1. Accelerating a RAID-5 array with a solid-state hard drive.

    24 May 2019

    A couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers mentioned in passing that he'd surprised himself by adding an SSD (solid state drive) to his file server at home.  To recap a bit, Leandra, my primary server at home has a sizable RAID-5 array storing all of my data.  However, one of the tradeoffs is that stuff recently written to the array is a little slow to be read back.  It's really not noticeable unless you're logged in and running commands, and even then the lag is something like one or two seconds.  Noticeable but not actually problematic.  At any …

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  2. Notes from Thotcon 0x0a.

    20 May 2019

    My notes from Thotcon 0x0a:

    Hacking Con Badges for Fun and Profit

    • Given by an EE
    • Badge hacking started with DC23, HHV.
    • Turned his DC23 record-badge into an analog clock.
    • AND!XOR's DC24 independent badge.
    • Maple Mini STM32.
    • Live spectrum analysis of 20-20KHz as an add-on.
    • Mic, pre-amp, FFT running on the uc.
    • Wired into the badge, rock-and-roll.
    • Inspiration and OSINT - look at the badge when it's announced, think about it
    • Get ideas
    • PoC - if you don't have this, you're not going to have anything
    • dev & debug
    • DC25 - NRF52 - 503.party
    • Blow up any images you can and start thinking …

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  3. War walking with a Raspberry Pi 0 W.

    06 May 2019

    You've probably noticed from the datestamps of my last couple of weeks worth of posts that they were autoposted by an agent.  This is because work has taken a turn for the extremely busy and I haven't had the time or the energy to write anything in particular; certainly nothing really useful.  Rather than wasting everybody's time I decided to relax a bit by picking up an older project, namely a new war walking rig and making it work.  Since I wrote that original post a few more security updates have come out for my phone and broke not only …

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  4. Neologism: @here grenade

    03 May 2019

    @here grenade - noun phrase - The act of tagging a message @here (meaning, everyone) in a crowded Slack channel (users >= 100), causing everyone who's busy but monitoring to drop whatever they're doing and flame you for bothering them by messaging @here.  Normally done by a user trying to get a response to a maximum severity ticket that's been ignored for longer than the SLA.

    Example: "PFY threw an @here grenade into the #tech-support channel because the border router was on fire and the admins on call were ignoring their pagers.  He got kicked but at least the outage is over."

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  5. Neologism: Proper channels excise tax

    29 April 2019

    Proper channels excise tax - noun phrase - The markup paid on commonplace things when you go through proper channels at work to do something rather than going rogue, buying it yourself and filing an expense report.  For example, a flight from Chicago to Boston might cost $176us if you paid for it yourself, but by using your employer's internal processes and vendors the cost of the same flight is closer to $630us.

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  6. Neologism: Trapdoor goalposts

    23 April 2019

    Trapdoor goalposts - noun phrase - When two or more requirements are set up so that meeting one automatically means failing another. This is a bad faith argument whereby it is impossible to meet the requirements someone sets, without admitting refusal to allow the outcome the other person desires.

    Example:
    "If you're making a decent income you can't possibly talk about poverty, you don't know what you're talking about."
    "I'm actually below the poverty line."
    "You just want a handout!"

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