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A friend’s 6 month old Maine coon cat is already enormous. He’s such an outgoing and fun kitty to play with.

A Maine coon cat is sitting on a shiny floor. His floofy tail is longer than he is.

Unboxing the Firewalla Gold Pro

My early access Firewalla Gold Pro 10 gigabit router came today. It’s replacing a Firewalla Gold Plus 2.5Gb router we’ve used for the last year.

Cardboard box with 'Firewalla' printed in the center

The production line isn’t fully running yet but the packaging and the router itself look like it is. Firewalla says the hardware design is finished and this is the same unit everyone else will get later this year. The software’s still under active development.

Open box showing the router and boxed power supply A yellow router in a semi-opaque wrapper A white metal box with 'Firewalla' embossed in the top

The Gold Pro is quite a bit larger than the Gold Plus and doesn’t have mounting holes on the bottom for vertical installation. It does have holes on the side for installing rack mount ears.

The front panel of a router with 2 10G ports and 2 2.5G ports The golden yellow metal bottom of the router

A fan screamed when I turned it on. It turned off a few seconds later. I wouldn’t want it in the room with me if it always ran at full speed.

Setup was mostly easy. The Firewalla app prompted to replace an old box or set it up as new. I followed the “replace an old box” process and was running a few minutes later.

“Mostly” means:

  • I had to reboot my ISP’s modem to clear out its MAC cache, and I initially plugged the WAN cord into the wrong jack on the Firewalla. Neither of those were its fault.
  • A software glitch in migrating the firewall rules from the old router to the new one stopped one of my remote servers from connecting in. This is an early access device so I knew what I was getting into. I reported the problem to Firewalla’s tech support and they’re looking into it.
Screenshot of its iPhone app showing its setup options

The end result was a smoking fast 8 gigabits down, 3.4 gigabits up connection. A speed test from my Mac Studio was faster yet.

Screenshot of a speed test showing 'Download 7989.90 Mb/s, Upload 3384.77 Mb/s'. Also, the Cardinals were losing to the Reds.

This is a beta device. It may stop working at any moment, catch fire, overfeed the dog, or call me bad names. As long as it keeps racing along like this, I’m going to be a very happy tester.

I can’t look at a number without trying to contextualize it. Today I got a new home router that can handle our 10 gigabit Internet connection. My first connection to another computer was a 300 baud modem plugged into my little Commodore 64. This new link is about 33 million times faster.

Wait, isn’t a year about 30 megaseconds? Indeed. That means I can now download more data in 1 second than I use to be able to in a year.

I wonder if I’ll have a 300 petabit home connection some day.

I walked out of the little restaurant in time to see my kid standing at a bus stop awaiting a ride. I walked up behind them:

“Want an empanada?”

“Where did you come from? Really? What kind?”

“Chicken or mushroom.”

“Mushroom!”

They reached into the bag and plucked out a steaming hot treat. I walked off without saying another word. I bet the other riders at the stop had so many questions.

Slack said they’ll start deleting old data from free workspaces. While I understand why people are frustrated, you can’t trust your data to someone else’s server. If it’s important to you, keep a copy somewhere under your control.

It might be inconvenient to self-host something like Mattermost, but perhaps not as much as having a company delete all your data.

Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites:

The polyfill.js is a popular open source library to support older browsers. 100K+ sites embed it using the cdn.polyfill.io domain. Notable users are JSTOR, Intuit and World Economic Forum. However, in February this year, a Chinese company bought the domain and the Github account. Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io.

This is fine.

The pattern matching on this shirt pocket makes me smile every time I see it.

A photo of a shirt pocket. The cloth is white with a grid of small blue and yellow lines. The pocket is so aligned with the shirt that it’s nearly invisible, except that a large coin is sticking out the top to highlight where pocket ends and shirt begins. Someone was paying attention at that factory.