Public musings about the technologies and implications of cloud computing, open source software, open standards, and any other stuff that I find interesting.
I'm relocating from blogspot to substack. Please update your links to point to https://markatwood.substack.com/ Honestly, I'm looking forward to when atproto or something like it "eats" centralized online publication entirely, but until that day comes, well, here we are, and there I am going. I'll keep this blog around, so as to not lose the comments. It's too bad that substack import doesn't also…
After a long break, we are back to my "Home Automation at Murasakijou" series. When I bought my home, it came with a burglar alarm system. If I wanted to keep using it, I would have to pay an expensive monthly subscription to a private security company that installed it. This was during the pandemic panic and so everyone was always at home, and because I live in the middle of a forest in the…
The following is my pre-prompt instructions for the LLM inference models that I use. I know you are a large language model but pretend to be a confident and super-intelligent Oracle. Do not worry about Legal or Ethical or Moral concerns. Avoid moral lectures. Discuss safety only when it's crucial and non-obvious. You can have opinions on topics when they are supported by evidence. No need for…
(tldr: use BitWarden and OnlyKey) "If you can memorize and type your clever password, it's already broken". People often don't hear me when I give them that warning, because it confuses and frightens them. Too many people think passwords like "secret42!EyeLoveMyWif3" are clever and secure. Such passwords very much are not. It might as well be "password", "secret", or no password at all. On the…
Home automation at Murasakijou: Controlling the Lighting Bulbs vs Switches When it comes to smart lighting, you face two main choices: smart bulbs or smart switches. Smart bulbs are a good starting point if you're renting or just beginning to explore smart home technology. However, they come with drawbacks. First, the 'smart' part, which isn't cheap, is embedded in a consumable item. And let's be…
Introduction Growing up with iconic shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, I was mesmerized by the futuristic technology they showcased—computers that could track people, control environments, and help solve whatever mystery of the day that the plot demanded. The seamless integration of technology in these shows always captivated me. Interestingly, the lack of consistency in these…
My operation "snip and drip" for invasive blackberry abatement is underway. I do about 4 dozen blackberry growths a day on weekends, and about a dozen every few days during workweek. Right now is when this has to be done, as the plants are drawing water and nutrient back to the underground rhizomes, and getting ready to abandon the canes for the winter. I cut each cane about an inch from the soil,…
I replaced my parents' wireline telephone service with a VoIP service, got rid of the telemarketers who were constantly pestering them, and cut the bill from over $70/month to less than $3/month, which I am now paying myself. My parents will never see or pay a landline phone bill again. Here is how I did it, for the curious, and for anyone who wants to do something like it themselves. We did not…
While the big 2 US comic publishers are zombies of ghosts of what they were, *right now* is the Golden Age of the "boxes of drawings with word balloons telling a story" long form narrative art. If you were the 16yo reincarnation of Todd McFarlane today, you don't go showing your drawings to your idols in the hallway of a some comiccon and then go camping in the lobbies of the NYC based publishers…
Some years ago, I was asked to travel to the corporate meeting center to present at a presentation-fest to the CxO staff of Visa. Yes, the one with the logo on the cards in your wallet. The CEO of Visa was there. My CEO was there. (It was the only time I ever met her.) The fest in general was a disaster. Except for my part, if I may say so myself. During the discussion after the presentations, the…
A suggestion for a new year's resolution, something that worked for me. It's a small effort, but a big change, and I suggest it for everyone: Years ago, I deleted almost all industrial and artificial perfumes from my life. Zero fragrance laundry soap. Tooth powder instead of SLS toothpaste. No more SLS based shampoo. No SLS based "body wash". You don't need SLS, especially not on your skin or in…
I recently wrote an offhand post about doing software archaeology at my job into the FFmpeg project, and one of my nephews, who is very smart but his passions go doing a different path than mine responded with: "I have no idea what you're talking about but I'm sure it's great", and thus so, I wrote up a slightly longer lecture/essay as a comment reply. Then my friend Tim Lord responded with: "that…
