Author Archives: landon

Don’t use pine for your sign handle. Instead, find some good ash or hickory, the kind they use to turn out good quality baseball bats and axe handles. For the sign itself, a thicker gauge of sheet steel is best. … Continue reading →

Senator Dianne Feinstein is introducing a bill that attempts to ban the use of strong cryptography in the US. Link. She supported crypto bans in the 1990s. I was a constituent of hers then, wrote her with my concerns, and … Continue reading →

While I’m sure y’all are nice folks at GoDaddy, I think you get what you pay for in this industry. And I’m willing to pay a little more to get better service. Like, a web server infrastructure that doesn’t randomly … Continue reading →

I spent several hours reading some “documentation” today for a certain component of an enterprise product. Actually what I was doing was a repeated loop of the following: Go to a page with a promising-looking title (e.g., The Fuckwidget Survival … Continue reading →

“Habit is what destroys art.” —Jim Harrison. Harrison died yesterday at the age of 78. https://t.co/qe0Mx0e2ud pic.twitter.com/H2wRRSk4Tm — The Paris Review (@parisreview) March 27, 2016 One of my favorite authors. I don’t quite have all his books, but it’s close.

“If I didn’t do that, I oughta be fired,” Comey [current director of the FBI] told the panel during his live testimony. [He was talking about asking the courts for crypto backdoor powers, when Congress has explicitly considered and then … Continue reading →

Thought experiment: The US Government definitely has the technical ability to take an older iPhone, decap the chips in it and extract whatever keys they need. This capability is just too juicy for a government agency to have left undeveloped. … Continue reading →

A friend of mine remarks, “Worth waiting 32 years for.” Shame we had to wait that long for the 4th movie, though. Ultimately they’ll make more money by having done a good movie than by selling plushies of things, or cups … Continue reading →

Now that we’re no longer under the Big Thumb of bulk surveillance [1] it’s a good time to reflect on the legal mumbo-jumbo being used to justify it. Wait. That was used. That’s all in the past now, and I’m happy … Continue reading →

Dear Asus, Please put less shitty chipset fans on your rather expensive motherboards. It’d be nice if these things lasted more than about a year. /signed/ a customer who was replacing a shrieking fan at 5AM this morning, bodging in … Continue reading →