Recent content on Assorted Nerdery
Cool discovery : Anyone who has their primary residence in the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, works in Massachusetts, or owns residential property in the
Commonwealth can apply for and receive an eCard for the Boston Public Library. 
You don’t even have to physically show up at any of their branches to get these
benefits. 
 The library provides a ton of digital resources…
In October 2023, I had 23 solar panels installed on my roof in the Boston area.
This post series will summarize our experience with the system thus far. 
 Procurement Process 
 We went with a company out of Arlington, Massachusetts, for the project.
I found the company using EnergySage , a quote aggregator. EnergySage is a
convenient way to get multiple quotations from…
One of the recurring joys of home ownership is plumbing. In 2021, the water
heater in our home developed a small leak. Fortunately, the leak was small
enough where we had some time to work out the next steps. Our long-term goal for
our home is fully run on electricity for both comfort and climate reasons. 
 The domestic hot water system that existed in the home when we bought it…
I’m trying an experiment with Cloudflare analytics and have enabled it on this page. 
 I’ve enabled a Javascript beacon on the page footer which supposedly allows me to collect pageviews. 
 According to Cloudflare , this beacon plays nice with keeping readers information private. 
 
 Cloudflare Web Analytics does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or…
If you’re coming here from the Chelsea Research Festival, I’ll be uploading more information about the project in the coming days. 

Comcast and I have long had a strained relationship. I recognize that the
service they’ve offered in the houses and apartments that I’ve lived in has been
reliable. However, I’ve never been a big fan of their business and billing
practices. 
 For example, I purchased my own DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem some years ago when I
first got their internet service. Some…
After a recent power outage at our house, I purchased a UPS to help keep the
internet online the next time. In addition, we noticed that when there was an
outage the power tended to come on and off multiple times before stabilizing. 
 I’ve been trying to buy products from brick and mortar stores rather than Amazon
due to the prevalence of counterfeit products mixed in with…
Prior to moving in our house, we replaced the old coil burner stove with a nice
fancy GE Profile Induction range - their PHS930SL2SS model. I grew up with a
coil burner and don’t really want to relive the experience! Overall, we’ve been
happy with the stove, but we’ve had several issues addressed under warranty -
mostly minor. 
 Minor issues: 
 
 The…
After our old Ford Fusion went for a swim in a rainstorm, we brought home a 2016
Chevy Volt. We’ve enjoyed driving the car over the past year. It’s a lot of fun
to drive - and we really appreciate almost never needing to stop at a gas
station. My wife likes the car as well. 
 We’re coming up on the 45,000mi service checkpoint. In general, electic…
Happy New Year to All! 
 We have a lot to be thankful for this year - loving family, good job,
etc. There’s an awful lot wrong with the world, but there’s an awful
lot that’s improving also. [1] 
 I’m looking forward to doing my part to keep the ship afloat for another
year! 
 [1] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Progress-Watch 
** 

I saw recently that Paypal would start blocking VPN and SmartDNS
services. Their rationale is that VPN services can be used for
copyright infringement. 
 They are correct in that VPN services can be used for copyright
infringement – they can be used to shield your IP address from others
and to make it appear that your traffic is coming from some other
location.…
Back in December, Ed Felten and the White House asked for public
comment on the EFF’s pro-cryptography petition. This is the letter
that I had sent. I urge you to file a comment. 
 
 Dr. Felten and President Obama, 
 I strongly urge you to support the unfettered deployment of strong
encryption without compromise or backdoors. 
 The fact of the matter is that…
I recently came into possession of a nice new Vizio Smart TV. It’s
pretty nice - 1080p, Netflix, etc. As part of the process for
connecting the television to the internet, they made you agree to a
number of different license agreements and privacy policies. In a fit
of UX mastery, they did not show the privacy and license agreements on
the television, instead instructing…
In my previous post on this topic, I tried to detail the way that I
fetch and send email using my laptop using a combination of mbsync and
systemd. This has been working extremely well – it runs in the
background and does the right thing when I am connected to the Internet.
The only issue with this setup is that I’ll occasionally need to clear a
lockfile out of the…
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 Hash: SHA512
 
 My SSL certificate expired on 11/1. I replaced it with a new
 certificate today. The SHA256 fingerprint of the new certificate is:
 
 27:88:83:BF:22:D3:55:62:1C:2D:26:B2:8B:C9:AD:32:E3:C2:A6:BD:B7:C8:41:53:F9:38:D8:C6:AA:63:88:B1
 
 This is going to expire in February 2016. I will likely replace it
 with one…
I’m disabling comments on this blog as of today. I’ve only received a
small handful of comments in the year or so that this has been up –
certainly not enough to justify the user needing to download over 1
megabyte of javascript from Disqus when they load the page. 
 Feel free to email me - john at johnbyrnes.info if you have any comment. 

I recently purchased a cheap T-mobile broadband USB stick for use with
my Debian Linux laptop. The device is the T-Mobile Jet 2.0 – a
rebranded Huawei UMG366. 
 After putting the SIM card in, I noticed that NetworkManager was
unable to see the card. Some DuckDuckGo-ing led me to this Linux Mint
forum post . 
 Apparently these sticks show up as a USB hard drive when…
I fly UA quite often and regularly get internet on my flights. The
speed and connection quality is quite acceptable considering that
we’re traveling through the air and talking through some
satellites. The rate is also quite reasonable - $1.99/hr for the slow
lane and $3.99/hr for the fast lane. 
 However, on my last two trips, the following things have been blocked: 
…
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
 Hash: SHA1
 
 I mistakenly deleted the secret key material for my PGP signing and
 encryption subkeys. *facepalm* Please backup your keys. The master
 certification key was left unaffected.
 
 The updated key is here:
 
 - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
 Version: GnuPG v2
 
…
Overview 
 Some months back, I discovered the Notmuch 
mail reader. It’s a pretty sweet piece of software based on Xapian to
index and tag your mail. As of today, the email setup described here has
displaced my Google Apps hosted Gmail for my personal domain. My goal
here is to document how I’ve setup my mail workflow. 
 As it says in the name, Notmuch is not…