As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
The dream of hypermedia can come to fruition in a world where clients can not only parse, but navigate with intent.
Ruby Central posted an extremely concerning “Incident Response Timeline” today, in which they make a number of exaggerated or purely misleading claims. Here’s my effort to set the record straight. First, and most importantly: I was a primary operator of RubyGems.org, securely and successfully, for over ten years. Ruby…
Building an iOS fermentation tracker with HACCP-style decision trees for home charcuterie, salami curing, and fermented foods - food safety without internet strangers.
An introduction to a new post series covering debugger basics.
Organizing and generating variety in politics
There was a recent incident where Microsoft somehow allegedly blocked a mailbox of a sanctioned individual . Any organization highly depending on MS products that might come into the crosshair should ask - can this happen to me? What would be the cost? How much I invest into prevention of this scenario? In this…
What Dollywood says about the state of America's Transit
It’s so easy
The mathematical constant pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is the most famous ratio in mathematics both on Earth and probably for any advanced civilization in the universe. The number pi, like other fundamental constants of mathematics such as e = 2.718..., is a…
In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate…
Two findings in PureVPN on Ubuntu 24.04. After a reconnect the system takes a default IPv6 route outside the tunnel, and the ip6tables OUTPUT policy is still ACCEPT, so traffic leaves in the clear while the client reports connected.
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
A thorough review of a major cloud outage.
Little Snitch by Objective Development is the first app that I install on a new Mac. In fact I just bought a new Mac, an M4 MacBook Pro with nano-texture display, and I installed Little Snitch via thumb drive even before connecting the Mac to the internet. While setting up my new Mac, which came with macOS 15.2…
Once in a while you get introduced to a tool that instantly changes the way you work. For me, mise is one of those tools.
Jailbreaking an old Kindle and turning it into a school dashboard using Cloudflare Workers, Puppeteer, and image processing.
Spend enough time looking at Python programs and packages for machine learning, and you'll notice that the "JIT decorator" pattern is pretty popular. For example, this JAX snippet:
A friend cleaned up and gave me a copy of a game I've not heard about before: Castrol Honda Superbike World Champions , a motorbike racing game for PC, released 1998 by Interactive Entertainment Ltd. and Midas Interactive Entertainment.
Minecraft generates unique worlds with Perlin noise. Covers the algorithm, octaves, and Fractal Brownian Motion - with a terrain implementation walkthrough.
I’ve used Mullvad as my VPN provider for a few years. Their service is good, they provide keys for 5 devices, rely on the Wireguard protocol, and offer alternative configurations as well. Despite that, my needs have changed and I wanted to be able to have granular control over DNS queries and the ability to connect my…
Who decided these personalized Siri features should go in the WWDC keynote, with a promise they’d arrive in the coming year, when, at the time, they were in such an unfinished state they could not be demoed to the media even in a controlled environment? Three months later, who decided Apple should double down and…
💡Update May 26, 2025: I've published the source code for TeleMessage Explorer: a new open source research tool I've been digging through the 410 GB of Java heap dumps from TeleMessage's archive server, provided by DDoSecrets. Here's a description of the dataset, some of my initial
Which is exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it
More delays, fewer accidents, and lower prices
My experience with my father's long-term care insurance company has not been an easy one. But I've learned quite a few lessons.
For the last two years I’ve had an O’Reilly subscription . Their offer is quite attractive with unlimited access to books not only by O’Reilly but also Manning and others. The catalog is just enourmous and covers pretty much every technical book around software engineering et al. that I might ever want to read. There…
Rant ahead: I hate TLS “Inspection” software with a burning passion and I wish we collectively as an industry would just knock it the fuck off and stop pretending it’s some great security benefit. Every time I encounter it, in whatever form, it’s a gigantic headache that makes everyone’s life worse off and as far as I…
With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.
