Google GMail Filtering

I use google email as my primary email.  It works pretty good except that the filters are very limited as to what they can do (no regex's for example).  

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Authenticators, Passkeys, and more - Oh my

Most major online sites  (Google, Microsoft, Banks, etc.) are now requiring some sort of multi-factor authentication (MFA) due to the number of compromised accounts.  MFA basically means you need two things to login in such as a password and something else like a code from a SMS text.  MFA comes in several flavors such as:

• A code sent to you via email, SMS text, or voice
• An authenticator app that generates a code such as Proton, Microsoft, or Google Authenticators
• A passkey which uses asymmetric authentication where you store the private key on your device and the vendor stores your public key.  They have to match for it to work

Microsoft has already disabled email MFA and, as of February 1st, 2027, Microsoft will disable SMS text and voice for MFA for their enterprise accounts (consumer accounts are not affected).  This is because it is just too easy for these methods to be hacked as they require a remote system to send you a code in plaintext which provides many opportunities for someone to intercept the code (e.g. social engineering, SIM cloning, forwarding all emails to the bad guy, etc.).

So why are passkeys better? There are several:

• They are based on asymmetric encryption so you hold the private key and the vendor has the public key.  If the vendor is broken into, the bad guys cannot get a bunch of passwords to hack  and the cannot get your private key part as that is on your device (see next item)
• The private key part is stored on your device or in a secure password keeper such as Bitwarden.  What this means is that a bad guy cannot remotely try to break into your account at the vendor; they need your device or access to your secure password keeper.
• You have no idea what the private key part is and it is very long so social engineering attacks will not work easily.
• The passkey is different for each account and site you visit.  So no more reusing passwords across multiple sites.
• Fake phishing websites will not work as they do not have the public key so you will not be able to login.  Also since you do not enter a password, they cannot get your passwords.
• You do not need to use an account id or password to login, just click on the passkey.  So it is much easier.

But like most things, there are some downsides:

• They are typically stored in a secure store on the device.  This means you have to set up separate passkeys on each device to access a single service (e.g. a bank account).
• In some cases, local devices (looking at you Windows 11) only allow you to store one passkey per service (e.g. Office.com) instead of a passkey for each account you have on the service.  So if you have work and personal Office.com accounts, you can only use a passkey with one of them. Sigh.
• To access a passkey, they typically use a short PIN (not good - looking at you Windows Hello) or some sort of biometric (e.g. finger or face id - good).
• If you loose a device or if fails, you loose all your passkeys and will have to regenerate them.  So always, always, set up an authenticator app as a back up MFA option.
• To get around the above issues, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and most major secure password keepers allow you to store the private key part with them instead of on the device which means you have to login to their services just to access the passkeys.  Frankly, I do not trust Microsoft and Google with my private key parts and I do not want them knowing whenever I use a passkey to access my bank account.  Instead I use Bitwarden secure password keeper.  If you do this, then the first 4 issues disappear (although in the case of item 4 you can log in with the passkey on a different device to regenerate the passkeys).
• Passkeys are implemented very differently by the different vendors.  Some like a Bank I use, do not ask for a PIN code so if someone gets my computer, they have full access to that bank account - oh boy.  Others use a passkey with SMS. Some, like Microsoft Windows 11,  only allow 1 passkey per service so no multiple accounts.  Some still require you to enter a login id, some do not.  Until this  gets sorted out and standardized, passkeys are a bit of challenge to set up and use.
• The worst thing though is if a bad guy gets your phone or computer and you are using a short, easily guessable PIN to access your passkeys, they can guess it and get access to all your accounts.

Even with that last problem, passkeys are better than Passwords with Email/SMS/Voice MFA as you really cannot do remote attacks with passkeys.  The bad guys have to get your device which is a much lower probability than a remote attack or vendor compromise.

So how to make passkeys work best for you:

• Use a secure passsword keeper such as Bitwarden (not LastPass as they get hacked almost every year).  This allows you to share passkeys between devices.
• Use a biometric ID of some sort such as Face or Fingerprint ID to unlock passkeys or, in the case of a secure password keeper a very long password that you use no where else.  Do not use a simple pin code because it is too easy to guess if a bad guy gets your device.
• Always set up authenticators such as Proton Authenticator as backups to passkeys in case you loose one of your devices and have to redo all your passkeys.

