December 1, 2023

Music Radar: This web app randomly samples thousands of YouTube videos to create a playable grid of loops, giving you endless sonic inspiration

Music Radar: This web app randomly samples thousands of YouTube videos to create a playable grid of loops, giving you endless sonic inspiration. “Built by Technology Greg, Sonic Garbage pulls over 3000 randomly generated YouTube audio snippets into a colour-coded grid and sorts them by ‘audio energy’ (volume?) or length, giving you a playable set of randomized samples that is tons of fun to mess around with. Sure, the majority of them may not sound great, but play around for a few minutes and it’s remarkably easy to stumble on combinations of loops that fit together just right and create something unexpectedly musical.” It really is, I tried it. It was amazing to me how much random audio actually made half-decent samples.

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
June 7, 2022

MakeUseOf: The 5 Best Free Random Decision Makers

From MakeUseOf, for a given value of “Useful”: The 5 Best Free Random Decision Makers. “If you’re trying to make a light-hearted, a random decision maker can help you to more easily make an unbiased decision. It can save you time and prevent overthinking. Of course, they won’t be suitable for large, life-altering decisions–you’ll need to ponder over those, sorry!”

Useful Stuff 0
July 7, 2021

The Register: Kaspersky Password Manager’s random password generator was about as random as your wall clock

The Register: Kaspersky Password Manager’s random password generator was about as random as your wall clock . “In March 2019, security biz Kaspersky Lab shipped an update to [Kaspersky Password Manager], promising that the application could identify weak passwords and generate strong replacements. Three months later, a team from security consultancy Donjon found that KPM didn’t manage either task particularly well – the software used a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) that was insufficiently random to create strong passwords. From that time until the last few months of 2020, KPM was suggesting passwords that could be easily cracked, without flagging the weak passwords for users.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
March 4, 2019

Lifehacker: Rediscover Random Netflix Episodes With This Web App

Lifehacker: Rediscover Random Netflix Episodes With This Web App. “Shufflix is a web app that randomizes a number of popular shows on Netflix, and offers a suggestion for what you should watch right now. For instance, clicking on Friends suggests that I watch Season 6, Episode 22: The One Where Paul’s the Man.” The tool doesn’t cover all series on Netflix, but apparently a bunch of them. I really need to watch an episode of Friends one day. Or Seinfeld.

Useful Stuff 0
October 28, 2017

Hit the Link, Get a Random Slashdot Story

Slashdot is 20 years old, so an intrepid reader created a tool that finds a random story on Slashdot and displays it. I ran it three times and got: a story about Verizon and yet another fee (2016), a story on the world’s largest scavenger hunt (2002), and a story about Motorola phones from 2013. Nostalgia for days.

Tweaks & Updates 0
May 17, 2016

Research: Making Random Numbers Even More Random

Okay, it’s not as much fun as a cat riding a Roomba, but I’m excited to hear that researchers have worked out a way to make random numbers even more random. “With an advance that one cryptography expert called a ‘masterpiece,’ University of Texas at Austin computer scientists have developed a new method for producing truly random numbers, a breakthrough that could be used to encrypt data, make electronic voting more secure, conduct statistically significant polls and more accurately simulate complex systems such as Earth’s climate.”

Research & Opinion 0

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