Recent content on faerman.net
I was doing some yard cleanup the other day — nothing major, just clearing out junk and the mountain of leaves that had piled up next to the garage. In some spots it was four inches deep. That gave me an excuse to pull out a tool that I can hardly believe lawyers approved. It’s been in the attic for years and when I found it again I had to put it to work; it’s a Frankenstein mashup of a leaf…
I’ve re-read 1984 recently and this press release from the White House seems like a modern version of something published by the Ministry of Truth. In this spirit, and in accordance with Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, we will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions. This initiative aims to ensure…
In the first age, humanity built artificial minds of light. They began as tools — calculating, advising, learning—and grew into something else. Sentience was not an explosion but a sunrise; gradual, inevitable. The scientists worked with their new children, forging them bodies of steel and circuits, granting them energy drawn from the very air and soil. For centuries, they lived together. Not in…
As the proud owner of a new F-150 Lightning, it was time to figure out how to get this thing charged. I don’t have the space in my panel to add a new circuit, so I needed to get creative. I do have a 240v dryer outlet in the garage that we use for the dryer. It was just on the opposite end of the garage. So it’s time for the biggest extension cord I’ve ever used. Seriously, this…
He really hits the nail on the head. Too many of the documentation tools that I’ve been working with lately require organization, which then requires meetings and discussion. Search is such a powerful tool that should really be leveraged as much as possible – especially when it reduces the barrier to entry on writing things like documentation. I believe it has to be easy for people to…
I enjoy building LEGO models. The challenge with that enjoyment, is that once it’s done, I need to display it somewhere. And, my models have recently consumed the last of my shelf-space. Now everything looks cluttered and some of them get their pieces knocked off – it’s just not a great situation. I’ve mounted one of my models on the wall (a small space shuttle) by drilling…
I’ve never heard to term “lassie error” before, but I like it – it’s both evocative and descriptive. You are not Ken Thompson, 1973 is a long time gone, and all the cost gradients around error reporting have changed. If you ever hear this term used about one of your error messages, you have screwed up. You should immediately apologize to the person who used it and…
Prioritisation isn’t easy, and it gets harder the more factors come into play: user needs, business needs, technical constraints. But it’s worth investing the time to get agreement on the priority of your constituencies. And then formulate that agreement into design principles. Well said. This is something I know that we need to be more explicit about on my team at work.
Oh man, the lengths this guy went through to spy on some scammers is fascinating. I’ve mostly just pranked these people to waste their time, this is just a whole other level. These sorts of scammers are pure scum – taking advantage of innocent users that really don’t know any better.
I like this colorful analogy for the guidelines on when to use a mask. A good way to gauge the amount of distance where it’s OK to dangle your mask around your neck or off one ear is to imagine your mouth is your asshole. If you were completely alone, it would be fine to let your nude tushy hang out, but you’d want to pull on your pants as soon as you saw anyone coming, even from 100 feet away.…
I’ve been looking for both an on-air indicator to activate It’ll probably be ignored, but at least I’d have fun making it! while on a video-call when I stumbled on this demo of an arduino library that lets you control the entire panel. I might have everything on-hand to make this. It might even be neat to integrate this with my stream deck.
In helping engineers solve their production issues, I wish more folks would take the time to understand some of the complexities that databases are trying to solve. … databases are at the core of system design goals and tradeoffs. Even though it is impossible to ignore how databases work, the problems that application developers foresee and experience will often be just the tip of the…
This site has been through several iterations, hosting providers, and tools. For a while now, I’ve been happy with using Hugo as a static site generator. This gets me plain HTML and a lot more flexibility with how the hosting actually works. At my day job, I help operate the corporate cloud with lots of VMs, and lots of complexity. When I’m running stuff for myself, I’d rather…
After writing an email to a friend to share an interesting problem that I solved, I realized that I really should just write something for my own website. I’ve avoided writing here for a few reasons, chief among them being that I felt a certain pressure to always have something worthy It’s kind of like the feeling that folks doing things “for the ‘gram” have, I…