Suppose that you are unhappy with the way that one of your vendors does business. You are not a dominant customer; that is, you don’t account for so much of their sales that they are willing to change their policies for you. This is the normal situation.

Welcome to …

People are overwhelmed with email.

In response, they declare email bankruptcy — that means that they arbitrarily delete their inboxes and hope the problem will magically fix itself — or adopt strange methodologies.

Here is the one true method of dealing with email. It works. It requires some setup. It requires some …

Definitions:

• A policy is an organization’s stated objectives and methods for accomplishing a goal.

• Sustainable means a model of a system that easily fits into a person’s head and can be used as an accurate prediction of how another person accomplished a goal.

So a sustainable software policy …

I was about to ask the mutt-users mailing list a question, when it occurred to me that I should really google it first. Indeed, my question had been answered about 3 years previously. And it’s really useful.

  # .n : limit to only threads with New messages
  macro index .n "l …

“Non-fiction” is an assertion of hope, not a statement of accuracy.

In farming, monoculture is the practice of raising a single crop over and over again. You can figure out exactly what fertilizers it needs, how much water, and predict your yield accurately, year after year.

Then, one year, a blight or a virus or a bacterium or a weevil comes …

I have a Sansa Clip+. It’s an MP3 player. Remember those?

Physically, it is about the size of a matchbox. Not the tiny model cars, which were always too big for their namesakes, but the actual give-away advertising matchboxes, made of sturdy cardboard with a friction strip on one …

The essence of the UNIX philosophy is not “make small utilities that can be fitted together with pipes” but to assume that at any moment, a user might decide to be a developer or a sysadmin and should have the tools to do that.

The problems of UNIX generally come …

Back in the DOS era of personal computing, the default prompt was the letter name of the current drive, followed by a colon and a >. So A:> or C:> if you were wealthy enough to afford a hard disk. DOS really had only one shell for a great many years …

Nobody wants backups. Everybody wants restores.

The questions are:

• what sort of disaster are you trying to recover from

• how often do you expect each to happen

• how much time are you willing to take recovering

• how much are you willing to spend

Let’s take a few common scenarios …

You might recall way back when I wrote not interested in cybercoders. That was not quite a year ago.

It appears that cybercoders hasn’t got the message, though. When it became clear to me that three of their recruiters were all going to try spamming me at once, I …

Nobody likes you when you’re 23 / And are still more amused by prank phone calls / What the hell is caller ID?

• from Blink-182, “What’s My Age Again?”, 1992

You probably already know that Caller ID is useful, and that it can be faked. If you want to know …

This completes a year of using Google Fi for cell service. Fi is a meta-provider which uses both Sprint and T-Mobile for underlying cell service. The downside is that you must buy a phone from Google, and there are only 3 options. They are very nice options, though, if you …

If you are faced with any sort of text formatting conversion problem, you should probably start with pandoc to solve it.

Suppose you have a portion of a website that you would like to turn into an ebook.

1. Use wget -nc -nd -v -r -l1 $URL to retrieve it. -r …

Attackers change their behavior, so we have to change in response.

Way back in the olden days, someone with evil intent would ping your IP address to make sure it was up, run nmap to figure out which of four or five exploitable services were available, and then pound their …