Category: Rants

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in or near people who are really interested in energy policies will have heard proclamations such as that ‘baseload is dead’ and the sorting of energy sources by parameters like their levelized cost of energy (LCoE) and merit order. Another thing that one may have noticed here […]
We were talking on the podcast about rope. But not just any rope – especially non-stretchy rope for using in a mechanical context. The hack in question was a bicycle wheel that swapped out normal metal spokes for lighter and stronger high-density polypropylene weave, and if you can tension up a bike wheel and ride […]
We miss the slide rule. It isn’t so much that we liked getting an inexact answer using a physical moving object. But to successfully use a slide rule, you need to be able to roughly estimate the order of magnitude of your result. The slide rule’s computation of 2.2 divided by 8 is the same […]
My son went over to a friends house this afternoon, when my wife had been planning on helping him with his French homework. This meant she had an hour or so of unexpected free time. Momentarily at a loss, she asked me what she should do, and my reply was “slack off”, meaning do something […]
I’m not proud. When many of us were kids, we were unabashedly excited when trash day came around because sometimes you’d find an old radio or — jackpot — an old TV out by the curb. Then, depending on its size, you rescued it, or you had your friends help, or, in extreme cases, you […]
I was off at the Chaos Communication Congress last weekend, and one of the big attractions for one who is nerdily inclined is seeing all of the personal projects that everyone brings along with them. Inevitably, someone would ask me what my favorite is. Maybe it’s my decision paralysis, maybe it’s being forced to pick […]
Every system administrator worth their salt knows that the right way to coax changes to network infrastructure onto a production network is to first validate it on a Staging network: a replica of the Production (Prod) network. Meanwhile all the developers who are working on upcoming changes are safely kept in their own padded safety […]
To the surprise of almost nobody, the unprecedented build-out of datacenters and the equipping of them with servers for so-called ‘AI’ has led to a massive shortage of certain components. With random access memory (RAM) being so far the most heavily affected and with storage in the form of HDDs and SSDs not far behind, […]
The holidays are rapidly approaching, and you probably already have a topic or two to argue with your family about. But what about with your hacker friends? We came upon an old favorite the other day: whether it “counts” as retrocomputing if you’re running a simulated version of the system or if it “needs” to […]
Al and I were talking on the podcast about the Home Assistant home automation hub software. In particular, about how devilishly well designed it is for extensibility. It’s designed to be added on to, and that makes all of the difference. That doesn’t mean that it’s trivial to add your own wacky control or sensor […]