It seems increasingly unwise to allow an Intel-made CPU to talk to the outside world. But the NUC-style machines are almost exclusively Intel. What should we do for a new firewall?

You’ll recall that I prefer firewalls to run Debian Stable, so that security updates are available promptly. While …

I recently ordered a dozen things from Amazon from six vendors. All the things were pretty technical – ethernet switches, fiber optic cables, transceivers, things like that. This is normal.

Four of the six vendors asked me to review their products. Two asked me multiple times over the same order.

Here’s my policy, and I urge you to consider the same one:

I will only leave a review on a commerce site if I have an unusual experience to report. An unusual experience is either surprisingly good or exceptionally bad. I won’t give any feedback for a transaction in which I paid the agreed amount of money, received the product in a reasonable time, and the product worked as expected.

Adding reviews outside of that policy has two negative effects: it adds useless noise to the review section, and it tends to inflate star-system grades.

Lots of projects focus on an MVP, a minimum viable product: the least effort that it takes to make something that someone will pay for. The idea is that you can use that as a base to incrementally improve the product into something that people will actually recommend to each …

Let’s name a thing: dominant data formats.

A data format is a specification for how to turn information into a digital encoding that a computer can work with, and of course how to reverse that back into a human-readable method.

A dominant data format is one that is used …

Somehow, without me being consciously aware of it, every device in the house that I use to play music has become capable of playing FLAC.

(FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio CoDec. A CoDec is a compressor/decompressor, a method of potentially squeezing lots of data into less data. Lossless …

“It seemed reasonable at the time.”

Well, it did.

Everything is a semi-rational reaction to something else.

Companies used to own and run their own machines on-premises. But doing it properly (HVAC, power, raised floors, standardized racks, management, redundancy, preparedness…) is expensive and not actually most companies’ core competency. So they moved to colocated datacenters, where a competent company …

It’s 2019. How much RAM do you need?

For a desktop or laptop, it’s fairly easy: everyone needs 8GB to get general work done. 16GB is suitable for people who are doing heftier work, and people who need 32GB or more always have a specific reason that they …

The HP Envy 13z is a lightweight, reasonably high-performance laptop with a relatively low price tag - under $600 for the 1080P 13" touchscreen, flip-hinge to tablet, backlit keyboard, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD, Ryzen 2300U four-core system weighing a little over two pounds.

(Those were the specs.)

It generally compares favorably …

We've had a nominal gigabit fiber connection for more than a year now. Let's take a look at how much of it we've been using.

Luckily, my firewall keeps track for me.

There’s this notion of a technological cycle of reincarnation, where an implementation is followed by a logical successor which leads to another one which carries on down a chain until someone has a bright idea which looks an awful lot like the original implementation. For example, it used to …

I remember that there are test patterns built into T1 CSU/DSUs, but not what they are or how to turn them on – if I need to know, I’ll look it up.

I remember that there are three QoS bits in the IPv4 header, but not where they are …

Recognize this pattern:

• Set a goal
• Work towards the goal
  • Evaluate progress:
  • If it didn’t get closer to the goal, try a different approach.
  • If it got closer to the goal, try improving it.
• Cycle.

That seems reasonable, right? It accomplishes what you wanted to do, possibly in a naive manner.

Okay, let’s look at the serious problems:

Several people have asked me recently what hardware I would buy today for use as a home firewall.

About a year ago, we switched ISPs from RCN to Verizon. I had no particular issues with RCN except that their prices went up each year without providing better service. (It’s true that RCN also fails to handle IPv6 natively, but Verizon shares that failure.) What’s happened in …