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Task list and personal knowledge base

Over the last several months I have moved to Obsidian to track tasks and act as a personal knowledge base. 

I have been tracking Obsidian for years as it added features, but it never had a task manager until recently. Before I use Remember the Milk for taska and Joplin as a knowledge base.  The problem was I had information in two locations and would often look in the wrong location. In addition, these systems required yearly payments to get syncing between my phone and computer to work. 

With Obsidian, all my data is in one place so a global search finds what I am looking for. Using various plugins, I can customize the notes and tasks to my workflow.  For syncing between my phone and laptop, I use Syncthing.  Whenever my phone and laptop are on the same wireless network, the Obsidian data is synced. And best of all - it just plain works. 

The primary Obsidian plugins I use are:

• Edit history: so I can recover things when I delete them accidentially. This works great across the phone and laptop (e. g. if I delete parts of a note on the phone and notice it on the laptop a few hours later, I can restore the information)
• TaskNotes: this is my task list where each task is a note.  That way I can have lots of information about the task. 
• Hidden  folder: hides the folders with the tasks in them as I only want to modify these notes via the TaskNotes interface. 
• Templater: allows me custom templates for my daily notes. 
• Omnisearch: true global search across notes and attachments
• Text extractor: extracts text for omnisearch from attachments
• Open tab settings: makes sure the tabs I want to see are opened on startup - the daily note and task list

If you are looking for a free, very good tool that just works to manage your task list and personal knowledge base; I highly recommend Obsidian.  Using Syncthing, you can get all the data on your phone and laptop in complete sync. 

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Oppo N6 Phone

Before I left Japan, I replaced my end of life Pixel 6 with an Oppo Find N6 foldable phone.

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Kobo Ebook Reader

I got a Kobo Clara BW Ebook reader a few months ago to make it easier to fall asleep at night.  At first I was able to check out books from the library via the Libby app on my phone and after a sync they would show up on the Kobo.  But then a few books just refused to show up on the Kobo.  A few hours of research and testing to find out that:

• Books will only show up on the Kobo if Kobo sells the exact same book with the same ISDN and other information.  Essentially what is happening, is Kobo matches their books to the library and lets you read one of their books for the library loan period.  They don't actually interact with Libby to download the book - just to get the loan period.
• The alternative (which works well) is to check out the book via libbyapp.com on your Windows or Mac computer (linux users are stuck with Wine or running a Windows VM under a hypervisor).
• Once you check it out, then click on Read -> Other options to download a *.ascm file which contains the book's metadata.
• If you accidentially, clicked on Read in Libby or Kindle, you open Libby on the phone, click on Read -> Other options and then copy the *.ascm file to your computer.
• Then start up Adobe Digital Editions, read in the *.ascm file and it will download the book.  
• Plug in the Kobo which will show up as a device in Adobe Digital Editions and copy the book over to the Kobo. 
• Back in 2023, you could do this on the phone, but Adobe killed their Digital Editions software on mobile phones. 

I looked and looked and could not find anyway to reliably get Libby library books onto the Kobo other than using Adobe Digital Editions on a Windows or Mac computer. 

One side effect of this is that once you have moved the book to the Kobo, you can return it to the library as there is no connection between the Kobo and the library to tell the Kobo that you returned it.  Just something in the DRM to tell the Kobo that the loan has expired. 

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Microsoft Support - The long and winding road

So for one of the non-profits I support we use Microsoft Teams for voice calls.  This works very well and is less expensive than all the other options.  At the start of 2025, Microsoft said they were adding SMS texting to teams which would be very nice for the non-profit to communicate with volunteers and for MFA for services that work with VOIP phone numbers.  So in Feb I signed up through the teams support portal and was added to the wait list.  In October they enabled SMS and I had to do 3 things to make it go live:

• Fill out a form that allows PSTN operators to validate your company. This was easy and approved quickly
• Create a 'brand' that is used to verify you with other SMS providers.  Again, pretty easy and approved quickly
• Create a campaign.  This defines the use cases for SMS.  This is where things fell apart.

