1. 802.11w causing random wireless problems.

    11 September 2023

    A couple of weeks ago I found that I had to replace the wireless router upstairs because its radios were spiking to extemely high temperatures a couple of times a day. 1 When anything spikes over ten standard deviations in the universe, generally speaking it's probably a very bad thing. So I did a little research and picked up a new wireless router, a Linksys EA8300 (affiliate link) which has very good OpenWRT support, 256 megs of RAM (which is a lot for a wireless router) and 256 megs of on-board flash storage. Most importantly, the EA8300 has three separate …

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  2. Oversight Committee, 26 July 2023, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.

    01 September 2023

    This is one of those really difficult posts to write. Not just because I've got a lot of stuff going on (when do I ever not, you're probably asking yourself) but because of the sheer volume of data at hand. Like a lot of folks, I caught wind of the House Oversight Committee hearing on UAPs (anonymized) (archive.is) (Internet Archive) (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) and my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately because I had to work early that day I didn't get to watch or listen to much of it, but because House Oversight hearings are a matter of public record …

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  3. First imprints.

    16 August 2023

    From time to time lately I've been thinking about what Cory Doctorow called the enshittification of just about everything and peoples' reactions to it. Sometimes there are less shitty alternatives which present themselves with a little looking, sometimes there aren't. Most interestingly, and this is a bit more common than I find comfortable, other solutions or alternatives to those things that are suddenly now user hostile are just... well... the reaction to them is like somebody just told the other person to shove a pair of daisies up their nostrils and hum Yankee Doodle. I've started filing this under the …

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  4. Crash handlers in Python

    03 August 2023

    Some weeks ago when I was trying to get the bot that runs my weather station stable, I ran yet again into a problem that for various reasons I hadn't put forth the brainpower to come up with a solution for. Stability implies that a system of some kind doesn't crash, which Weather Station Bot was doing occasionally. Part of this wound up being due to the microSD card Clavicula 1 was running on wasn't well suited to being outside all the time, but part of this was due to bugs in my code that I hadn't quite shaken out …

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  6. Neologism: Avocado Toast

    05 July 2023

    Avocado toast (n): a cheap luxury, especially one which is perceived as being very expensive but is actually trivial; can also refer to the trivial cost thereof.

    "Oh, hey, when can I drop off that fleece you loaned me?"

    "Nah, keep it. It's just avocado toast."

    Avocado toast (v): To reduce your spending by a trivial amount, (i.e., by the cost of avocado toast).

    "Oh shit. How are we going to pay to fix the car?"

    "We could... stop eating out?"

    "The frame is bent, it's leaking coolant, and the front bumper is in a tree. I don't think …

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  7. Orienteering in life.

    14 June 2023

    "Don't follow me, I don't know where I'm going either."

    --Unknown

    Since I got my last big project finished up I've been trying to figure out what to do with myself. A certain amount of debugging was involved (as one might reasonably expect), culminating with the microSD card in my weather station tanking with terminal corruption (such that the card's on-board controller permanently locked it read-only). I'm fairly sure this was due to the card being used outside; enclosure aside the thermal cycling of the natural day/night cycle probably wrecked the silicon. I've since replaced it with an industrial-grade …

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  8. Organics, AI, and what people want to believe.

    25 May 2023

    You pretty much have to have been living inside a farday cage with a stack of dead trees for company to have not heard anything about large language models taking the tech world by storm. Without going into too much detail (because that's not what this essay is about) you take some clever statistical math, a metric fuckton of GPUs, and several petabytes of text scraped from most of the Web, mix thoroughly with a couple of million USD from investors and some Python, and bake it all in a large network of virtual machines running in someone's network (usually …

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  9. Building a weather station.

    28 April 2023

    Note: There are some affiliate links in this post. You don't have to buy stuff with them if you don't want to.

    One of the things I always wanted to build was a weather station. For some odd reason they always struck me as being intrinisically neat; sensors that could tell you about what was going on outside when you couldn't be outside yourself. Many years later when I got into amateur radio, I discovered that weather stations were a thing that people would build and put on the APRS network to broadcast local weather conditions. Thing was, I never …

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  10. On retreat again, October 2022.

    04 April 2023

    Time and funds permitting, I try to go on retreat every year or two. I like driving someplace new, someplace I've never been before, and getting off the grid for a couple of days. I find that it makes it much easier to relax, rest, catch up on my reading (or sometimes television), do some writing, tinker with locks a bit, and generally be nonverbal for about a week. It's not easy these days (and won't be for a while, I suspect) but it is something that I at least attempt periodically. The AirBnB I rented had a most unusual …

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