Recent content on Ramblings of an Elder Nerd
A CC0 licensed proposal for Bambu Labs or anyone else to use to provide a secure binding between an embedded device with an on device UI and a local management application for access to privileged APIs
A helper script to create ACME DNS-01 validation entries on Porkbun's DNS service from TrueNAS
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Wherein we pick apart a spam voicemail and the way it tries to suck you in with escalating threats
thoughts about getting laid off and excitement for what lies ahead
On the game of Cracker Whistle, from Zoom
Wherein I ramble about surveillance capitalism and avoiding it as much as possible.
2023 Resolutions and shit
I needed some desk drawers, so I made them with my laser cutter
Wherein I profess my love for CI/CD
head desking with hugo
Time for the every few year effort to revive this blog. I might port over the old stuff later, but for now I just want to get it all configured for CI/CD with Hugo for generation, Github Actions to build and deploy to a refreshed S3 Bucket/Cloudfront hosting setup. moved to cloudfront initial s3 sync deployment hugo deploy working Still not sure how sold I am on this theme, but I’ll work on…
The talk I gave about streamlined vendor review processes at Art into Science: A Conference on Defense 2020
Black Lodge Research Arduino Class
wherein a company does email marketing right by asking me to opt-in
I had to move off the server I'd been on for 10 years
Drobo saved my data's bacon
Thing I love about living in Seattle
It's funny what you find when you're doing renovations on your house.
In preparation for the Arduino Class I'm teaching this month at AS220 Labs, I made this breadboard template in Inkscape to make it easier to layout circuits for the presentations. I figure this will be useful to others, so you can grab the SVG here . Enjoy!
Posting this mostly as a reminder to myself for the next time I have to do this. For those who don’t know, a statically linked binary is an executable that does not require any support libraries. All the required support libraries get included in the binary itself. This results in a binary that will run on any system of the right CPU type (i386, x86_64, ppc, etc.) The downside of this is…
Archive of the Intro to Arduino Class I taught at AS220 in June 2009
Besides being a computer geek, I’m also a bit of a foodie. I was doing a little yardwork today, planting some plants, weeding, and cleaning up our overgrown herb garden. After trimming all the blooms off the chives, I started in to do the same on the sage, as that had gone and bloomed. Thinking to myself that sage was tasty and edible and that its flower must be as well, I tasted one of the…
I’d been wanting to pickup a Meggy Jr from the fine folks at Evil Mad Scientist Labs for a while. When I saw that the MakerShed had them on sale last month as they were cleaning out inventory in preparation for Maker Faire , I decided that it was time to spend the cash and pick one up. Then I saw that they had free shipping for orders over $100 and I was reminded of the quote from Contact:…
I’ve given this site a much overdue overhaul in terms of design. Along with this, I plan to actually start posting here on a more regular basis, as my friends and colleagues like to chide me about why I keep a site if don’t post anything to it. This should be the impetus to actually do so.
My neighborhood is filthy with ice cream trucks. During the summer, it’s not uncommon to see four to six of them roaming the streets from noon to 8pm. Generally, I don’t have a problem with them. I like ice cream. I also like our Rhode Island favorite, frozen lemonade, which they all sell. What I do have a problem with is the way they announce their presence. It used to be that ice…
I got interviewed by our local NBC affiliate, WJAR 10, about a month ago for a segment on over the air (OTA) HDTV. It aired last night and apparently again tonight because they got so many calls about it. It was a lot of fun being the technology evangelist for OTA HDTV for Rhode Island. Not bad, huh? I was a little nervous and forgot to mention a couple of things during the interview. While I did…
I spent the better part of yesterday digging up about 24 square feet of the side yard to make room for a raised bed garden. Late in the afternoon, a friend stopped by and helped with installing the raised bed frames and getting them level. I’m pretty sore today in places where I forgot I had muscles. Today I’ve got to go get a whole boatload of peat moss to fluff up the soil. Our soil…
I think that it’s funny that Bare Bones Software (the makers of BBedit) have registered “It Doesn’t Suck” as a trademark .
I got a pleasant surprise this morning while I was making french toast for breakfast. The first egg I cracked had double yolks. I liked the look of it so much, I had to take a picture. The really neat part was the way the two yolks were all squished together coming out of the egg and then slowly separated into what you see in the top of the picture.
