Chuck Carroll's RSS Feed: A place where I complain about technology or dive into quasi-philsophical subjects.
I have music collection of over 12,000 tracks. I prefer to actually own my music (ie digital files) and being able to play it on any device I choose rather than using a service like Spotify. That said, I also prefer using OGG over MP3 , and the majority of my music collection is (currently) in OGG Vorbis format. Over the years, I've been accumulating lossless albums from places like Bandcamp and…
We all have that friend or family member that believes in the most ludicrous things, convinced of a conspiracy that doesn't fit into the reality shared by the rest of us. I don't think an empirical mindset is the default for humans, but is something that's built over time, usually through education (though I wonder how much of our bullshit-detector calibration arrives with us at birth). I also…
One of the most challenging things about the CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam isn't subnetting, spanning-tree, routing protocols, ACLs, or calculating longest prefix match. The most challenging thing is figuring out what study resources to use. There's a ridiculous amount of CCNA study material available out there and all of them claim to be the best. I spent far too much time trying…
Reddit is now requiring you to have an account and be logged in to use old.reddit.com, the less cluttered and bloated desktop website. Ars Technica has a great article with a breakdown of Reddit's reasoning behind this, but essentially they claim they're worried about scrapers accessing content without paying for it - content, of course, that Reddit didn't even create and yet are monetizing it as…
I picked up a Palo Alto Cloudgenix ION 2000 off of eBay and decided to try and stick OPNsense on it. It has a ethernet ports, 4GB of RAM, 128GB SSD, and an Intel Atom CPU. What I hadn't considered was a lack of any video out on this thing, making it difficult to load a different OS. After some searching, I came across this helpful article . Installing OPNsense (or another OS like pfSense, for…
I was recently handed down a D-Link DNS-323 NAS which I thought would be great for my brother to use. Although the stock D-Link firmware functions okay, it's officially EOL and there hasn't been an official update for it since 2013, and therefore using outdated protocols. I did some research and found the project Alt-F , an alternative custom firmware for the DNS-323, as well as several other…
A few months back, Ars Technica published Password managers' promise that they can't see your vaults isn't always true . I haven't used an online password manager in 5 years. Previously I had been using Bitwarden, which is fine, I just prefer to take ownership of as much of my digital life as I can. My setup is KeepassXC to manage all my passwords in a database and Syncthing to sync all my…
This post is not about electric vehicle hesitations like range anxiety and more complicated trip planning. No, this post is just me complaining about the digital experiences that come with owning a modern vehicle, but especially with an EV. Yes, this is yet another edition of "Bad Technology that Chuck Doesn't Like". Let's take charging. At the apartment that I'm officially moved out of as of…
We're in the process of moving and it's eye-opening just how much stuff we've accumulated over the span of just two and a half years. During that time, my in-laws from Viet Nam stayed with us for several months, and we welcomed our son into the world. As a result, we made a lot of purchases and learned a few things. I can now speak firsthand just how much advertising is targeted toward new parents…
During my holiday break, I built a Stratum 1 NTP server in my home lab. Ordinarily, we get our time from internet-based NTP servers which usually Stratum 2 or 3. With Stratum 1, I can get significantly more accurate time directly from the Stratum 0 GPS satellites orbiting above me. On these satellites are atomic clocks which are the most accurate timekeeping devices humanity has ever created.…
"Ignorance is bliss" usually has a negative connotation, a way to refer to someone who is ignorant on some topic that someone else has deemed very important (sometimes meant as an insult). In my view, ignorance can be a positive thing when it comes to most topics. It's not so much about a lack of information on a topic, but more so about selective non-investment in what others consider as very…
Updated: 2026-01-09 Other than looking cool to your friends, owning your own domain increases your digital self-reliance. It's kind of like having your own phone number. Just like switching cell phone carriers if you don't like your provider, you can easily switch registrars, hosting companies, or email provider and the world would be none the wiser. There are many reasons to have your own domain…
I have an NVMe base for my Raspberry Pi 5 and it's been running for a little over a year without any issues. A couple of months ago I switched to Almalinux and noticed that I could SSH into it right after it booted, but around 30-40 minutes after boot, I could ping from another host on my network but could no longer SSH. When I restarted and directly consoled in, everything was fine until that ~40…
This is a follow up from something I wrote in 2020 titled The End of Ownership in a Digital Age where I discuss (ie complain) about what it means to "own" something in the modern digital age. I've recently experienced a kind of digital revocation of a purchase through Bandcamp - a company I've only had positive things to say about until now. Some background: I prefer to buy DRM-free music so that…
A few years ago I published a post about aliases , one of which I set up to allow me to SSH into a shared web server. Someone shared that post to Hacker News, so naturally the gaping flaws in my understanding of both aliases and SSH came to light. One piece of feedback I got was that my alias "sshchuck" was "suboptimal". At the time I barely had a grasp of SSH, but since then I've become far more…