random strings

I will bet a shiny nickel that in 2028, you will be able to buy newly made spinning disks and that they will be economically justifiable for large media collections, backups and archives.

My wife worked for the first public ISP for several years.

koreader is an open source ebook reader application originally designed to replace the firmware on Kobo E-Ink reading tablets, and then ported to run on Amazon Kindle, Android, PocketBook, and Remarkable devices.

It’s a nice title, but what this really is, is my personal preferences on interfaces for reading fiction.

‘Due diligence’ is the business terminology for taking care of details when you enter into a contract.

It is essential to realize that these technologies [large language models, currently called AI] do not answer questions about a model of reality, but about a model of language.

The thirty year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product… which…

I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and in-screen.

I switched from GNU screen to tmux when I discovered that the minor bug I had been experiencing for years had been reported several times and always dismissed with “can’t reproduce”.

People use tools to get things done.

Modern social media could have learned some useful things from Usenet.

Of interest to highly technical budget-quality optimizing folks, mostly.

I am aware that this trick never works (cf ‘Hacker’).

Being a mini-review of the Asus Zenfone 9.

If you have an Apple Mail client (MacOS, iPhone, whatever) that recently stopped sending email to some servers, the reason is because Apple doesn’t play nicely with other products.

If your company is planning on hiring 4-6 technical people a year, your next hire should be a recruiter.

Blogs publish articles, or entries, which are basically the same as Usenet posts – but there’s no widespread mechanism for grouping and replying.

The categories of certainty of knowledge are statistical and fuzzy.

I’ve had this idea for seven years and haven’t done anything with it, so I hereby release it into the public domain and hope someone will make it – preferably an open source version.

beep, boop bleep, bloop creep, croup deep, dupe heap, hoop keep, coop leap, loop neap, no-op -30-

Last night Politico published an unprecedented leak of a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade, the decision that established a right of privacy and the consequent right to an abortion.

When something goes wrong, especially (but not limited to) at startup, you should log an error message that is as informative as possible.

There are two kinds of smart home enthusiasts: the kind who buy into a particular cloudy ecosystem and need to buy all new stuff every few years, and the kind who spend all their time tinkering on their in-house systems.

It is 2022.

When a backup fails to complete, that’s a reliable sign of trouble.

When you believe in things that you don’t understand, Then you suffer, Superstition ain’t the way – Stevie Wonder Every time I write about the mechanical processes behind this blog, I stop adding entries to it.

This blog is created by Pelican, a static site generator that combines some text files that I write with a layout and some CSS styles to produce the HTML that is rsync’d over to the nginx webserver which answers your requests.

It’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime – or at least, those rooted decades deep.

I just realized that I internalized the O’Reilly house style decades ago, and so I think it’s the proper way to write documentation.

When you stop looking for ways to improve your sound reproduction experience and instead look for new music to listen to, you have begun to recover from audiophilia.

Let’s say that you are constructing a technical employment advertisement and you would like to specify that this position requires someone who knows what they are doing in a few technologies.

Twenty-five years ago, approximately, my housemates and I bought office chairs – rolling five-star bases, adjustable arms, comes in a box with an L-shaped hex driver like IKEA stuff – and put them in our dining room around the table.

Biometrics are usernames, not passwords.

The Cloud – where did we get that metaphor?

This is a reminder to myself on how to make the systemd journald relay everything through rsyslogd, so we get useful info in /var/log.

Fun fact of the day: the AT in SATA is a direct reference to the IBM PC/AT launched in 1984.

This sounds like general problem of enterprise security.

I will assume you have a working DNS server listening on the default port, 53, and that you have certbot or some other means of acquiring SSL certs.

My work-issued MacBook Pro (Retina, late 2013) began to break down: the speakers fried, it was running out of memory (8GB), and then it started rebooting spontaneously.

I don’t know about your mother, but my mother is not even a power user – Windows, hunt-and-peck typing – and she taught herself to use IRC because that’s what the other people in her social group were using.

Coworker: the username was autofilling so I assumed it was correct.

A smart contract can prove that someone who knew a secret agreed to the terms of the contract, but it can’t prove that someone who says they aren’t party to that contract is lying.

Pseudovalidation is a major goal of marketing and advertising.

In the last few years, email marketers have started sending streams of messages that reference each other, apparently attempting to induce a feeling of an existing relationship, and then shame that I am somehow not carrying my end of it.

I began an entry in July of 2018 with this: The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line.

In the beginning of my experience, it wasn’t that computers had fonts so much as each computer had A Font, and that was how the computer talked to you.

How the RPG rules describe dice rolls: this result on the dice is a critical success, this range is a success, that range is a failure, this result is a critical failure.

What’s running on the firewall?

For every computer system, someone needs to know what they are doing, and check up on it when something goes wrong.

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house.