I often wear a shirt, handed out by internet monitoring company ThousandEyes, that says this: And everyone, who wants to think they’re at all clever about actually knowing what traceroute is, asks me what it means. And why there’s serious depth to this joke. So let’s start with what the…

My mom insists I’m hard to shop for. Anything I want, I tend to get myself, and often my needs and evaluations of a thing are just plain…ornery. When I was perhaps ten years old, I got as a gift a cool clock that told the time using marbles. The…

Back when I was something like 8 years old, I was into computers and robots and all the nerdly things that would foreshadow my career in tech, and I spotted it, over $60 then-dollars for a toy robot with a bunch of functions, and it was voice controlled, how cool…

So, for whatever reason, I decided to go down the rabbit hole of using a word processor that I had used for many years in my youth: MS Works 3.0 for DOS. At school, I was a heavy ClarisWorks user, and I have fond memories there too, but my Dad…

TLDR: I’ve been shipping using thermal label printers for years, and I go with the “Honda Civic” of label printers, the venerable Zebra LP2844, aka the “UPS Printer”. You can get them cheaply on ebay, parts and the one consumable you’ll need (labels) are plentiful, and there’s no vendor lock-in…

We recently had a bedbug problem in our apartment. This is the story. It was a “minor” infestation, but for reasons that will become obvious, that word means very little. This is more a story about social interactions and people who helped in a time of need, people who didn’t…

I’m an engineer. I’m a nerd. Most of my social life is online. And that was before 2020, when pretty much everyone’s social life had to get online. I enjoy writing, and given the above intro, that means I’m writing things online. Back in the day, if you wanted to…

White Knights trying to help the people they love, and how not to. — I’m an engineer and a technologist. I solve problems. I see many, many things in life as “situations which can be improved, often with technology”. …

As a sysadmin, I come across ancient systems running modern OSes. For what I do, this is fine: the bare level OS and a couple of low-CPU daemons often do not need miner-level CPU power. Often, even the CPU of an embedded system would be fine. Our greater need is…