ACCIDENTALLY HACKING THE PLANET

Last summer I tried to hack the Wall of Sheep at DEF CON. It didn't work. The short version is that I tried to make a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack against the Wall by crafting a username: <script type="text/javascript">alert("I was here.");</script> Because I'm kind of a smartass, I later changed my Mastodon username to something similar: <script>alert("Tek");</script> Then I laughed about it with my geeky friends and promptly forgot all about the joke.

FAVORITE APPS: PASTEPAL

I used to think the Copied clipboard manager for Apple devices was spiffy. I don't know how or why, but that app disappeared from the Internet and the App Stores. PastePal seems to be its spiritual successor. It works perfectly, it syncs across devices, and the pro version is a one-time, reasonable $15 purchase. It's the only clipboard manager I've found that checks all those boxes.

PIANOS.

I worked as a software developer with a strongly opinionated manager. He believed that we'd achieve Peak Programmer Productivity™️ by standardizing on one common desktop setup. Of course, that meant we'd all be writing Python code in Eclipse or some other similar abomination that he liked that month. This is for him. From now on, we'll all play the piano. This nonsense of everyone knowing a different instrument is costing us time and money.

EERO + FIREWALLA = PERFECTION

I built our home Wi-Fi network on eero Pro 6 mesh routers. It's great. I love it. It works as advertised. If your household is like most others, where no one has specific highly technical needs, stop reading this and buy an eero system. I've recommended them to my friends and family with lots of happy feedback. However, our needs are specific and highly technical. Making and fixing computer networks is a significant chunk of my job.

WAKE UP, LITTLE SUNSHINE

I prompted ChatGPT with: "Write a song I can sing to my son to get him awake and moving to get ready for school." It replied with: Verse 1 Wake up, little sunshine There’s a new day dawning You’ve got a big adventure It’s time to get moving Chorus Rise and shine, let’s go to school Time to learn, time to grow Put on your shoes, grab your bag You’re ready to go

THE INTERNET IS A ROUGH NEIGHBORHOOD

This week I stood up a new firewall in front of my home network. This one has much better logging than the old one, and I've been watching the block reports. A screenshot of blocked inbound connection attempts, originating from all over the world. Real talk, friends: DO. NOT. expose a machine to the open Internet unless you're 100% confident it's bulletproof. "I run my service on a custom port!" Doesn't matter.

FOX NEWS FIRED TUCKER CARLSON

However it's spun, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson. Carlson had the most popular cable news show by a wide margin, and it's inconceivable that Fox would simply "part ways" with their highest earner, with zero notice, without cause. Hint: it's never good to cost your employer a billion dollars — not that Carlson is the only miscreant at Fox.

INTEGRATE THINGS WITH FOCUS

I use the Things task manager to keep track of what I need to do. I use the Focus pomodoro timer to help myself focus on a task that I'm actively working on. Focus integrates well with another task manager, OmniFocus: you can drag an action from OmniFocus into Focus to create a task to work on, and that task will have a button that links back to the original OmniFocus action.

APPLE WON'T TOTALLY BLOCK UNWANTED EMAILS

Apple's email apps and services don't allow users to completely block senders. If someone is sending you messages you don't want to receive, tough. You're going to get them. The iCloud.com website's Mail app doesn't have a sender block mechanism. Instead, it offers a way to create rules based on each message's attributes, such as its sender. Rules support these actions: Move to Folder Move to Trash Forward to Mark as Read Move to Folder and Mark as Read Move to Trash and Mark as Read Forward to an Email Address and Mark as Read None of those actions are the same as bouncing or silently discarding an email.

UPGRADE YOUR RASPBERRY PI WITH AN SSD

I upgraded my Raspberry Pi to use an external SSD drive instead of its built-in SD card reader. If you use your little computer for anything non-trivial, so should you.

For boring old dd sequential reads, the SSD is several times faster than the SD card: