Comcast is advertising their “WiFi Motion” feature, which is basically “pay us to track when you’re home or away”. I wonder how often they get subpoenaed for that information, or whether they give or sell it without the hassle of a warrant.

While I would never in a million years let this into my home or office, I thank them for drawing attention to their ability to spy on customers this way.

Not to brag, but I just:

  • Compiled an IRC client on Mac for the first time.
  • Installed an IRC daemon on a VPC
  • …inside rootless podman
  • …with mandatory TLS via LetsEncrypt
  • …and mandatory user authentication
  • …over IPv6.

and I successfully connected the client to the server on the first attempt.

OK, I’m bragging.

What really killed Stack Overflow

A lot has been said about how AI killed Stack Overflow’s traffic, but that graph’s been falling since 2016. Here’s the real reason:

Screenshot of the "votes" column of a list of Stack Overflow questions: -2 votes, 3 votes, -2, -8, -1, 0, 0, -2

This is a screenshot of its “newest questions” page, zoomed in on the “votes” column. Although almost no one asks questions there anymore, its gatekeepers still have the energy to tell new users that their questions suck and aren’t worth bothering with. Even though the site’s nearly dead, the trollmods keep diligently telling new users to get lost.

There’s a large group of hall monitors who take glee in turning people away who don’t meet their criteria for their exclusive club. They finally succeeded in convincing the rest of the world not to bother with Stack Overflow. Wikipedia is notorious for this, too, although they’re large and general-purpose enough to keep their traffic for now.

I won’t shed a tear for sites who let the these tiny people take control and drive everyone else away.

We have empirically determined that three P0 issues are about the most I want to handle concurrently, and after that I trend toward snippy.

There’s a drone high and to the right of Sutro tower, just parked there. Watching… what? It’s too small to be a helicopter, and how often do you actually see those truly hover, fixed XYZ, more nor than a few moments? But it’s also much larger than the little bird I got for a present a while back. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to see it from this distance.

Good: the HackerGadgets 21700 battery board for uConsole seems to be very nice.

Bad: Triple-check the 21700 cells you order.

Most Nitecore batteries with the protection board, such as the NL2155HP, are 75.3 mm, 1.9 mm longer to fit in the holder.

They mean it. Pay attention. Don’t be me.

I’d been using Chezmoi to manage config files for quite a while. A couple years ago I started use mise as a task runner, then adopted it for tool management. And now I’ve started using it for file management. It’s so good. I still think Chezmoi’s great, but mise watches for changes and automatically git commits them, which is the part I always forgot to do myself until the files had drifted beyond repair.

I feel like this security questionnaire is trolling me.

Q: Are AS/400s used to process, store data or used for scoped services?

A: We are not a hat factory in 1993.

To log into the Teams website on my Mac:

  1. Use Passwords to log into Okta.
  2. Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
  3. Log into Teams with Okta.
  4. Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
  5. Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
  6. Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
  7. Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
  8. Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
  9. As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.

I might’ve broken my personal “rust target directory size” record.

ᐅ du -sh .
480G    .