Recent content on Ryan Bagley
The blog now shows the text of a footnote when you hover over its citation number, so you can read a reference without jumping to the bottom of the page and back. 1 It involves one Hugo partial and a few CSS rules. I’ve been envious of other blog’s footnote popovers that usually come from a JavaScript library such as Bigfoot or littlefoot, which assemble the bubbles in the…
Subsea internet cables carry 99 percent of transoceanic digital traffic. 1 Financial transactions, diplomatic communications, military data, and the mundane browsing of billions of people all travel through fiber-optic strands resting on the ocean floor. These cables require something that is in desperately short supply: international cooperation. They need it for route surveys, installation…
Iran’s HTTP requests from February 24 to March 8, 2026 from the perspective of Cloudflare. Courtesy of Cloudflare Radar . At approximately 06:15 UTC on February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel began air strikes against Iran. Less than two hours later, at around 08:00 UTC, Cloudflare Radar recorded HTTP traffic from Iran dropping to zero. The internet, by every observable measure of…
Western mob wife appears to have been the overarching clothing aesthetic at the last Sundance Film Festival in the state of Utah. Luckily for me, the look didn’t reflect the demeanor and most people were excited to get paparazzi’d on Park City’s Main Street. There was a lot of nervous laughter and reverse cat calling during my time roaming the streets. Although I have lived near…
I’m slightly addicted to reading the news but I often forget about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. This describes the phenomenon where if you’re an expert in a field you can spot lots of errors and problems with news articles in your given field but return to absolute trust once you read another article within a field you know nothing about. The subjects of network infrastructure and…
Update on January 30, 2026 : A MyBib developer contacted me about this extension’s behavior. They confirmed that this was expected behavior and it was how they were pooling the retrieval of user citation requests. The instance where my computer downloaded several PDF files was a bug that has since been fixed. MyBib has updated the language in the Chrome Web Store to reflect the reality of…
An early morning sweaty run along the Jiangbeizui Riverbank Park in Chongqing, China on July 24, 2025. A comparable environment would be if Miami had a heat wave in the dead of summer and then got sucked into hell. In 2025, I ran a total of 2,358 miles, which is a decrease of 1% from 2024 . I had a lot less elevation gain this year at 91,566 ft, which is down 46% over 2024. The lack of training in…
Gustav Holst, The Planets , op. 32, Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by William Steinberg, Deutsche Grammophon, 1971, LP. I stepped into a music store this weekend for the first time in quite a while. I was compelled by an urge to possess something tangible. It was a strange feeling because the phone in my pocket was capable of instantly streaming probably a vast majority of the music in the…
Chongqing (重庆市) has taken the triple crown of sweatiest, most crowded, and hectic place I’ve ever been to in my entire life. Traversing the heart of the city near the Hongyadong Folk Custom Scene Area (洪崖洞民俗风貌区), over the Qiansimen Bridge (千厮门大桥), and Times Square (时代广场) is otherworldly. All the traits of the city come together to create a visual experience that more closely resembles the…
Although Cisco Live suffers from zeitgeist mania , with this year being AI, there are still a lot of value from sessions and the tribal excitement of being with your industry peers. Either by outright luck or doing something correct at work, my management deemed me worthy to get sent to Cisco Live in San Diego. This was actually my first business trip despite being with my currently employer for a…
Map of major international submarine internet cables near Taiwan. Source: TeleGeography . The seemingly ever present threat of China invading Taiwan stands as one of the most critical and closely watched geopolitical flashpoints globally. Decades of political separation between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan, coupled with Beijing’s unwavering claim of sovereignty over…
Full install kit for a Ratgdo v2.53i. In late in 2023 the Chamberlain Group, who makes the popular garage door opener Liftmaster, discontinued API connectivity through MyQ for third party home automation applications like Google Home, Apple Homekit, and Home Assistant, among others. 1 As someone who purchased a Liftmaster garage door opener specifically to have it integrated with my Apple Homekit…
ExifTool has been a surprisingly useful piece of software in my recent quest to archive all of my family photographs. This includes scanned film from before the time of personal computers and also mangled files that don’t have the correct EXIF data to indicate exactly when they were taken. With the correct EXIF data you can maintain a tidy image archive that plays well with other programs,…
Late Spring on a nearby mountain trail in Centerville, Utah. In 2024 I ran a total of 2,389 miles, which is an increase of 7% over 2023. I had quite a bit more elevation gain this year at 169,078 ft, which is up 14% over 2023. There was a lot of extra running in the mountains to train for the Speedgoat 50K I did. The unexpected drop of in August was due to some harrowing food poisoning that lasted…
Archiving your personal collection of family images can quickly become a mess without some sort of organizational approach. I think the first and most important aspect of any organization measures would be to clean up and standardize image file names. In my mind, this involves having a date indicator with year, month, and if at all possible, a day. This would look something like…
There are a lot of reasons a network engineer might use a 16-bit BGP community tag in an enterprise environment. It can be forced from pre-existing constraints and overcoming technical debt while still giving the opportunity for managing and propagating routing information at scale. Or you just want a compact way to assign and manipulate routes. The first 16-bits available within the full 32-bit…
