I'm back from Pittsburgh. I think everything's done. Somewhere in the back of my head I have things to write about and maybe some photographs to post. I don't have the brainpower to do that right now, though. Hopefully I'll get my head together soon.
A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off? To where on the other system were they copied? Sure, you can deduplicate them through various means but that tends to be kind of a sledgehammer thing to do, especially when one of the things with files is a mobile device. You could always upload the files to a provider's cloud1 storage, like Google Drive or iCloud or something.
thousand meter stare - noun phrase - Watching multiple poorly designed dashboards jam packed with graphs, meters, gauges, and other barely useful metrics, day in and day out. If you imagine the thousand yard stare into multiple displays showing said dashboards, that's it.
Fairly serious hardware hackers and makers like to post lists of all the gear they use for whatever it is they do (mostly the big-name Youtubers and bloggers who do a lot of retrotech work and reverse engineering). That's all well and good, but I'm just a schmuck from Pittsburgh who likes to mess around with stuff. While cleaning up my office over the holidays I decided that maybe I should put one of those lists together because maybe it would help someone later. So, here is just about every tool that I have sitting on, under, around, or within …
If you've been following the news lately, undoubtedly you've heard one way or another that massive rounds of layoffs have been taking place. I got caught in one of them.1
If you're younger than I am you may never have been laid off before. That's okay.
I've been laid off a few times in my career, so here are a few things to keep in mind if this is your first goat rodeo.
I can't tell you "don't panic" because you might have very good reasons for feeling panic. I'm certainly not going to judge you for it and …
I try very hard not to pay too much attention to mercury in retrograde, mostly because I think it's a bad idea to name names too often because Things tend to hear them.
Who am I kidding. I have a calendar that charts mercury in retrograde out to 2030.ev that warns me ahead of time. I just wish I could get the odd warning of what might be coming down the line.
A couple of years back, when we thought that the covid pandemic might actually be over someday I did some research on RFID blocking fabric to see if it was actually worth anything. Somewhat surprisingly, I discovered that it does actually do what it says it does, within certain parameters (if you don't use something right it won't work; who knew?)
Late last year two noteworthy things happened: First, I finally got my hands on a Flipper Zero after waiting many months for it to arrive (no thanks to US Customs seizing the shipment for unspecified reasons) and spent some …
As I write this we're just a week or so shy of Christmas. It's been, to put it mildly, one hell of a year. Enough so that I've pretty much coasted into holiday break on fumes (again) and, probably against my better judgement, I'm trying to come up with something (anything, really) to write. If I were smart I'd give it another couple of days to relax and get my head straight. Maybe read some books or something to let the organics rest and wiring cool down.
I apologize in advance for how disjointed this post seems. I've been tinkering with it off and on for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there isn't strictly a linear narrative. The context loops around a bit because it's easier to explain a few things after the fact than it is to arrange them chronologically. I promise, it'll make sense (probably).
Modulo people possibly taking me slightly too seriously I've never been particularly shy about talking about my love of table-top RPGs. Though I started with Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, as I got older I …
You might be wondering why I've been up on my bullshit about adblocking and web browsers lately. Privacy issues aside there's a story behind this (which, if you know me, should be entirely unsurprising).
It hasn't been any particular secret that I've been living in the Bay Area for the last decade or so. I'm sorry to say that some of the stereotypes of Silicon Valley are, in fact, true and partially to blame for my encroaching kinetic pattern baldness. One of these things is the compulsive propensity to gather every last scrap of user information, no matter how trivial …
