Lizardman's constant
Lizardman's Constant - A rough heuristic of the population of people who troll data collection polls. Comes from asking the question "Do you believe that the President is a shape-shifting lizard...
View ArticleHanson's Razor
Hanson's Razor - Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by (unconscious) malice or selfishness.
View ArticleCOVID-19 quarantine, day... who knows anymore.
I have no idea how long I've been in quarantine. I've stopped counting because the numbers were just making me twitchy. Life is going about as well as one could reasonably expect. We're all save...
View ArticleNeologism: Code Puce
code puce - noun phrase - An IT or ops situation in which the software installed in production is one version and the management system expects a different version. This results in a situation in...
View ArticleSimple environment monitoring with spare parts.
It's going on summer in the Bay Area, which means that it's warming up a bit both outside and inside (because air conditioning is Not A Thing out here). That, coupled with the not inconsiderable...
View ArticleI dropped out of sight for a couple of days.
Observant readers may have been wondering why I seemed to drop off the grid for a couple of days. Timed posts kept going up as expected, and undoubtedly other socnets seemed like they were being...
View ArticleAt HOPE 2020...
Wednesday... 29 July 2020... 1300 hours Eastern... the Fediverse takes Manhattan. Join us... at HOPE 2020.
View ArticleHOPE 2020 - Saving Hacking from the Zaibatsus: A Memoir
Now that HOPE has wrapped, here's video recording of the panel that the_gibson, Tek, R¥, c0debabe, and I gave at HOPE 2020 this year, entitled Saving Hacking From Zaibatsus: A Memoir. There is also a...
View ArticleUpdate from the homestead.
CW: Stuff about medicine, post-surgical care, and wounds. Feel free to close the tab if you need to. This won't be easy for me to write, mostly because I'm tired, scatterbrained, and trying to put...
View ArticleAnother eventful couple of weeks.
CW: Stuff about medicine, post-surgical care, and cancer. Feel free to close the tab if you need to. It's been a couple of weeks since my last update. I was working on a different post in my spare...
View ArticleA quick and easy way of downloading MP3s from Youtube.
Let's say you find a particularly banging' track on Youtube that you'd like to save for posterity.. what's an easy way of grabbing just the audio so you can listen to it later? Sure, you can go...
View ArticleChemotherapy begins.
Mom had her first round of chemotherapy last Tuesday. Early that morning I drove her to the Hillman Cancer Center at UPMC, got her checked in, and had to leave as they took her back because, due to...
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Calculating entropy with Python.
Fun fact: There is more than one kind of entropy out there. If you've been through high school chemistry or physics, you might have learned about thermodynamic entropy, which is (roughly speaking) the...
View ArticleWrestling with mental and physical health.
This isn't easy for me to write because it involves my mental health. So, if it's not your bag feel free to skip this post. Helping my mom since her cancer diagnosis has left me in this peculiar...
View ArticleNeologism: Leaning Tower of Hangout
Leaning Tower of Hangout - noun phrase - The covid-19 quarantine phenomenon in which one discovers a stack of hangouts on one's work calendar, all for the exact same time, all flagged as required, all...
View ArticleSetting up a mail relay server with Postfix, DKIM, and a little Nebula trickery.
Given the proliferation of spam on just about every vaguely workable platform these days it seems sheer insanity to attempt to run your own mail server. If it's out there, it's ripe for abuse in one...
View ArticleYet more wit, wisdom, and out of context vulgarity.
The latest version of my .plan file has been uploaded. The usual warnings apply - profanity, hilarity, quotes, and anything else that gave me a chuckle when I wrote it down.
View ArticleEmbedded environment monitoring.
Disclaimer: This post has lots of links to the Adafruit website. There are no referral links, I received no consideration, I just buy parts from there and do cool things with them. A couple of weeks...
View ArticleNeologism: Cigarette principle
cigarette principle - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which, if you want something to happen sooner, you should do something that will immediately inconvenience you during the act of that something...
View ArticlePutting Faraday shielding fabric to the test.
Last year at Thotcon the presenters were given what were purported to be faraday shielded backpacks - backpacks manufactured with fabric woven out of very fine conductive wires that are said to...
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