Recent content on Alyx Wijers
Amusingly, as I write this, I’ve just realized we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of H2O: Just Add Water, which first aired on July 7th, 2006.
A little over a year ago, I published a post (“I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers “) about having re-created a website that showed up for a few seconds…
For those who don’t know, a lot of my hobbies revolve around networking equipment and related infrastructure. Every once in a while I buy used hardware from companies that specialize in IT asset liquidation.
From these purchases, I keep receiving gear formerly owned by large organizations, either entirely un-wiped or so sloppily wiped that all it takes to uncover sensitive information is…
This one’s going to be a bit of a tangent from the normal (and infrequent) posting, and probably more scattered, but it’s a thing I worked on recently and I figured I may as well post about it.
In 2008, the Australian show “H2O: Just Add Water” released in the US market on Nickelodeon, and watching it became a “core memory” for me. Even now, 17 years later,…
published early on 2024/12/30 because I’ve been at 38c3 and am too busy travelling and not having reliable connectivity to post it on time
A dramatic cover photo of a down power line on a road that I took during the storm. Disclosure Notice At the time of writing, it is currently Wednesday, November 20th 2024. My power is currently out due to the “Bomb Cyclone”. This is being…
Why, and How? The other week, I wondered to myself: “What if I made a Mastodon instance that only supports IPv6?”.
IPv6 has been out in the world now for over 25 years, and yet as of the time of writing Google reports IPv6 adoption at only 42%. It’s improved in recent years, by a long shot, but ISPs and corporations have still been struggling with deploying it. There’s…
Late at night on December 1st, I got a ping on my company Slack account. I checked, worried something may be going on at work, since I’m up for on-call starting on December 4th in case it’s something I need to be tracking for handoff.
It was something along the lines of “@Alyx is on the front page of Hacker News!”. I went over to check, and sure enough, at the moment I…
What is SDF ICF? If you’re not familiar with SDF (http://sdf.org), it has been running near continuously since the mid 1980s when it launched as a BBS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System) for the anime Super Dimension Fortress. In the decades since, they’ve expanded to provided free access to Unix systems, hosted educational workshops, e-mail services, personal…
Last May I wrote a post in which I did some basic testing on the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe and speculated on potential use cases for it.
I finally took a trip down to a data center to deploy some new hardware for colocation. I haven’t worked with RouterOS much before, so getting started was a bit bumpy due to lack of documentation… anywhere. Right off the bat I upgraded from the…
(if you’re a curator at the Computer History Museum and want to adopt zelazny.freenode.net, email me at hello@alyx.sh)
In October 2018 I was at a surplus sale at Oregon State University, a bi-weekly event I often attended when I lived in the area. One day they added a pallet of servers for sale, all e-waste, but among them one stood out: a single HP DL140. Like the rest, it had a…
(if you’re just looking for the map, it’s here)
For the last few years, I’ve ran https://s.en0.io, collecting metadata about blocked firewall traffic from all of my physical servers and VMs around the world. It’s not a particular useful pursuit, but I have the resources for it so why not?
There’s a simple Python agent that runs on the servers (github),…
an addendum has been posted, read it here
2023/12/02 - Hello, Hacker News! Check out these pictures of my cat: https://emma.pet
Back in February, Mikrotik announced the CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, a peculiar 25gbps NIC. They’ve thrown an entire router into a PCIe NIC. But why?
Wait, why? Mikrotik’s product listing has illustrations that suggest using it in a file server and a…
GeoCities-style 88x31 “Powered by Estrogen” buttons A big stereotype of late 1990s and early 2000s internet is the little “88x31” GIF buttons. There were thousands of them, advertising things like “Works best in Netscape”, new technologies, and about a billion other things. The ones I’ll be focusing on here are in the format of “Powered by $X”,…
Twitch Plays TTY A couple years ago I watched a video by Joel Creates where he shows off his work on the set for the short film Infinitus[1], and in it he shows off that in the set they used an old UltraTec Minicom II TTY as the control panel for the airlock. I was curious about them since it seemed like a cool gadget I might be able to display the weather or time on with a retro-looking vacuum…
For the past few years I’ve been printing my Christmas cards on old dot-matrix printers using “Card Shop Plus!”, a greeting card software I grew up with.
Printing Christmas cards in December 2017 using an Epson FX-80 and an HP Vextra XU 5/90C In the past I’ve used real hardware (HP Vectra XU 5/90C in 2017, IBM ThinkPad 390E from 2018-2020), but unfortunately I…