So… I went to Staples this morning to pick up some DVD-Rs. Pretty routine trip; run in, grab DVD-Rs, stand in line, check out. While I was in line, I noticed that they had TurboTax sitting there in a POS display. I thought to myself, “Better get that too, as I think we have all the various and assorted tax information now and it would be nice to figure out if we’re going to owe…
I spent this past weekend at ShmooCon . Getting there was a complete pain in the ass, as National airport was apparently fogged in for the better part of Friday. I was slated to take an 11:55 am flight down, which was delayed until 12:25 and then canceled. The fine folks at US Airways then rebooked me onto a 3:30 flight, which didn’t actually get off the ground until about 6pm. I finally…
Having grown up in Rhode Island, I’ve heard the term ‘Swamp Yankee’ my whole life. I assumed that everyone knew and understood this term. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Take a moment and read the history of Swamp Yankee
After missing the Doughty show last friday at The Call, I finally broke down a spent the big ten bucks on a Pollstar account. Now Pollstar pokes me any time a venue or artist that I have selected has an update to their schedule. It seems that The Pernice Brothers are going to be playing at The Century Lounge here in Providence on August 25. I think we’ll go check it out. We’ve seen…
Implementation Sticker Posted in Cambridge, England I spent last weekend participating in the Psy-Geo Provflux 2005 event here in Providence. One talk that really grabbed my attention was by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg about their novel Implementation . It was written as a series of discreet sticker length chunks that may be read on their own. I first noticed one the day before their…
Love the Flock of Seagulls look! A stylist working for Matrix is apparently a fan of the old Flock of Seagulls look. At the end of their selection of hairstyles for men, all promenently featuring their Trix line of products mind you, is this modern look at Mike Score’s unforgettable hairdoos. The thing that really kills me about this styling guide is that 80% of the men’s styles…
The modernist prefab housing trend is gaining some traction in Germany . As a fan of modern design and prefab housing, I fully support this. There are some beautiful prefab structures being sold these days, so much better than the crap that went up in the 1970s. Also, pick up a copy of the April/May 2005 issue of Dwell to see an article on a cool prefab apartment complex that is going up in…
Rick Santorum (R-PA) is floating a bill that would force the National Weather Service to hold back any of its data if it competed with a private sector company that also provides similar information. The essence of this bill is that the NWS will only be allowed to provide “severe weather forecasts and warnings designed for the protection of life and property of the general public.” Of…
A couple of years ago when we were looking for a new house, I had the pleasure of going through one house where they had no concept of keeping their house nice for potential buyers. Note to prospective home sellers: when you’re showing a house you want to sell, be sure that your slacker son is not sleeping in his room in the middle of the day.
Apparently a number of folks who own Frank Lloyd Wright homes from his usonian period are having are hard time selling them. This is just plain sad. According to this AP article on Yahoo news, the average home buyer is so hung up on multi-car garages and sprawling kitchens and bathrooms that they won’t even consider the beauty and elegance that is a Wright home. If I had $400K and wanted to…
My wife and I are sitting here having coffee early this fine November morning and listening to the sound of our neighbor Bill putting the garbage out for tomorrow’s collection. Bill is always the first person on the street to get the garbage out. He gets it out a full 24 hours before the garbage men actually come to get it, despite the fact that you’re not supposed to put your garbage…
This week at work, I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to get AIX installed on a couple of machines. I had to get AIX 4.3.3 installed on a RS/6000 B50 server and AIX 5.3 installed on an eSeries p520. Both were no end of trouble for me. First off, I’m no slouch when it comes to installing Unix machines. I’ve built tons of Solaris machines, a couple of HP-UX boxes,…
I was kind of bored on Sunday, so I figured I would try my hand at making an icon for Mac OS X. For the all the Marklars out there, here a translation: I was kind of bored on Marklar, so I figured I would try my marklar at making a marklar for marklar.
Having spent way too much time over the last year cooped up in this house, we decided that we needed to start getting the hell out of the house more often. As we like to do with all decisions of serious import, we acted on it immediately by getting out for a quick nibble this evening. We were originally going to go to Olives on North Main Street, but when we pulled into the parking space in the…
Every day, around 4pm, our dog starts getting all excited because it’s almost his dinner time. You can’t even adjust yourself in your chair without him thinking that you’re getting up to feed him.
In a moment of utter boredom this morning, I was contemplating my navel lint. Every evening, after a day of wearing one shirt or another, I manage to accumulate a certain amount of lint in my navel. I know it comes from the shirt I’m wearing, as it is inevitibly the color of the current day’s shirt. The big question is why don’t all my shirts have a little hole wear my navel…
Are you in need of X.509 certificates for your systems? Are you outraged by the expense of commercial CAs? You can be your own certificate authority. I’ve tried out a bunch of different Open Source CA packages and found most of them to either be too rudimentary (e.g. the CA.sh script that comes with the OpenSSL distribution) or way too complex (OpenCA). However, I’ve finally managed to…
About John Duksta
The Wedding Widget - The wedding favor for Dennis and Jess’s wedding