A key inspiration for this post is Sam Reich, who lives in my general neighborhood. Reich has spent seven seasons of the show "Game Changer" (Wikipedia) reminding everyone of a single crucial detail: Sam: thanks for the reminder that there's always some troll hanging out. 😅 The current tech climate often focuses on uncovering vulnerabilities. So, in that spirit, let's dive in. And so this tale will surely end well, won't it? ... Read more »

I find it fascinating when people think they can just make up bullshit. Tragically, that means that I'm fascinated a bunch of the time. The most recent time though was earlier today when Steven Rattner was on NBC misattributing the ideas of someone over at the Hoover Institute for that of a "Scottish political theorist in the 17th century". Check it out, skip to about 4 minutes 20 seconds: In this case "Ferguson's Law" was self-coined by Niall Ferguson in his April 2024 op-ed in Bloomberg where he states: ... Read more »

To all of the users of the OpenWrt One device, I need to start by saying "I'm sorry". My intention was not to break your firmware. 😅 Of course, I'm talking about commit 6c8cc862 where one of the onboard storage drivers was removed. This all comes down to a difference of opinion in the theory about the job of an operating system. In my (humble) opinion, an operating system should include the drivers needed to bootstrap and install said operating system. This is pretty important in the idea of "self hosting" in computer science (not to be confused with the "homelab" idea of self hosting): ... Read more »

Let's look at a map It all started with this air sensor: Then I took a look a bit deeper: I found it really odd that the air quality only plummeted in the past few hours. Due to the overall proximity to the fires, I would have assumed that it had been high for hours earlier. After looking at that and realizing that PurpleAir also provides access to their sensor network through their website, my next stop was the same area. ... Read more »

On Saturday May 20th, 2023 the 17th Ninja Penguin event kicked off with a night of art, dancing, and celebration all themed around cyberpunk penguins. This year featured artwork by Pinguino, David Shorey, Random, and myself as well as music by Keith Myers, James Ford, Mass Accelerator, Ninjula, Headshot, GRAPHIXX.X, PBOB, Bubbles, and Michael Walker. The past couple of years, I've done some projection mapping in the space which I curate throughout the night. This year we wanted to do something a little different and the answer quickly came to us: a penguin pendant. ... Read more »

While tooling around the web I stumbled across a tidbit with regards to one of the minor workings of Nautilus... which is really to say what appears as a core component of the GNOME desktop environment. Dave Jansen wrote up an interesting note on enabling webp image thumbnails in Nautilus. TL; DR, there's an RPM which it seams the team working on the Workstation flavor neglected to install - webp-pixbuf-loader. Install that and restart Nautilus (nautilus -q) and you're off to the races. ... Read more »

I tend to dally here and there in electronics. As I'm not a "professional" (but absolutely in "hacker" category) there are often conventions that end up being completely foreign to me. The most recent of these was the handling of Gerber files by Texas Instruments. A little history G-code is a generic term for the text based command language used by CNC devices. Most dialects originate from a standard published by the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) in the early 1960s referred to as "RS-274". I say "dialects" because (like most languages used in computing) it's been extended, mutated, and generally abused in the name of getting shit done. ... Read more »

It's code drop time! Both in the sense of new things in the world but also deprecation of old nastiness. I'm happy to let folks know that has been "Blanque Cheque" rebuilt. https://brianredbeard.com/projects/tools/blanque_cheque/ Blanque Check stemmed from shitty corporate payroll companies who insisted on having sending them a check to setup payroll. In 2009 this chapped my hide a bit so I began looking into this. Fortunately, the memory of the Internet is long. I was able to find a multi-part blog series that I got quite a chuckle out of back in the day (and was one of the inspirations for blanque cheque). While his original blog(s) no longer exist ... Read more »

This has been a long time coming. I've been "meaning to get around" to fixing up this site for quite some time. Looks like I finally got to it. There's still work to be done with making it look the way that it used to, but once again I have a platform for running my mouth. At some point in a hot second, I'll make it pretty and get my various hosted tools back into place. In the meantime, if you want to take a look at some of what I've been working on, check out my GitHub profile: ... Read more »