on the cube. But each position could also be in one of three orientations. So for just the corner pieces there are 8! * 3^8.

Next are the 12 edge pieces. These can only be placed along the edges and could have one of two orientations. So that’s 12! * 2^12 combinations just for the edge pieces.

Finally, there are the middle pieces. these are always locked in relation to each-other, and while they each have 4 orientations, these do not matter. But the cluster of middle pieces can have one of six orientations as a whole. Multiplying our answer by six.

“Possible” cube configurations: 8!*3^8 * 12!*2^12 * 6 = 3,114,144,235,763,269,632,000

Little over 3 Sextillion possible starting states… Fortunately, not all of these are possible without a screwdriver, and those can’t be solved without one 😉

Some more tech news. I enabled anonymous access to my FTP again (but with all write operations disabled of course), and once more, vsftp proved more tricky than it needed to be. While it works like a charm and is easy to configure, yet again there was an unexpected relationship between parameters that could have been documented better.

Because I am paranoid, I have configured the FTP to only allow certain very specific users. This is set in a text file. when local_users is enabled this file is read. When local_users is disabled but anonymous is YES then the list does not matter. Turns out when both modes are enabled, the anonymous user needs to be in the list of allowed users.

So now the default behavior is to send a visitor to the anonymous download-only FTP site without prompting for any password. To access the unsafe but passworded ftp user you need to add “username@” before the domain and then enter your credentials.

I made a logo for this site and the overall project. Any symbolism was just accidental, but I like to think that the wings/feathers represents freedom and the eye represents knowledge or awareness.

I also tried the alias approach to disposable email addresses. With the mail configuration I am using you just add the new address to /etc/aliases and then run newaliases. To send using those aliases is just a matter of adding it to the mail-client.