The problems started with the fact that Microsoft has multiple different service centers and the one you get when you click on the '?' on the main teams page cannot help with SMS.  However in trying to be helpful, they will waste weeks of your time trying to help until you finally reach a manager type who has enough knowledge to say they cannot help. They even wrote back one time that the screen shots I sent them were "from a third-party application. To better understand the situation, could you please clarify the following..."  See this post for more information.  The main helpdesk folks tried for 2 months to find me help and the best they could do was to give me this email pstn@microsoft.com which 

bounced.  Sigh.

The way it works is you fill out the forms and some automated system looks at them, approves or denies it.  The errors the system said I had made no sense such as CallToActionMissingOrInaccessible, but when I look at it all the links are good and the text is just like their example. Back in Feb, I was able to fill out the help form asking for SMS to be enabled.  In Oct this I get these options:

Notice that there is no case type for SMS.  When I pick General Inquiry I get this:

This is what I get when I interact with the chatbot:    

🤖 said:

If there is no specific case type for SMS campaigns, you can still open a new case by following these steps and providing detailed information about your issue:

Navigate to the Phone Number Service Center: From the Phone Number Service Center home page, you can find options to create a new case at the top of the page or at the bottom tile. Alternatively, you can go to the "View my existing cases" page or the "View my company cases" page.

Select Create a New Case: Choose the option to create a new case.

Provide Case Details:

Case Category: Select "Submit a new request" if you want to submit a new request related to your SMS campaign.

Country or Region: Select the country or region for which the phone number you are submitting this case for.

Case Type: If there is no specific case type for SMS campaigns, you can select a general case type that closely matches your issue or select "General inquiry".

Enter Case Title: Provide a title that summarizes your issue with the SMS campaign.

Notification Emails: Enter the list of people who will receive automated status notifications from Microsoft. This is optional.

Description: Describe the issue you are facing with your SMS campaign in detail. Include any error messages you have received and any steps you have already taken to try to resolve the issue.

Additional Supporting Documents: Upload any additional documents that might help in resolving your case.

Submit the Case: After entering all the required information, select "Submit". You will then see a new screen where you can view your case number.

If you need further assistance, you can contact the TNS Service Desk directly.                                    

The major issue is that you cannot follow the instructions as most of the case options such as General Inquiry above go directly to the chatbot which does not allow you to enter data into a form like the instructions (whoops infinite loop).  The other issue options are for porting numbers which I do not want to do. Hmm, perhaps re-open a previous ticket - nope that is not an option either.

Ok, lets try to find contact information for the TNS Service Desk.  Searching Microsoft public documentation gets this:

Sigh.  But, but, Google to the rescue.  I was able to find a phone number (800-416-3882).  The people there could not help, but gave me an email communications@tnsi.com.

So tried it and they had no clue what I was talking about.  Eventually I filled in a ticket for New TN Acquisition with fake data and finally got a hold of someone who could help.  Why they make it so hard to get help is beyond me.

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Sending emails on new Blogger posts - version 2

In this post, I talked about using Make.com to send emails whenever I made a new blog post.  Unfortunately, that turned out to have many problems of which the main issue was that gmail required authentication every three days and you have to use the desktop browser version to re-authenticate.  In other words, it was not usable, especially from a phone.  I am now trying Zapier.com to see if it works any better.  It works a bit differently by using the RSS feed from blogger instead of logging into blogger to see if there is a new post.  Also it seems to be better about only getting a new post, not an older post and it checks every 15 minutes so I can post multiple times a day and people should get emails.  We will see how it works.

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Sending emails on new Blogger posts

I have been using follow.it to allow people to get emails whenever I post something to the blog, but did now like it as it never led people to the blog.  Instead they just copied the blog posting to their site and the person would view it there.  So after looking around at all the other services that have the same sorts of issues, I cobbled together a solution that will work for me and may be even better.

I created a free Make.com account and used their tools to connect Blogger to Gmail.  Now a new post will trigger a Make scenario which will then send an email to all the folks who have signed up.  I put people's emails in the BCC field of the Gmail app for privacy.  The Make scenario runs once a day and will only pick up the most recent blog post which is fine with me.

Next, I had to create an easy way for people to let me know they wanted to sign up.  Blogger is pretty limited on this, but as a workaround, I set up their Contact Me widget and then hid it with a custom style "#ContactForm1{display: none !important}" in the theme.  I can then copied over the widget code into my own HTML/Javascript widget and modified it to remove the name and message fields. Now I have a simple form with email field and a subscribe button.  As an aside, I also use the fields in the custom widget to create a Contact Me page on the site.

