Short but sweet: if you encounter errno 11 (EDEADLK) on MacOS it's because the file you're trying to access has been offloaded to iCloud and can't be read, and based on how you were accessing it (script, cron, 3rd party backup daemon) it won't even try to download it for …
A recent headline tells us that millions of email passwords were recently stolen from six ISPs. Security wonks like to exclaim that this is a failure by the admins at those companies, but the reality is more nuanced than that. I think their inability to escape storing plaintext passwords is …
Brief thoughts Quantum computers are the cold fusion of our lifetime: for the classes of problems they'd be good at they would be world-changing. Unfortunately they're mired in problems nobody wants to discuss: Best we've seen is a qubit holding its state for 20 seconds , so we have to solve …
Chef has an undocumented feature that's super handy and more people should know about. Sometimes you'll be designing a recipe and want to execute a specific task but not until the very end of the Chef run. The solution to this is usually to invent something that will always execute …
My primary email for the past 15 years has been a .me domain. The first problem I remember encountering was trying to do an RMA for a Seagate hard drive and their form kept rejecting my information with no useful errors. The problem turned out to be my email TLD …
Editor's Note This is a reproduction of a post by Martin Sustrick that was on 250bpm.com before that blog was wiped and replaced with a new blog hosted on Substack. The author did not migrate their old posts, but I admire this incisive take on licensing and want to …
There is a lot of consternation lately about the growing onslaught of low-quality (spam) and completely AI submitted bug reports, pull requests, etc. This is unrelated to AI scrapers which can be another problem, but I'm more interested in the concerns about the bottleneck of "code review". Perhaps you can't …
I don't know why I'm like this, but being unable to edit messages when I'm writing something more than a simple message/reply drives me insane. The Old Days Letters. Book reports. Papers. All of these drove me a bit insane because I can't come back to what I wrote …
I use the Keepass family of software for my password management and on my iPhone I can use the wonderful KeePassium which supports syncing the password database over WebDAV for self-hosting your "cloud" sync infrastructure, but KeePassXC on Linux/FreeBSD offers nothing of the sort. If you want to sync …
One of the earliest blog posts I made before I somewhat abandoned writing blog posts in lieu of this "microblogging social media" hype train we all rode for a decade was titled Archiveopteryx: The IMAP Server You Always Wanted . This post didn't give Aox much traction, but I think the …