An annoying problem solved: Accessing JSON documents with an API.
I spend a lot of time digging around in other people's data. If I'm not hunting for anything in particular then it's a bit of a crapshoot, to be honest, if only because you never know what you're in...
View ArticleNeologism: Profit harvesting
profit harvesting - noun phrase - A polite name for the act of finding each and every little remaining way to gouge money from someone or out of some thing. Called nickel and diming when hard...
View ArticleNeologism: DC AC
DC AC - noun phrase (humorous) - The primary mechanism of air conditioning inside the DC Beltway. Notionally, the movement of air due to revolving doors caused by the never-ending cycle of...
View ArticleUsing Huginn to get today's weather report.
A common task that people using Huginn set up as their "Hello, world!" project is getting the daily weather report because it's practical, easy, and fairly well documented. However, the existing...
View ArticleSummer vacation is rapidly coming to an end.
It seems as if another summer is rapidly coming to an end. The neighbors' kids are now back in school, school buses are now picking their way down the streets, and due to Burning Man coming up it's...
View ArticleNeologism: Text message tunnel vision
text message tunnel vision - noun phrase - When you get so fixated on texting that you forget that you can just voice call them.
View ArticleNeologism: Basketball mode
basketball mode - noun phrase - When a service or application crashes and restarts itself over and over, i.e., bouncing like a basketball every few seconds. Considered an outage.
View ArticleMore non sequiturs, cynicism, profanity, and random junk.
Yes, I've updated my .plan file again. The usual disclaimers and warnings apply.
View ArticlePlease Try This At Home: Dr. Mixael Laufer
In September of 2019 a conference called Please Try This At Home was held in Pittsburgh, PA. One of the talks was given by Dr. Mixael Laufer on the topic of how to acquire pharmaceuticals such as...
View ArticleNeologism: The Paperless Office
The Paperless Office - proper noun phrase - When the only reason your workplace seems to use no actual paper on a day to day basis is because the printer is always inoperable when someone needs to use...
View ArticlePen testing vs security assessment.
A couple of weeks back while traveling I had an opportunity to spend some time with an old colleague from my penetration testing days. Once upon a time we used to spend much of our time on the road,...
View ArticleEchoes of popular culture and open source.
(Note: This post is well beyond the seven year limit for spoilers. If you haven't seen 2001 or 2010 by now, I can't help you.) Many years ago, as a loomling, one of my very first memories was of...
View ArticleExperimenting with btrfs in production.
EDIT - 20191104 @ 2057 UTC-7 - Figured out how long it takes to scrub 40TB of disk space. Also did a couple of experiments with rebalancing btrfs and monitored how long it took. A couple of weeks ago...
View ArticleNeologism - Wires
wires - noun - Person to person backchannels. "I had to pull some wires to get that expense report fixed before the boss saw it."
View ArticleNeologism: Entropic debugging
entropic debugging - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which one can spend weeks on end debugging something using a multitude of techniques, give up in frustration and/or disgust for a couple of days,...
View ArticleChallenge accepted: Archiving a Mastodon account with Huginn
Last weekend I was running short of stuff to hack around on and lamented this fact on the Fediverse. I was summarily challenged to find a way to archive posts to the Fediverse in an open, easy to...
View ArticleProject announcement: Bluetooth power controller for the Pwnagotchi
This is the initial announcement of a new project pwnagotchi-bt-power (mirrored at Gitlab), a short utility written in Python which will cleanly shut down a Pwnagotchi from an Android phone over...
View ArticlePictures of the Doctor's hardware upgrade.
Remember when I got an authentication chip implanted last summer? Here are the pictures I took before and after the procedure, and in case you're feeling brave here's the video footage.
View ArticleUsing Ansible to restart a bunch of services running under systemd in --user...
Let's say that you have a bunch of servers that you admin en masse using Ansible. You have all of them listed and organized in your /etc/ansible/hosts file. Let's say that each server is running a...
View ArticleThe Ferrett's book signing for The Sol Majestic.
On 22 June 2019, The Ferrett paid Borderlands Books another visit during the book tour for his latest novel, The Sol Majestic. From my vantage point in the audience, I took a couple of pictures....
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