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 looked at that arrangement and needed to talk about their sudden feelings.

Biometrics are usernames, not passwords.

And you can’t change them when you change your name, and you might accidentally change them via trauma.

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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 simple things as you talk:

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.

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

However, this only works as long as the other party actually internalizes the risk and liability. Since there are no consequences for mishandling data, operating IT services you’re not structurally competent to operate, and eventually having your crown jewels stolen - the contractor doesn’t really internalize risk, has no incentive to mitigate it.

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
connect = 127.0.0.1:53
cert = /etc/letsencrypt/live/randomstring.org/fullchain.pem
key = /etc/letsencrypt/live/randomstring.org/privkey.pem

Substitute the locations of an appropriate SSL cert and key.

• Start stunnel4.

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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 MacBookPro, with an Apple-designed and -produced M1 8 core CPU.

Herewith, a micro-review.

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, because if you’re only using one channel then you can have your client autojoin – but that was enough to get her in. Presumably she learned group etiquette on the fly, the way most people do.

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 know it:

In the last few years, email marketers have started sending streams of messages that reference each other, apparently attempting to induce a feeling of an existing relationship, and then shame that I am somehow not carrying my end of it.

This does not work anymore.

I began an entry in July of 2018 with this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

I can now say this:

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2019) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I can recommend that you purchase this tablet if you are comfortable with the use of adb and command line tools. It is cheap ($95 on Prime Day) and capable of doing a number of useful things, such as…

In the beginning of my experience, it wasn’t that computers had fonts so much as each computer had A Font, and that was how the computer talked to you. All of them were quite low resolution; blocky and bad.

Now I expect every character to be drawn in an appropriate, smooth, curved, and informatively differentiated typeface.

When did that change start, and when was it complete?