So now what happens is I get an email when someone wants to get emailed on new postings which I then add to the Make scenario.  For me this works fine as I am very low volume.

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Driverless Cars

Aa friend of Sawako's picked us up to go for a hike in his new Tesla car.  Even though I am not a fan of the Tesla driverless technology (I think they should use more than just cameras), it really worked well.  My guess is because of the amount of data they are collecting.

The friend said he still keeps his hands by the steering wheel, but he can go door to door between two locations several hundred miles apart with just 1 or 2 times where he has to modify what the car wants to do.  In fact, he says the car is overall a better driver than he is.  No California stops, always uses the blinkers, etc.  I did like the feedback that the car provides on the big screen so you can see what it is 'thinking' and fix things before they get bad.

So I guess this is the future.  Either the Waymo with lots of sensors, but not as much local data or the Tesla with not as many sensors but lots of local data.  The downside to either of these is if you are in an area where the car does not have much data, it is more likely to make mistakes.

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Automated Mobility Devices

 I took a flight from Seattle to Denver recently and at the Seattle airport there were several of these.

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Technology Planned Obsolesce

I was chatting with a person and it reminded me of how much of our technology is deliberately designed to be tossed away after just a few years.  For example, I was a TA for a second year college physics course and all the students had these nice TI-35 calculators (no cell phones in those days).  

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Microsoft Fun - MFA

As mentioned previously, I run O365 domains for a few non-profits.  One of them has volunteers come into the office to screen videos from a camera before posting them on the website.  The volunteers log in on a shared account. 

Due to phishing and hacking issues, Microsoft has been gradually forcing people to use MFA. While this is a good idea in general, as usual there are edge cases where it doesn't make sense AND Microsoft's own documentation and web UI are all over the map concerning MFA.  So there are multiple locations in their web UI where you can manage MFA for users - both per user, by policy, and by setting defaults in at least 2 different places (notice that all my settings are to disable MFA):

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Microsoft Fun - Licensing

So the other day, I got this wonderful email from Microsoft saying there was a license up for renewal on one of the domains I manage:

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Microsoft Fun - Support for support

I maintain Microsoft O365 domains for two different local non-profits.  These are a good deal for non-profits as they get 10 Business Premium and 300 Business Basic licenses for free plus nice discounts on other products.  As such I get to deal with the quirks of a large company.  O365 has a nice option to get support when you have problems.  It has a AI assistant (not useful for the questions I have) and then open up tickets with options for phone or email callbacks (although it seems they always want to use the phone).  The support folks try hard, but are often not able to help much.  A few annoying quirks are:

• They often want to see you screen and start up a screen sharing session.  They like to do this via teh quick assist app that only runs on windows and mac machines.  If I say I am on a linux machine, they go 'huh', talk with their manager, and, depending on if the manager is experienced or not, will then switch to teams which does run on linux. 
• Microsoft has multiple support groups for their different products, but links to access these support teams is either in the left side menus (Identity) or scattered around on various screens (Teams) instead of being accessible via the nice ? icon. O365 support cannot transfer tickets to other support groups and, unless you do a lot of poking around menus, you have no idea they even exist. 

So, for example, I have a question about MFA and open a O365 support ticket.  They contact me, start up a quickassist screen sharing session, and walk me through opening up a support ticket with the Identity support group.  Good thing they did as the options they had me pick to open up the ticket had nothing to do with MFA - it was more with dealing with how to create applications.

So now I need support just to access support - way to go Microsoft.  Seems like an immense waste of time and resources.

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Superbloom: How Technologies of Connnection Tear Us Apart by Nicholas Carr

This book reinforces my beliefs that we are much more a product of our environment than we like to admit. As with the concept of Blue Zones where if we are in an environment that encourages healthy habits, we will do them; this book discusses how social connection technologies shape us and are the root cause of many problems today.

I like Blue Zones because (1) Dan Buettner bases his ideas and hypothesis's on a lot of empirical research and then, most importantly, he tests them out and finds that they hold up in areas where he gets cities, organizations, etc to make changes in their environment to encourage more healthy behaviors.  Simple changes such as putting healthy foods is better locations in stores, making areas more walkable, etc.  Living in Tokyo, I find that the environment encourages much more walking so I walk more than when I live in the US.

