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linux install: HP Envy 13z

Sat 15 December 2018

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.

the difference between peak and sustained usage

Wed 12 December 2018

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.

cycle of reincarnation

Sat 17 November 2018

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 that CPUs did all their math by themselves, then they outsourced the hard parts to floating point coprocessors, then those got built in to the main CPU chip again. Graphics subsystems are particularly prone to the cycle.

advice on buying firewall hardware

Mon 22 October 2018

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

for a total of $176, including shipping. Links were accurate as of October 22, 2018.

This gets you a tiny box, similar in size to random commercial house router/firewall/wifi access points, which can run a standard Linux operating system with a complex firewall running at 1 Gb/s in and out, more RAM than strictly necessary, and an SSD which is both very large (and therefore can last a very long time) and boot the system quickly enough that you can do a reboot without losing TCP sessions.

I would also recommend a medium-sized USB thumb drive to set up as an emergency booting and backup device. Call it another $15 or so.

FIOS one year later

Sat 20 October 2018

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 that year?

all email disclaimers are utterly useless

Wed 10 October 2018

All email disclaimers are utterly useless – except, possibly, one that a lawyer sends you that, on that particular message, reminds you that you are not in a privileged relationship.

why computer security is terrible, a partial explanation

Fri 21 September 2018

One problem: we have built an immense network of supercomputers that is essentially a Commons. An abuse of this Commons that would be ridiculously unprofitable if it had to be carried out by humans – say, an expected return of one one-hundredth cent per attempt – is highly attractive to unscrupulous actors who can automate a billion attempts for an expenditure of a few days or weeks worth of setup and expect a hundred thousand dollars of return.

kitchen philosophy

Sat 04 August 2018

Gas ranges have the UNIX nature: they are powerful, can be controlled precisely, and if you only half-know what you are doing, it’s possible to blow up your house. If you do know what you’re doing, nearly any problem can be solved by taking it apart and cleaning things or replacing components.

amazon kindle fire hd10 microreview

Sun 29 July 2018

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.

replace procmail with maildrop

Thu 26 July 2018

By all means, replace procmail with maildrop.

zfs is pretty good

Mon 09 July 2018

Someone on the debian-user list just discovered that gpt partitioning allows you to put 128 partitions on a disk. They got really excited at the granularity that would allow. They weren’t thinking about the exciting maintenance procedures that would inevitably follow – not enough space here, too much space there, backups all over the place.

lies, revisited

Thu 17 May 2018

In ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks’ (2014) I wrote about varying measures of CPU power versus perception of speed, and concluded that there were no order-of-magnitude differences in affordable CPUs. Three and a half years later, there ought to be some change in the market. What’s the best bang-for-the-buck these days?

taking names

Tue 15 May 2018

If you have a domain name registered, you need to renew your registration every few years. You can generally ask for a 1-3 year cycle.

the cost of GPL is not in dollars

Wed 28 February 2018

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as well.

The price for using an LGPL’d math library is distributing the source for the library along with your product. If you modify the library itself, then that falls back to the GPL.

In no case are you getting something for nothing. It’s just that the cost of using GPL’d software isn’t usually in dollars, but in contributions of more software.

a most important job

Thu 21 December 2017

Your company probably needs a librarian. Maybe more than one.

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