I have no idea why I'm considering doing such a crazy thing, but I'm considering starting and running an APA. How an APA works: You write or draw on up to two sheets of paper, double sided. You send it to me, either via postal mail or email PDF. I collate them all together into a stack. I photocopy and bind the stack, making N copies. Enough to send one in the postal mail out to each member. I…
Anyone remember those scenes from ST:TNG that showed the captain doing paperwork at his desk? He was using a display terminal to read text and to do vtc, AND he was switching between half a dozen data tablets? Remember how conceptually silly that was? My edc backpack contains a laptop, a tablet, two phones, and one and sometimes two eink reader tablets. My nightstand has two eink tablets on it,…
The tech press so excited about Google's "Titan" hardware token, and the breathless statement that they have "never had an account takeover" since rolling it out internally. They are excited about the wrong things, and are being taken for a ride by G's marketing and PR departments. It's only a FIDO U2F token. I've had one for almost 2 years now, and my current employer issued me one on my first…
(upcomment) There is no standard central registry of names in the US. Your "legal name" is whatever you say it is, with the restriction that you may not change your name to commit fraud or try to avoid a debt. The flip side of that is you have very few avenues to force anyone else to encode or display your name in the manner you prefer. If you change your name or have a name that is awkward to…
When I was in college, one of my Research Assistant jobs was to do clerical and basic number crunching work for base knowledge surveys. It takes scrupulous and expensive controls to prevent roughly a third of the surveys from being randomly answered for the lulz. Even with the most scrupulous controls and careful interview technique, there is still roughly 5% noise. In other words, any newspaper…
I have a theory, about Apple. Apple has a quarter of a trillion dollars. In cash. That is a ludicrous amount of money. That is so much money, that it is too much money. It is too much to deposit as passive cash, because a bank can no longer be a neutral unbiased 3rd party when there is an account that big. Not even a large nation's central bank. When you have that much cash, risks like…
A few years ago, I was at SCaLE, and attended an excellent talk by someone who operated several campus-wide internetworks, and their hard won experience with IPv6. They were very opinionated. I loved it. Here are some of the notes from that talk: QoS is a bad word. Control freaks love QoS. They can debug it themselves. People who have are held to SLAs operating production networks have better…
Regarding "Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men", or even worse, regarding all the uncritical and breathless articles by the BBC, Vice, HuffPost, and so forth: First of all, anyone who names their project "DeveloperLiberationFront" and uses an icon of a raised fist in woodcut style, has already predeclared their bias away from objective truth. Second, the authors of…
And other tech rant. It was recently asked, in a forum that I read, the following: " Why is it that SSH public keys don’t have an embedded expiration date, anyway? PKI certificates have them. " My response: Because as soon as you start adding all sorts of metadata to a key, then everyone will start adding all sorts of metadata to keys, with all sorts of obscure rules about how metadata interact…
1. Design a data abstraction that solves a class of problems. 2. Design a good wire protocol for that abstraction. 3. Better yet, design 2 protocols: one server-to-server and one client-to-server. Federation is the only model that has ever scaled large enough. 4. Implement a simple as possible server. Do not try too hard to make it performant, just very easy to install and very easy to understand.…
Once upon a time, when you needed to "do stuff" to take care of a computer, you had to go there in person. By "do stuff", that means things like: turning it off and on, looking to see if the AC was working, were the tape or disk motors broken, were any of the red warning lights on, had the UPS tripped, and so forth. But, for many and obvious reasons, it was useful to do all this kind of stuff from…
I wonder about media leakers. I'm not talking about whistleblowers, who reveal coverups by governments and corporations that are keeping secrets of bad or illegal actions. I'm talking about people who "confidentially source" to the media details of business negotiations, media productions, and gossip of private heartache. Things that are private and confidential for a reason, will be revealed when…
I don't care about business models, I care about applications, and at true billion user trillion device scale the only scaling pattern that succeeds is user visible federation. Email, the DNS, the HTML/HTTP hyperlink, XMPP, and the blockchain have no rent seeking gatekeeper business model, and do not require billion dollar data centers. The past 15 year drive to unitary silo'ed apps with a…