Recent content on Micah Bird's Site
It is very rare that I come across a piece of media that grips me to the degree that I actively have to separate myself from it. I picked up this book after seeing someone recommend it in a Hacker News thread about the umpteenth-Meta/Facebook privacy scandal. Boy howdy did I have no idea how much blood is on the hands of their executives, both figuratively and literally. I have immense respect for…
A bit of context A while back, the CEO of Tailscale, Avery Pennarun, gave a tech talk to the Mines ACM club. On top of being incredibly star struck, this talk was truly awe-inspiring. There was one point he especially stressed that continues to echo in my head. I am going to horrifically butcher a quote he gave, but it was something to the effect of: Back in the early days of technology, the easy…
This blog post is adapted from a presentation I gave for HASS 465: THE GOOD LIFE, FROM ARISTOTLE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE. This first game is all about exploration, climbing every mountain, looking in every corner, and going on a grandiose adventure… But who do you play as? Well, this little fella of course: The name of the first game is is Tall Trails , and your objective is to find your…
The Scam Today out of the blue I was contacted by a business that I made a website for ages ago. They simply sent a picture of the following letter they received in the mail and asked if they should do anything about it. Here is that picture: Although it’s a solicitation, what the heck is the domain marston-holdings.com and why would they want $288 for it?! Well, when going to that site, it…
The following a short compilation of albums that can be legally downloaded from an official source, be that directly from the artist or publisher itself. Whether you are just starting a local music library, or already have terabytes of music, I think all of these would make great additions to your collection! After all, who doesn’t like free?! Various Artists - Ghostly Swim A phenomenal…
With all the hype surrounding the new Pebble devices, I thought it was high time that I share how I still rock my Pebble Time ( a device that released in 2015! ) to this day. The key, is Gadgetbridge . Why Gadgetbridge? Although I haven’t conducted any formal experiments or taken any measurements of battery life, anecdotally, I can say Gadgetbridge provides better battery life than the stock…
Preamble Manage a Kubernetes cluster for your homelab? Tired of mucking around with kubectl apply -f and helm install commands, and wish your deployments were more declarative, reproducible, and controlled with Git? Well, ArgoCD is the solution for you! This tutorial will go through setting up ArgoCD from scratch, and even how you setup a cluster with a single command! Make sure that you already…
Preamble I noticed that when updating Ungoogled Chromium , seemingly randomly WebRTC would stop working and as a result apps like Discord would fail to connect when joining voice calls. Searching online didn’t yield any similar issues, but after some hunting in chrome://flags/ , I found a fix! Testing WebRTC First, make sure that indeed your WebRTC isn’t working and not some odd fluke,…
Why..? In my transition to going to university, I came to the realization that I will have to forgo my desktop for something that is portable and powerful. I spent many weeks trying to find the perfect “gamer” laptop that would fit my compute need (it felt a lot like those “pick two” triangles between performance, portability, and battery life) but I could not find anything…
The following are tech talks that I find comedic, learned lessons from, introduced me to new tech, and/or all of the above! Last Upated: December 31, 2025 Zoz - Pwned By The Owner: What Happens When You Steal a Hackers Computer (DEFCON 18) This was the first DEFCON talk I watched and it’s an entertaining hacker tale! Although the technology discussed is ancient by modern standards, the…