Work asks that I bring home an Apple laptop so that I maintain some sort of fluency with the systems that the majority of our employees use. For the last while this has been a 2011 MacBook Pro with 20GB of RAM and an SSD. The keyboard finally sputtered its way to an unusable state (most of the modifier keys, shift/ctrl/alt/command/option/super/meta/hyper...) were unpredictably triggering or failing to trigger) and I asked for a replacement.

"Whatever has a functioning escape key, please."

So they signed out a 2015 MacBookPro to me. It has 8GB of RAM (not upgradable) and an SSD (ditto).

If you have a Linux system that was using systemd as its init system, and you changed it to something else, and now nearly everything is incredibly slow:

Remove libnss-systemd; check for and remove systemd options from /etc/nsswitch.conf.

As you will no doubt recall, that config controls the methods that the system uses for various lookups. Most things are files, which is to say the system should look in the appropriate config files. hosts is usually files followed by DNS. If you have Kerberos or LDAP or some other networked signon system, this is where it would be configured.

Who knew that systemd wanted control of that, too? Not I.

The Google Nexus 6P was an excellent phone, until it developed severe battery issues when it was about a year old. Google did me the courtesy of replacing it with the Pixel XL, which was a reasonably good phone until two years in, when it developed moderate battery issues which …

Centralized facilities are easier to manage. Centralized facilities are easier to control.

Distributed facilities are harder to manage, harder to control.

Centralized facilities need expensive, difficult redundancies to maintain function during a partial outage. Distributed facilities need coordination.

Centralized is cheaper than distributed if you don't pay for the things that can make it reliable.

If a previously reliable gigabit connection is suddenly working at 100 Mb/s, you probably have a flaky cable. Replace it. Yes, I know it hasn't moved in months or years so there can't possibly be any mechanical stress. Kill it with scissors.

This is a reminder that spinning storage is still useful for large data dumps, media, backups, and other bulky things that you don't need to change continuously.

But mostly, it's cost-effective. The two current sweet spots for capacity/performance (assuming brand-name, non-sale, 7200RPM SATA3 3.5" disks) are at 4TB (about $75) and 10TB (about $270).

I also remind you that you want RAID for reliability, but it's not backup by itself.

Via Rick Thomas on the Debian Users mailing list:

In any case, the solution I came up with is

apt-get --purge install -y sysvinit-core dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0-
apt-get --purge autoremove

Note the trailing minus-signs on dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0- These packages need to be deleted in the same pass as sysvinit-core …

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 there …

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.

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 to …

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'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 can articulate …

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 be …