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 …

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 …

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 …

The fate of a modern desktop CPU is to sleep for hours on end, up until the point that it is called to leap into action for a few seconds. Later, it will be pushed to the limits of thermal overload for quite a few minutes or hours, along with …

Nintendo’s 3DS pocket-sized game system includes “Streetpass”, a method of sharing your high scores, Mii avatars and other game information with random strangers who also have 3DS systems. That includes the levels designed by Super Mario Maker, which are a few megabytes apiece.

The swap happens anonymously and automatically …

People just don’t take security seriously, because security is hard to understand and hard to implement and hard to maintain. We need a new way of “doing” security, and I’ve got an idea. Let’s go back to the notion of skeuomorphism: we use pictorial representations of real-world …

1. Look up unrelated technology names from 10+ years ago. Make a list.
2. Sort the list by an arbitrary criterion.
3. Pick the name third from the top.

Alternate method

1. Make a list of common English words that are 6 or fewer letters long.
2. Google each of those words. Make a note …

Why I am not moving to Canada (although I quite like Canada and many Canadians):

because the people of my country need me to help defend them. And I am not much of a hero, but I will try.

This may count as advice to myself more than anything else, but since I’ve given it repeatedly, I might as well write it down.

A “tweak” is a change to how a program looks or functions which is very small. It might be defined as the smallest change which …

The purpose of an advertisement is to plant the idea in your head that you need or want some thing that can be purchased.

Having lived in such a society for a few decades, my now-instinctive reaction to a successful advertisement is to assume that I might want a thing …

I ran out of business cards a few weeks ago, and forgot to order more. Surely there’s another box around here? Yes, of course there was — left over from three headquarters moves ago.

And tomorrow I’m going to a conference.

Well, business cards are a waste of good …