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.

Primary elements: the document, even at book length, takes the form of a precise, pedantic, but informal letter to the audience. The author might reference themself as …

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.

Or at least, I have.

Places in the house with acceptable sound systems:

• my bedroom
• the living room
• the den/theater
• the …

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.

A typical want ad will say something about required years of experience in each of those technologies. This is …

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. They were cheap and comfortable.

I can't tell you how many people …

Biometrics are usernames, not passwords.

That is all.

The Cloud -- where did we get that metaphor?

The answer is pretty simple. Imagine you are a techie working on an Internet project in the late 1990s. You are explaining to a less-technical audience how your application is going to be built. You have a whiteboard, and you draw some …

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.

In /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service, set

Requires=syslog.socket

In /etc/rsyslog.conf, set

module(load="imuxsock" SysSock.Name="/run/systemd/journal/syslog" ) # provides …

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

Let's work backwards.

SATA, the Serial AT Attachment, is different from PATA, the Parallel AT Attachment because, among other things, it uses a 7 conductor cable rather than a …

This sounds like general problem of enterprise security. There are no consequences. I can entirely get why a company would outsource IP cameras to a third party cloud, even with storing data on-site. Business runs on contracts. It's entirely normal to contract out everything except your core competencies, if it's …

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.

• Install stunnel4

• Create a config file in /etc/stunnel4/dns.conf

pid = /var/run/stunnel4/stunnel.pid

[dns]
accept = 853
accept = :::853 …

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 mentioned this and work bought a replacement. Since I'm capable of working around exciting new bugs, they sent me the newest M1 …

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.

I assume she didn't use any /command except /join -- maybe not even that …

Coworker: the username was autofilling so I assumed it was correct. But you know what they say about assuming.

Me: That it is indistinguishable from making a mistake, only you didn't realize you had even made a decision?

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. Actually validating a claim is expensive and often boring. Why not just make people feel like they're important in some way?

But once you recognize it, pseudovalidation feels disrespectful: these people are lying to me and don't even care if I …