Map of the C-Lion1 Submarine Cable path from Finland to Germany. Source: TeleGeography . The recent severing of submarine cables in the Baltic Sea has brought to the forefront the critical vulnerabilities surrounding the infrastructure that underpins modern society. On November 17, the BCS East-West Interlink cable, owned by Arelion and spanning from Lithuania to Sweden, was severed. 1 Shortly…
With the correct image processing you can still get a 100 score from PageSpeed Insights despite an image heavy article. This is an evaluation of my Speedgoat race report in July. I use Hugo to build this little blog and it frequently gets incredibly frustrating. My safe space in technology is tagging BGP routes with regex matched communities, not web development. There are tutorials, guides, and…
Recent heightened scrutiny of government regulation surrounding BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) ROA (Route Origin Authorization) has emerged as a critical topic within the internet infrastructure community. As the fundamental routing protocol of the global internet, BGP is essential in ensuring that data reaches its intended destination with efficiency. To put it simply, BGP works like a postal…
On Wednesday, Meta announced 1 it was ending its direct peering relationship with Deutsche Telekom (DT) due to the fee being charged for the connections. DT also had some strong words on their perspective of the situation. 2 This effectively means all DT customers will now have their traffic flow along a longer path through another internet service provider to reach Meta applications. It could…
I recently visited the Island of Madeira on vacation and was impressed with their internet speed. For an island in a remote part of the Atlantic it was not something I expected. After looking further into the island’s internet connectivity I peaked into a new view of the region’s politics and technological history. Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal and boasts a rich history shaped by its…
The energy at the beginning of any race is exhilarating. Tapering for weeks after intense training leaves me with tons of pent up energy. My third time completing the Speedgoat 50K has been the most humbling. Every time I do this race I come away shredded by the demands of the endless hill climbs that wreck all semblance of confidence I had in training. But this year I thought it might be…
The AI vacuum hard at work Is it too late? The ever hungry AI titans demand more and more data that is vacuuming up the entirety of the internet. You just got off a boring Zoom call? Chomp . 1 Checked Facebook for upcoming birthdays or said hello to a friend? Slurp . 2 Take a peak of your friend’s recent vacation on Instagram? Mmmm . 3 How about the latest news aggregated by X? Scrumptious .…
Quite a while ago, I got assigned to what seemed like a straightforward network task: turning up a simple cross connect with an external company using eBGP for route advertisement. However, this mundane and simple task would lead me to a greater understanding of BGP quirks and exceptions. To set the stage, our network and the other company’s network needed to advertise routes to each other on a…
The local family carrying the dowry offering from the pavilion to their house down the street. Notice the smoke in the distance from the firecrackers going off. The lady in the foreground is carrying ducks and chickens in a basket. After witnessing 2,760 kilometers of China all I wanted to do was sleep but my wife wouldn’t let me. We had just arrived in Kunming after twelve hours of travel, which…
Watching the entire country of China zoom by my window at 350 km/h. These high rises in Wuhan were impressive. A frequent oversight foreign travelers make is underestimating the size of a country they are visiting. I once overheard travel plans from tourists visiting the American West that involved visiting the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles confined to the space of 2 days with a car as…
A beautiful 10.84 mile run in the early morning outside of Sun Valley, Idaho. I was camping in a valley to the north of Ketchum. It was rather cold in the early morning despite being August. In 2023, I ran a total of 2,255 miles with a cumulative 147,877 feet of elevation gain. This was similar to the 2,165 miles and 181,394 feet of elevation gain in 2022. Month Distance (miles) Elevation (feet)…
I’m a big proponent of building a home network of whatever size or complexity. For technical and non-technical people it can help you understand the fundamentals of how the internet works. One small part of those fundamentals is giving yourself the ability to connect to your house from anywhere in the world. You can do that with a public IP address but what happens when your modem reboots…
Imagine yourself living in some Jetsons technological utopia. You go down to the robot store and buy the latest helper model . Of the many benefits listed, one is to make your home life easier. Anything from opening the door when you get home, making you delicious meals, keeping the house clean, walking the dog, and everything else that would establish domestic tranquility. Several blissful years…
Super Bowl LVII had a 60 second commercial that tried to dupe the American public. Xfinity marketing their new 10G service along with the achievement of getting a man on the moon was a pairing that wouldn’t be missed by anyone. Somehow we had skipped from 5G past 6G, 7G, 8G, and even 9G! What an engineering feat to be praised along with the moon landing. Their arrogant marketing slogan…
A space mining station as interpreted by Adobe Firefly After the onslaught of AI driven engines in early 2023 I was instantly intrigued with the generative capabilities of image generation. While ChatGPT is a monumental milestone in AI progress it does not carry the same spectacle as algorithmically generated images. Many of us have seen the incredible art built with a few simple prompts. Works…
The newly upgraded 4Runner with mammoth 35 inch tires. I’m good at avoiding social engagements. It is all the easier when you have a hobby that can take you far away into the wilderness. On Easter Weekend I put this expertise into play and ended up touring a portion of the San Rafael Swell Recreation Area located in central Utah. Many people end up at the majestic cliffs dubbed The Wedge in…
