When the canvas API came out a number of years ago, I made a simple website to learn something about it. It was basically a white canvas that people can draw on it. Nothing super fancy, just 300x300 pixels that you can draw black lines on and save.

I think I made one mention of it in foxymonkies and that’s it, and pretty much forgotten about it. Until recently.

It turns out that there 442 user-created images over that time (some blank, but uniq isn’t filtering them out so there might be a dot or something odd there). Since I don’t keep a timestamp, I have no idea how recently these images were generated. Since there is no name, I have no idea who created most of these (most of them were definitely not me).

So I’m releasing it for your viewing pleasure and entertainment. Some of these are kinda nsfw if you work at some lame company where Michelangelo’s David is nsfw.

To not lose my 2 RSS viewers, I have moved the 400+ doodles into a seperate link.

For most of my childhood, money was always scarce. I don’t know whether it was actually the case or whether I just believed it was. I always felt bad asking for money or for stuff (anyone remember scholastics?!). $5 was a lot as a kid, but it bought a lot of stuff back then. It also meant that I was careful about what I spent my money on, and avoided spending money on myself. It also meant I tended to spend money on things rather than experiences, as things were a lot easier to quantify.

That hasn’t translated too well into adulthood. I became fixated on seeing my balance only going up. Everything needed to be planned out. Overspending this month meant I couldn’t spend much next month (or the next few months as was the case of my first car). While all these sounds like good habits to have, I was literally sitting on $20,000 worried over a few hundred. I was too worried to spend/invest that money.

In some ways that fear has served me well. I was able to buy my own place without any help. It was hard spending $40,000 that day, but it felt so liberating.

I am a lot better at spending money now (especially for things I need); but I still have challenges. I still have difficultly in spending money on things that make me happy. I will without hesitation spend an extra $1000 on paying down my mortgage (which is gonna last another 20 years regardless). But the amount of anxiety of doing the same thing for something I want? Ridiculous.

A number of weeks ago someone pointed me to darkmail which was started by the same people who ran Lavabit before it shutdown.

I thought “this sounds great!… if it works”

Sadly I do not know how it works without reading the specification. The website is pretty bare, as is the wikipedia article (at the time of this writing). But I have used, and have a general understanding of, PGP and S/MIME. Both of which have not seen really great adoption, and remain pretty niche products.

There was an interesting post on the planet Mozilla by Joshua Cranmer, who works on various parts of the Mozilla Mail module, gave his opinion on why e-mail security failed. While I have not come across many of the problems (which I probably would if more people used it) he points out, one issue he does point that I think is pretty major is the fact that you cannot do server-side searching and SPAM filtering on a pure end-to-end encryption model.

So it would be interesting to see whether and how Darkmail solves this issue. Or whether we would have to accept sacrifices in security for more usability.