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 operated by my exocortex (which they were, for the most part). You've probably been wondering what happened.
You know what? Fuck it. I don't have the compute cycles right now to do a proper intro. I count it as fortune that I have the compute cycles just to type this right now. There's no easy or polite way to talk about it. My concentration is …
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 research infrastructure I have at home has left me wondering and worrying about just how hot my office gets during the day while I'm working. Now, I could just put a simple little thermometer on my shelf (and I did) but my concerns are a bit bigger than that. What happens if my office temperature reaches a critical point and servers start melting down on …
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 which everything is running more or less smoothly, and at the same time everything in the monitoring system is going bonkers. Compare with code red, code blue, and so forth.
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 and sound in northern California, as much as we can be during a pandemic. Working from home is working from home. To minimize risk we're getting as much stuff delivered as we can, modulo periodic trips to the local pharmacy to pick up filled prescriptions and suchlike. I wish I could say the same of things back home in Pennsylvania, but I'd be lying and …
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 person?" and consistently getting a roughly 4.5% "yes" response.
One of my earliest covid-19 lockdown projects was doing a little work on my home wireless network. I have a fairly nice wireless access point upstairs running OpenWRT, sitting behind the piece-of-shit DSL modem-slash-wireless access point our ISP makes us use. All of our devices connect to that AP instead of the DSL modem. Let's call it Upstairs. However, the dodginess of the construction of our house being what it is (please don't ask), wireless coverage from upstairs isn't the greatest downstairs. The fix for this, conveniently, is to set up another wireless access point downstairs and connect the two …
Before I repost this Twitter thread in toto, I'd like to say a few things. First, Zander is an old friend of mine (pushing 20 years at this point). Second, while he might bill himself as "an amateur chemist," his scientific expertise has been helpful to me numerous times over the years, so I feel that I can vouch for his knowledge as well as his assessment of the situation. I asked him if I could repost this research earlier and he gave his permission. For clarity I've made minor edits to add punctuation. I've also reposted the images he …
As you might have seen in previous posts, my stuck-in-quarantine project has been restoring my C64 so I can play around with it. Part of that involves figuring out what you can reasonably use such a venerable computer for in 2020.ev, besides playing old games. Word processing and suchlike are a given, though I strongly doubt that I could get my Commodore playing nicely (or even poorly) with the laser printer in the other room. Also, the relative scarcity of 5.25" floppy disks these days makes saving data somewhat problematic (though I've got a solution for that, which …