Biggest geode we found While touring most gift shops in the west you might encounter beautiful hollow rocks with giant crystals inside. In the most general terms these are called geodes. After seeing some locations in Utah where you can dig them up for free I have been planning to go. After seeing enough epically priced geodes in gift shops you begin to wonder if they are just trying to price…
3D printers in the LabOps Laboratory This article was later published on Trail4Runner.com on December 13, 2022. All images are owned by the respective individuals. Have you ever worked on your 4Runner and an idea for a modification popped into your head? Perhaps something that would make your life easier or solve a unique problem? If so, consider yourself a junior member of the inventor’s club. In…
On the highest point in Utah but only halfway done for the day. While I have avoided formal running races so far this year I was still drawn to running iconic natural features of my surrounding area. Some of these locations include the internationally known Grand Canyon in a brutal rim-to-rim-to-rim single day ultra marathon. I might attempt this sometime in 2023 if I can maintain consistent…
Mechanical engineering is a subject of fascination for me. By that I mean watching loads of Youtube videos where I’m spoon food complex topics and nothing actually hard or challenging. When our family’s vacuum died when I was a young teenager, I asked if I could take it apart to see if I could get it working again. Dissecting this seemingly dead appliance was like taking a basic…
The Instagram overlanding (off-roading) community was scolded in late 2021. I’ve been thinking about it since it happened. It caused quite a hullabaloo at the time and there was a brief period of drama. The source was what some saw as a chronic style of behavior in perpetuating a cycle of advertising self-exploitation. The practices of prominent community accounts were called out directly as…
Bird’s eye view of Iron Mine Lake. I knew it was a bad idea going into the mountains in early July. But I ignored all the wisdom my father had tried to pass onto me from his backpacking adventures as a kid with his own father. The advice was pretty simple and logical. To avoid mosquito Armageddon, wait until the first week of August before venturing into the mountains. This is because high…
New running shoes are always a beauty to look at before they get sloshed across the roads of the world. For some reason in late December of 2021 I decided to give into the pressure of social media. This wasn’t Facebook or Instagram but rather on Strava, the bicycling and running tracking application. The virtues of this platform are lightyears ahead of what one might call normal social…
Feeling tiny in grandness of the geography. On the cusp of summer my excitement to get out into the world had gotten as high as it could have. Leaving my house no longer required a coordination of equipment to stay warm. No excessive amounts of coats, jackets, sleeping bags, thick socks, and everything that would protect you from an unforgiving cold environment. Instead, the dawning possibility of…
The bumper’s inaugural trip to the High Uintas Wilderness. As a fair warning to readers, this guide is not meant as a step by step instruction replacement from C4 Fabrication themselves 1 or professional Toyota mechanics 2 . I sincerely recommend consulting the product’s installation guide as a source of definitive information and a variety of community reviews to get a more…
Entering the early part of the canyon Some fair weather in early February convinced me to finally give some new camping equipment a test run. All of it had been lying around since the previous Black Friday. The 0 F rated sleeping bag kept encouraging me to brave the winter weather. You’ll be warm in my fluffy embrace it kept saying to me. So I finally did it. But not to the true test of…
The Switch Pros SP-9100, SD Offroad Mount Tray, and ARB Twin Compressor ready for assembly. As a fair warning to readers, this guide is not meant as a step by step instruction replacement. I sincerely recommend consulting each product’s installation guide as a source of definitive information. Please consider this article as more of a personal review and collection of tips for these…
After the dirty kerfuffle earlier in the summer I decided to pursue some luxury camping conditions. Obviously, the great motivation here was to reduce the pounds of dirt my dogs could absorb into their fur. Another was to solicit my wife into the great outdoors with an easy and enjoyable camping experience. I always feel better blundering around and making obvious mistakes when I have my…
A small stream feeding into Whitney Reservoir. Sometimes you need pleasantly boring. My first camping trip as an adult was certainly not at Whitney Reservoir but it seemed like the first one without any major issues. My first venture into the wilderness as a responsible adult was a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon wilderness between Glen Canyon Dam and Lee’s Ferry. The trip was cut…
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Yemeni President Abdo Rabbo Mansour Hadi address reporters before their bilateral meeting at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on July 29, 2013. U.S. Department of State This paper was written as part of my International Security Studies master’s thesis while attending the University of Arizona. Introduction The state of Yemen has become…
The National Doctors Tea Party made a stop at the Utah State Capital in the summer of 2010 to hold a rally in opposition of President Barack Obama’s proposed health care overhaul. All images were taken on a Mamiya 645 Pro with a 80mm f/2.8 lens. Film used was Kodak Portra 400 while outdoors and Portra 800 for indoors. I saw this guy wearing tea bags on his colonial era hat on the news one night. I…
Thousands of students from local colleges and universities march to Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on May 4, 1989, to demonstrate for government reform. AP Photo/Mikami This paper was written as part of my Political Science bachelor’s thesis while attending Brigham Young University-Hawaiʻi. My advisor was Dr. Michael Murdock. Introduction Over the past decade, the People’s Republic of China has…