In Superbloom, Nicholas makes the point that we are now overwhelmed with data from a zillion different sources.  To deal with this, our minds use shortcuts, rules of thumb, etc as that is the only way we can deal with it.  The problem is that the rules and shortcuts do not work well with this mass of data.  One rule is that if something is repeated a lot, we pay more attention to it whether it is true or not.  As he states "Repetition is, in the human mind, a proxy for facticity," which unfortunately is just not true with all the data we are exposed to these days (e.g. Trump and the Republican party is a great example of this problem).

We are also changed by all this data and the shortcuts we take to make sense out of it.  The screens full of abstract, often incorrect information cause us to become dislocated from reality.  We start making decisions based on alternate realities, instead of based on what is best for our physical selves just to get more cred, more attention in that alternate reality (e.g. people doing internet challenges that hurt themselves, people seeing family members dying from covid, but still refusing to be vaccinated).

This problem is especially acute for children as they are trying to make sense of their world.  They a need a firm basis in the physical reality before being exposed to all the data of the internet.  I feel they need to be taught and trained how to critically view the data they see via screens, especially with the ability of AI to basically fake anything these days.  Anything you read, hear, or view over a screen needs to be treated as untrusted unless you have some basis in reality to trust it (e.g. you see the bank branch, you trust the source of the information you are reading because of their reputation, etc.).

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The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, et. al.

Just finished reading this book by the founder of Deepmind, arguably the most important AI company in the world.  He thinks the impact of LLMs will be much larger that what I thought in this post.  A wave is a major cycle of innovation across multiple domains.  In the last 250 years we have gone through 5 waves with AI and Synthetic Biology being the 6th wave of change.

Innovation Waves in Recent Human History

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Microsoft is drifting back into bad habits

For a brief time of a few years, Microsoft was doing pretty good at putting customers first and not trying to mislead them  Unfortunately, they are reverting back to their bad habits.  Classic example is Bing.  This is what a normal Bing search page looks likes:

And this is a Google search page:

Now look at the Bing search page if you enter google like you would if you wanted the google search engine:

If you are not careful, you may not notice that you are not on the google search page. This is just the latest in their regression.

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Desktops reach 1 petaflop

Saw this article for a personal AI supercomputer for $3000 that delivers 1 petaflop of performance.  Compare this with the first machine to reach a petaflop in 2008.  So in only 17 years we have gone from:

• $120,000,000
• 130,464 processor cores
• 103,000 GB ram
• 296 cabinets
• 2,345,000 watts power
• Retired 2013

to this (tiny beige box to left of monitor):

• $3,000
• ~20,000 cores (not known exactly)
• 128GB ram
• 1 tiny box
• 1,500 watts

In 17 years this is a:

• Cost reduction of 99.99%
• Core reduction of 84.67%
• Ram reduction of 99.88%
• Size reduction of 99.99%
• Power reduction of 99.93%

What do you think will happen in the next 2 decades?

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Artificial Intelligence - LLM Models

I am very concerned about the impact of the latest AI powered by LLM models that is being added to everything online without any thought for the consequences.  I encourage you to watch this video by Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology which explains some of the impacts.

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Using blogger from a phone

It has taken a bit of trial and error, but I think I have a process for posting blog entries.

1. Write the draft post using Joplin on my phone as no internet access is needed. I do this during the day as we travel.
2. When we finish our travel for the day, I copy the photos from my camera to my phone and save any photos I like from Sawako's account to my account.
3. Then I do simple editing of the photos, deleting bad ones, cropping, and some color fixing. For Sawako's photos, I have edit the ones she takes in portrait mode as that uses HDR which means multiple images for one photo. I have to use Snapseed as Google photos crashes on these.
4. Then I start a new post on the blogger website as the app doesn't handle links or lots of photos very well. I copy over the text from Joplin and add in the photos. For each photo I resize it the large size. Sometimes the website doesn't see photos in Google photos so I use the blogger app to add them to the post.
5. Finally I link the temple names to descriptions of them and add in a jump break, the - in the blogger toolbar, under the first photo. The jump break is needed to allow blogger to show multiple blog entries on the first page.

I was really hoping I could use the blogger app, but it mucks up many photos so they just show up as IMG and it's lacking many of the options the website has such as forcing links to open in another window, image resizing, and formatting options.

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