Recent content on Vermyndax's Lair
I don’t really understand why the Claude app requires almost two gigabytes of RAM just to run. I understand that it’s running under Electron, but it doesn’t make any sense that the memory usage is so high.
Trying to set things up to work remotely on the Mac Mini has been pretty painful. I spent most of the day trying to get this locked down the way I want.
Ok, running another test to see if this works.
Just making a test post for the blog from my phone.
Surprise! My Mac Mini arrived a full month early.
I’ve been trying to use AI apps, mostly Claude and ChatGPT, to experiment with doing various things like everyone else. I have found that the apps themselves are actually very confusing to use.
This guy is on to something with regards to AI, but I doubt it’s a silver bullet.
It’s another new year and I didn’t write a single post in 2025. I didn’t even remember how to make a new post on this blog.
What’s a man to do with the last few hours of 2024?
Hilariously enough I forgot to mention one of the things that has really plagued me this year. My memory. I’ve been getting a little freaked out about how poor my memory has been getting. I keep forgetting simple things, like… words… names… places. I keep forgetting to do things. I keep forgetting entire portions of my life, almost like there’s a black hole slurping it all up and waiting to pull…
apple.news/A1JRhv3dUTsWcvJiSppcIow Leave it to the banks to create a shitshow like this. This is why Apple and Google did their own thing.
2024 is at and end and I thought I would sit and write, stream of consciousness-style, about things that I remember. Some of this is going to be pretty raw emotion and if you’re not up for that, please tap out now. Overall it’s been a pretty good year. I’ve been at peace on a great many things and struggling with others. Technology-wise I am still rolling with four main devices: An M1 Max MacBook…
Why does this work: private_ipv4_google_access = "true" …but this doesn’t: private_ipv6_google_access = "true" This anomaly comes to you courtesy of Google’s “google_compute_subnetwork” Terraform resource. A gander at the documentation says this: Ok. What are the acceptable inputs there? The examples in the documentation provide exactly zero guidance. You either have…
I want to feast But I’m not hungry. I want to drink But I’m not thirsty. Pink toes turn yellow when clenched tight. Tomorrow I will push the same buttons Click the same links Read the same bullshit. Pointlessness abounds. Tripping through a meadow where all the grass is dead. No bloom. Once I was hungry. Once I was thirsty. I can’t even remember that once.
I’ve thought about writing a blog entry about this for quite some time. I spent a majority of my career in the email space for government agencies. I can confirm this blog article does a better job than I would have done. It’s time to declare SMTP as dead.
Warning: rambling and useless post. I don’t know why. I cannot sleep well Monday night and into Tuesday morning. I almost always wake up too early. I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve tried various methods to shut my brain up when this happens. None of them work. Instead, I just succumb to the screaming mental state and get out of bed. This morning I woke up at 4am after a mere 5…
resource 'google_api_gateway_api' 'api_gw' { provider = google-beta api_id = 'my-api' } resource 'google_api_gateway_gateway' 'api_gw' { provider = google-beta api_config = google_api_gateway_api_config.api_gw.id gateway_id = 'my-gateway' } Am I the only person here that thinks this resource naming is absurd? I should be able to look at these resource names and immediately understand what is going…
So you can find me here.
I tend to use Facebook on a web browser so I can use ad blockers to control the experience. Yeah, I know… but Facebook is how I stay in touch with extended family. Anyway, I noticed this afternoon that Facebook seems to have taken a page from Youtube’s playbook and start messing with ad blockers. I’m using Arc with uBlock Origin and as you can see from the screen recording…
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/195octe/youtube _started_slowing_video_buffer_with_adblock/ At some point, Google and YouTube deserve some consequences.
If you’re just coming back to work today to find your data filters in Terraform (or Pulumi, or whatever) are broken while trying to run a deployment, check this out: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/update-on-amazon-linux-ami-end-of-life Amazon has pulled all of the old Amazon Linux AMIs that might respond to your filter. You need to check and make sure your filter is updated. This issue is…
A long time ago I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions. I instead made goals. I felt like this was more attainable and a better fit for the human condition. I didn’t punish myself for missing a goal, I just readjusted until I tried to attain them. 2023 ended and I found that I wasn’t even thinking about goals for next year. I do have a physical goal of losing weight and…
I’m predicting this to be a real shitshow. https://developersalliance.org/open-source-liability-is-coming/ Link to external blog entry I did a lot of time in the US federal government space. In the latter part of my career there, there was a big push to stop using open source software as much as possible due to supply chain concerns. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to exclude…
Welcome to the first entry in a new series… er… category… maybe tag… hell I dunno… where I sit back and spill the beans on some of the true tales of my life being an IT guy. I hesitate to call this a “series” because who knows if I will actually keep this up. But I figure that somewhere, somehow, these short anecdotes deserve a small corner of the…
It’s the day after Christmas 2023 and I’m trying to wind down for the year. I’ve been reflecting on 2023 and all of its glory and horror. My morning reading started with this fine article: https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan While I don’t work at Google (and never aspire to), I identified with many things in this article. It seems that over the past 20 years…
Hello again. Nice to see you. It’s almost been a year. I was supposed to do better on maintaining this site during 2023, but I didn’t really meet that goal. Some of the reasons were that I was tired and didn’t have much to say, but some of the reasons were largely technical. Moving the Blog As you can see, I’ve moved on from hosting this site at Medium. To keep a long opinion short, Medium has…
I was telling my youngest daughter, “When something like this happens, I can’t rest until I figure it out.” What was that? At some point in iOS 16, our Apple Family setup stopped sending notifications for “Ask to Buy” purchases from our daughters. I don’t know if this started on the first installation of iOS 16 on my devices or on theirs, but it was plain broken. It’s supposed to send a…
