I just realized that I internalized the O'Reilly house style decades ago, and so I think it's the proper way to write documentation.

Primary elements: the document, even at book length, takes the form of a precise, pedantic, but informal letter to the audience. The author might reference themself as …

When you stop looking for ways to improve your sound reproduction experience and instead look for new music to listen to, you have begun to recover from audiophilia.

Or at least, I have.

Places in the house with acceptable sound systems:

• my bedroom
• the living room
• the den/theater
• the …

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 …

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 …

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.

In /etc/systemd/system/syslog.service, set

Requires=syslog.socket

In /etc/rsyslog.conf, set

module(load="imuxsock" SysSock.Name="/run/systemd/journal/syslog" ) # provides …

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

Let's work backwards.

SATA, the Serial AT Attachment, is different from PATA, the Parallel AT Attachment because, among other things, it uses a 7 conductor cable rather than a …

This sounds like general problem of enterprise security. There are no consequences. I can entirely get why a company would outsource IP cameras to a third party cloud, even with storing data on-site. Business runs on contracts. It's entirely normal to contract out everything except your core competencies, if it's …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

What's running on the firewall? A big list follows, with discussion.

• ACPId - reports on thermal performance
• atd - executes delayed jobs via at
• cron - executes repeating jobs, like the local backup, the remote backup, and the automated package updater.
• dbus-daemon - nearly useless, but Linux more or less requires it
• ddclient - dynamic …

For every computer system, someone needs to know what they are doing, and check up on it when something goes wrong. That person is the sysadmin.

If you don't know who the sysadmin is, it's you.

It's just like everything else in life: if you care about a thing, you …

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process …

One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don't: it's generally quite easy to change their window manager theme -- and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations -- a frame, a titlebar, some buttons -- are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window …