Blog posts by David E. Weekly covering technology, startups, education, and life from 1996 to present
Cyrinx is now open source and live at cyrinx.org. It's a research modem that moves real data through the air as sound, from a laptop speaker to a phone microphone, with no radio, no pairing, and no network. Byte-verified at 36.6 kbps between a MacBook and a Pixel 7a.
A phishing email landed on a mailing list I'm on. Google had scanned the attachment and called it safe. It wasn't: behind it was a live Browser-in-the-Middle kit that steals your Google session in real time and walks straight through two-factor. Here's what was hiding behind the blob URL, and how it builds on what other researchers have found.
A new Vendor Spending page, under Budget, indexes a decade-plus of district checks: search any vendor, see year-by-year totals, browse by category. And it answers the obvious question — did we really triple our spending? Mostly no: the big swings are bond construction and pass-through, not baseline operating.
The board's 619 policies now have searchable Spanish titles. Every school page shows who teaches there. The site behaves on a phone. And two bugs in our own data — doubled English Learner counts and 22 broken Spanish transcripts — that we found and fixed.
There's a search box now. Type a school, a topic, a dollar figure — it searches six years of public record in English or Spanish, and links straight to the document, not just the meeting that mentioned it.
We just shipped the first fully symmetrical, closed-loop 2x2 MIMO acoustic transport protocol. By combining analytical SVD spatial solvers, orthogonal Zadoff-Chu pilots, and dynamic Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) sensing, we are laying the protocol and signal processing groundwork for 24 kbps over sound.
I want to chat with my family finances without handing the data to anyone, and without abandoning a decade of Quicken history. Here is how, plus why Agent Skills are beating MCP servers as the shape of these integrations.
Three RCSD-authorized charters were a 404 on the site for months because a branch never merged. Tonight they're live, the /schools/ index has three sections instead of one, and the MCP tool can finally see what each board item actually proposes.
A while back my home network started acting strange. Not broken, exactly. Just a low-grade wrongness. Video calls would glitch for a few seconds and come back. Large file uploads would stall and resume. Speed tests mostly looked fine. Occasional ones didn't. Every tool I pointed at the problem said "looks ok to me."...
I was pulling apart a Netgear Orbi WiFi 7 mesh system for Network Weatherhttps://networkweather.com and found an undocumented 31-byte Qualcomm vendor IE in the 5 GHz beacons from each mesh node. In these captures, one six-byte field appears to encode the node's current upstream parent, another matches the BSSID of the radio sending the beacon, and the parent field changes when the mesh…
We analyzed 1,586 rental rates from flight schools across America to map the true cost of renting the world's most popular training aircraft.
What changed between launch day and the first public announcement of rcsd.info.
Why I built rcsd.info, an open data portal for the Redwood City School District, and how you can adapt it for your own district.
I connected with a friend yesterday about his job search. He's a scientist with 20+ years of experience leading drug development teams, recently laid off because his company is winding down. Tough market right now. Biotech capital has gotten scared and shifted toward late-stage assets, which means a lot of very qualified people are looking....
PSA: consider pulling in charitable contributions to the next few weeks that you were considering making next year....
A great leader inspires a team with possibility, vision, agency, and genuine caring for their people at every level. They are willing to fearlessly dive into the details and roll up their sleeves alongside their team when needed to get the job done. They actively solicit feedback and critique to improve and create a culture where it's safe to speak up. When a hard call needs to get made, they…
The new iPhone is here! And yes, to cut to the chase, I am going to get it because it is bright orange, thank you very much....
I re-coded a Rust library in Swift 6 this week and was surprised to see it was a third the size. It ended up with no third party dependencies beyond the system Frameworks, whereas the Rust crate pulled in several third party crates that in turn pulled in innumerable other libraries - creating a situation with multiple versions of the same library ultimately needing to be included....
Folks; thanks for all the kind comments on my transition last week. It's time to start sharing what I'm working on now - fixing employees' remote & hybrid connectivity....
Today is my last day at Capital One....
After seven+ months of work, studying my ass off for my written, and a retest after I went long on my first power-off 180, I've finally achieved a life long goal of becoming a Commercially-rated airplane pilot....
Trust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......
About a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official on a school board was a whole new thing. New regulations, new standards, incredibly complex budgeting processes.. I started my learning even as a…
Folks; Hacker Dojo is looking for an Executive Director....
Human adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of it and keeping those adaptations with us even beyond the circumstances that required them....
The main goals of a technical interview are to assess what the candidate knows, how they explain what they know, and how they reason: how they handle being pushed beyond their limit of firm knowledge and have to rationally speculate. Common failure modes are: clamming up being unwilling to reason or share their thought process, bullshitting confidently and erroneously prognosticating, and not…
I suspect that one of the most powerful points of leverage for any tech company - in a downturn or no - is excellent developer experience....
