Crab cake Benedict, Red House Cafe, Pacific Grove, California.

A plate of poached eggs Benedict over a croissant, and rosemary roasted potatoes.

I just got the happy news that a Firewalla Gold Pro 10Gbps firewall is on its way soon. Today we’re limited to 2.5Gbps Internet connections because that’s what the current Firewalla Gold supports. Of course, now I also have to upgrade our other switches to match it.

This is shaping up to be an early Christmas.

Never doubt that Apple is the master of packaging. My replacement credit card came in the mail today in this unnecessarily beautiful wrapper.

A slightly off-white heavy stock envelope with rounded corners and an embossed Apple logo.

The envelope itself has an NFC chip. You touch your phone to it to activate the card inside.

A rainbow-colored cardboard sleeve with a titanium credit card nestled inside a perfectly-sized cutout.

For Science™ I read the NFC with my Flipper Zero. It didn’t seem to contain any personal information. My guess is it’s a code that the phone interprets as “open the Wallet app and activate that credit card we told you was on the way”.

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao's home raided by FBI agents - CBS San Francisco

Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao’s home raided by FBI agents - CBS San Francisco:

In an emailed statement to CBS News Bay Area, the FBI said, “The FBI is conducting court authorized law enforcement activity on Maiden Lane. We are unable to provide additional information at this time.”

Election officials just announced that Thao’s recall election petitions met the criteria to be put to ballot. This hasn’t been a pleasant week for her.

EU today decided to postpone a vote of their ridiculous “Chat Control” anti-privacy law. That a government would even consider it is a reminder of the critical importance of distributed, federated systems. A website operated out of Brazil isn’t subject to EU law. A Mastodon server in France can ignore bad US laws. A private mailserver in California doesn’t care about China’s laws.

Huge companies like Meta and Google with international business presences have to follow dumb regulations from around the whole world. You and I do not. This is our strength.

Currently reading: My Struggle: Book 2 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Many thanks to Jim for nudging me toward Book 1 way back when. It captured me. 📚

The moon over Northern California.

A dark wood pergola in a back yard. Pine trees and palm trees in the near distance. The moon and stars in the back.

I’ve got my weekend reading sorted out.

A photo of the front cover of the paperback version of “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”.

I spent all last night dreaming about making a web interface for an AI chat API so I could play with it in a browser. Flask vs Node vs Rust vs Elixir. How to authenticate. Let the user select which model to use. Billing concerns. I planned it all and woke up this morning ready to build this thing I’d thought through.

Until I remembered I have zero interest in using, let along making, such a thing.

I’ve gotten 4 plausible recruiter cold emails today. Nature is healing.

Things I like about our relatively new Whirlpool refrigerator: It usually keeps our food cold.

Things I dislike about it: Random things stop working, such as the lights don’t turn on when you open the door, or the ice maker stops making ice, or it stops blowing cold air into the parts that are supposed to be cold. It doesn’t tell you that something’s wrong. You have to notice on your own. Then you have to reboot it by cutting power at the breaker for 10 minutes.

A sleepy Keeva caught a patch of sun.

The world’s sweetest and gentlest Boston terrier is sitting droopily in a sunny bit of carpet.

My company hosted a business dinner last night for infosec leaders. It was a reminder how small the San Francisco tech community can be. What you see in advance: Jane is the CISO at an intimidatingly large corporation whose stuff you use every day. What you see when you get there: Jane is awesome and funny and you have 3 mutual friends from past gigs.

The Bay Area tech pool seems enormous at times. It’s way more interconnected than you’d imagine.

This is interesting and dangerous. I’m trying the new macOS Sequoia Passwords app. I exported my passwords from 1Password to a CSV and imported them into the new app, then soon saw a bunch of ancient logins from old employers. What? Searching for them in 1Password found nothing.

Oh, turns out those are archived in 1Password. The normal cmd-F search doesn’t look in Archive even if you’ve selected it. The other opt-cmd-F find does.

Hope you remembered to delete the passwords that would get you beaten up.

I’ve recently started playing with Zellij. What you need to know:

  • Like tmux with on-screen menus that guide you through the tricky bits.
  • Mouse scrolling works by default.

I’m beginning to doubt that I’ll ever go back.

I think I’m going to upgrade my personal MacBook Air to Sequoia tonight. YOLO!

Let’s go Ballers!

A pro baseball game from behind home plate, looking down the 3rd base line. Downtown Oakland is in the background.

It’s time to view the samizdat, the Entertainment.

A picture of a TV showing an early frame from “Hackers”.

Since Ben Surtees sold his Bartender 5 app to some (IMO) shifty company without telling his users, I’ve deleted it from my Macs and installed Ice. It’s not yet as nice as Bartender, but it’s open source and does 95% of what I wanted.

The conference has little rubber duckies all over the place to play with.

Someone is holding a small, metal flake blue rubber duck with an orange bill.