Apple provides a long list of privacy-focused features to help you maintain your modern-day sanity. It’s not too often that you get to taste the actual benefit of these features and how they give you control over the flow of information. For instance — privacy features in Safari are cool, but they’re largely transparent and once you turn them on, it’s not really all that clear how the features are…
I was one of the lucky few to snag an iPhone 14 Pro Max on launch day. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t around to take the delivery — we were on the road to my cousin’s wedding when UPS tried to deliver it. I rerouted the UPS shipment to a UPS store near our house. Monday about 12:10pm… I received a notification from UPS that they had dropped my phone off at the UPS Store. The planets had…
Apple seems to have all kinds of slick tricks up their sleeves. Some day you’ll be futzing around with the trackpad and moving things around, some days you’ll hit the wrong key combination… and some days, something will just happen. It’s like one of those happy little accidents that Bob Ross loved to talk about. Yesterday while I was trying to shift some tabs around in Safari on macOS Monterey…
It’s time for my version of the WWDC wishlist. WWDC is almost always about the software. Each year they talk about what’s coming in the various *OS plans for the year. They decidedly do not focus on hardware. You can get a prognostication of the hardware they have in the pipe, but it’s fun to see what they have in mind for future iterations of the software. Last year I was convinced that Apple was…
Many years ago, I embarked on a home automation hobby that has drained my budget. Home automation is a horrifically expensive hobby (like most of them). There’s a lot of trial and error. You’ll almost always buy stuff that doesn’t work or integrate well. It’ll be expensive. You’ll want to replace it because it’s not perfect. Siri looks like HAL9000, just… more chill. I started off with the center…
I desperately want to love Safari. I desperately want Safari to succeed. It probably won’t.
Electron owns way too much of my disk. It’s time to move on.
In one of those “duh” moments for today… I’ve been wrestling with an oddity in my git repositories with vscode. Sometimes when I open a git repo, it will just suddenly duplicate all of the files in the repo. It seemed to happen most of the time when I was opening a large git repository with vscode. Turns out that iCloud is to blame - something about vscode and iCloud Drive…
I have always wanted to use Firebase and Google Cloud for more and more projects. My last support experience with AWS was bad enough that I decided it was time to make the leap. Galaxycow is now using Firebase hosting. Bear with me for the SSL errors for a little while.
Pro Tip: Don’t use iCloud’s “Hide My Email” feature to create email addresses to use with Amazon accounts. They trip a security rule and AWS is straight up impossible to work with on resolving the situation. We’ve reached the point where it’s so hard to prove your identity and actual use of a product that it’s just not even worth the time.
I’ve noticed that my M1 Max Macbook Pro battery has been getting hammered lately, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. Activity Monitor was confirming some of my greatest fears: Safari was actually using significant energy. I didn’t know why. The lesson? Beware of new features.
Spotted this morning on reddit: Could the “Followable Web” feature be a substitute for Collections? Or will it be a complement to them? This industry is hilarious.
I find that one of the primary reasons I never finish any of my little one-off projects is because I have a complete inability to break things down into smaller chunks. I can see the end state, and I just want to skip forward to that.
We’re using Gitlab at work and it’s frankly more tuned for doing what you need in an enterprise setting. Github was a pain to manage at NASA, and I wouldn’t recommend it. To that end, I’ve started migrating my personal repositories over to gitlab.com so I can experiment, because that’s how I learn. Merry Christmas to you and yours. Sorry I’ve been so quiet.
This thing is flat-out amazing, and I’m sorry I waited so long to get one.
Apple has a knack for building things under our noses over the course of years… actually, even decades. They’re really good at building onto their technology when it works. When it doesn’t work, they throw it out and start over, only to build it up in the way that matches their final vision. We saw this happen with the M1 chip. It took them more than a decade, but they finally…
I don’t really understand how people stay in this industry their whole lives. It’s truly exhausting. Each day brings a whole new package manager, vulnerability, technology, emotional or religious attachment to some component or platform… it’s just exhausting. I don’t see how we’re ever going to get anywhere. I might need a vacation.
Many years ago, I embarked on a home automation hobby that has drained my budget. Home automation is a horrifically expensive hobby (like most of them). There’s a lot of trial and error. You’ll almost always buy stuff that doesn’t work or integrate well. It’ll be expensive. You’ll want to replace it because it’s not perfect. I started off with the center of my universe on Amazon Alexa (like most…
It’s interesting to me to see who’s doing the actual tracking. Thanks to Safari, it seems the worst violators in my bubble are… tech sites.
I do not understand how there are 50 million people in this country who look at the hatred, corruption, lies, narcissism, blatant ineptitude and moral bankruptcy and think… “We need 4 more years of this.” I understand it’s about the journey and not the destination, but… seriously?
Apple never announces hardware updates at WWDC. They only talk about the software and things that developers care about. The new hardware always comes in the September/October timeframe. I don’t understand why the press continues to think Apple will release new hardware at WWDC. Yes, they talked about Apple Silicon, and they gave you a good guess about when it’s coming out - but they…
Probably the toughest and most mind-boggling thing about any cloud profession is that you could easily spend your entire career working and learning about one of the cloud providers, such as Amazon or Azure. But the reality, in practice, is that CIO’s want you to know them all. Why? They just don’t feel comfortable with “all the eggs in one basket.” But they’re more…
This morning’s toilet read from Medium was amazing. You should check it out.