Amazing: Didn’t see the Watch Ultra coming - amazing battery life and durability, astonished that they’ve obsoleted dive computers. Neat improvements to mic and speaker, tho I’m not sure how much the “emergency siren” is gonna help at ~85dB versus, say, yelling?Personal locator beacons now possibly obsolete - but satellite SOS doesn’t compete with the T-Mobile/Starlink deal since it’s extremely…
I sued a spammer!...
The Metaverse is not a bad idea not because it can’t be built. It’s totally doable, though challenging with dozens of very complex and exciting risks that require solving for: human perception, haptics, foveated rendering, extremely lightweight optics and compute, low-latency network interconnects, and edge processing of a massively sharded but contiguous world. The depth of rich and exciting…
I’m one of the tiny team that built Howdy, a new voice-first chat application that sends speech & an auto-punctuated transcript to close friends and family. We launched our iOS app in Q1 of 2022 and we’re working on the Android app!...
I had the pleasure of working at Facebook many years ago. It was a very exciting time, where smart engineers from around the world got a chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder on problems that impacted a large and growing fraction of the human population. A lot of the excitement was due to an earnest belief that in helping people share with each other we would help people feel better connected to…
> BLRB is shutting down. All accounts, content, and pages will be deleted in the coming days....
Today Sonic.net installed a 10 gigabit synchronous, unmetered XGS-PON fiber optic link to my home in Redwood City California. The connection will cost me $40/month. My only gripe is that I can’t get static IPs, too! I spent the earlier part of the week wiring my home with 10G capable switches and getting a 10G copper Thunderbolt 3 interface for my notebook — which means that for the first time…
The Meta announcement is interesting and unexpected....
The 20th century model of life can be roughly encapsulated as being in three acts: in the first act, one is educated up to the limit of one’s mental capacity. Then, once full of knowledge, you are sent out into the world to work for as many years as you can. Finally at the end of your career you retire, have some fun, travel a bit, then die. We can call these stages: Learn, Work, Play and they…
I know the schtick is to “start with the small stuff and then build” but the purple iPhone and reskinning of the Podcast app were pretty underwhelming. There’s so much more Apple could be doing in the podcast production and consumption space. Boo....
Blessing...
This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it has been some 20 years since my primary job was computer programming. It’s quite possible that I would struggle — or even fail — at a number of the technical interviews that I passed in the past. This is not a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my…
This morning I was reflecting on the fact that it has been some 20 years since my primary job was computer programming. It’s quite possible that I would struggle — or even fail — at a number of the technical interviews that I passed in the past. This is not a sign of my dotage yet! but rather a reflection that my focus and skills development has been in other areas. I haven’t maintained my…
How can you make it less likely you’ll be hacked? Only a fool would describe any setup as “hacker proof”, but with every meaningful effort to adopt best practices, you’ll close off holes that will make it easy to attack you....
One of the common online retail experiences is to show a product or service rating with one to five stars. But should we weight each rating equally? What makes a given rating more or less helpful to discerning whether the product is any good or what the critical deficiencies are?...
This is an idea for a startup that should probably exist and then get acquired by AirBNB or the like. I’m not planning on starting this company myself. If you do end up making it or have already done so, please get in touch....
Just as an FYI since I wasn’t able to find this information elsewhere…...
So Apple came out with their new M1 based laptops and Mac Mini. The new MacBook Air looks like a nice fit for a college laptop: going completely fanless was a bold choice, though it’s disappointing that they said literally nothing about the camera optics namely something better than the very tired 720p from cam on the last few generations given that this is such a point of excellence and pride…
On Wednesday evenings for the past few months I have been part of a new class run by the Aspen Institute where a small cohort of experienced tech leaders have been learning about public policy and how to drive change in the federal government. It was announced today....
My name is David Weekly. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for nearly 25 years now, invested in 60+ startups, created mexican.vc returning >11x cash-on-cash, founded three companies and two non-profits. I’ve created corporate R&D teams at both Facebook and Google presenting our team’s work to the CEO, and seen a huge amount of innovation happen everywhere from garages to emerging markets to big,…
Mostly, it's a bunch of iterative improvements and polish. It's not a revolutionary new phone but it's definitely a better iPhone and is definitely a step forward. Mostly it's a better processor and a better screen with a better camera. The screen is much less likely to crack but the cases are just as likely to scratch/dent. Wireless charging works a little better. There's a nice blue color. The…
In other contexts this is known as "kinesthetic learning" aka "learning by doing". Any skill that you have to actually perform in order to learn practically falls into this bucket. It's a very efficient way to learn but also scary, because it requires performing an action when it's obvious that not enough is known about all the potential impacts of the action. The truth is, some systems are too…
Happy GivingTuesdayNowhttps://www.facebook.com/hashtag/givingtuesdaynow?source=feedtext&epa=HASHTAG, folks!...