Don't use Brave 2025 Mar 25
Linked is a detailed list of all the reasons Brave is not the privacy-focused web browser it claims to be. Firefox hasn't escaped its own controversies lately, what with adding AI bullshit nobody wants, but it's a lot less underhanded and duplicitous than what Brave's been up to.

Grumpy IT websites 2025 Mar 18
There's a genre of websites such as the one linked that address pet peeves common in how people interact with IT folks. While I can relate, I've also done enough IT to know that nobody who needs to is reading these websites, let alone taking the advice on for themselves. It's a nice thought, though. Something to commiserate with.

Everyone knows my location 2025 Feb 3
This guy breaks down exactly how the panopticon works – from banner ads on your phone to the ad brokers who put them there to the data brokers who skim their data off the ad auctions to the market where your data is sold. And he proves in plain text that no, it doesn't matter if you've selected "don't share my location" or "don't allow advertisers to track my identity" because the ad companies do it anyway.

You can love or hate AI, but it’s killed crappy 8GB versions of pricey PCs and Macs 2024 Dec 31

Companies like Apple and Microsoft have, for years, created attractive, high-powered hardware with 8GB of memory in it, most egregiously in $1,000-and-up putative "pro" computers like last year's $1,599 M3 MacBook Pro or the Surface Pro 9. This meant that, for the kinds of power users and professionals drawn to these machines, that their starting prices were effectively mirages

To meet the requirements for Copilot+ label and the marketing push behind it, PCs must have a recent high-end processor, at least 16GB of memory, and at least 256GB of storage. ... Apple's face-turn on the RAM question—its first bump to the Mac's base amount of RAM in 12 years—didn't come tied to any specific feature. ... Whatever the reason, something that had been a flat $200 upgrade to any Mac for years and years was suddenly included in the base price, lowering the prices for all other RAM upgrades by $200 as well.

lol

Wordpress Leadership Explosion 2024 Dec 20
Slowly exploding in front of the world since September is WordPress's leadership. WordPress, for anyone who doesn't know, is software used to make and run websites. A lot of websites. Something like 43.3% of the websites on the internet. Everyone from your neighborhood cafe to the State of California to Sony Music. (the brandensite does not use WordPress – I find it bloated and burdensome.) And while WordPress is an Open Source project, it's de facto controlled by its creator, Matt Mullenweg. This hasn't mattered outside of project leadership – Matt's direction has rarely courted controversy – until recently.

Because recently, Matt decided that one of the big for-profit WordPress hosting companies, WP Engine, even though they were obeying their contracts and agreements, still wasn't contributing to the WordPress project enough money, wasn't giving back enough to the community. So he used his control over the WordPress project to throw a public tantrum and shut down their link to WordPress, stranding all their customers' websites. WP Engine responded like the adults in the room, with a PR-crafted letter and lawyer-crafted lawsuit, and the courts have since forced WordPress to play fair. So Matt, who is worth somewhere around $400m, in turn threw another public tantrum and shut down all WordPress.org account registrations.

Which is what spurred Joost de Valk, probably the second-biggest name at WordPress, to write the linked blog post, where he basically says (in polite words) that it's time for WordPress to get rid of Matt Mullenweg and move to proper board-of-directors-style leadership, and oh yes also that he's actually already taking the steps to do so. Matt commented on Joost's post:

I think this is a great idea for you to lead and do under a name other than WordPress. There’s really no way to accomplish everything you want without starting with a fresh slate from a trademark, branding, and people point of view.

Which I read as a very polite "fuck off."

Of course, if you check on Matt Mullenweg's website yourself, this is all a smear campaign and Matt's of course being a completely reasonable dictator and all his dictatorial actions are justified. Naturally.

Yet still, you can't tell me it's better for this software that's so massively important to the web to be under the control of one person, especially one person who acts like a spurned child on a playground lashing out against the people who are playing with the toys in a way he doesn't like.

Spotify playlists are full of low-effort slop, and nobody notices 2024 Dec 20
This is a Harper's article about "ghost artists" – sound-alike muzak created for "mood" playlists that Spotify encourages the creation of because it's cheaper to play these tracks than music created by real artistic effort. It's presented as yet another eking away at musicians' ability to make a living from their art, yet the deeper issue I wonder about is the listener's inability to tell that they're listening to pandering, derivative slop. Quoting one of the musicians hired to create these tracks:

Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch. And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.

It comes as little surprise that the muzak companies behind this have close financial ties to Spotify, and are also starting to lean into AI-created music, because of course they are.

And then there's this Hacker News comment about the Harper's article, from a person claiming to run one of these muzak firms, which passes no judgement, but does add a new point-of-view:

I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.

The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.

I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.

It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.

Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.

Not to be a snob, but... (I am a snob) listen to real fucking music, people.

How to repair the Windows 11 right-click menu 2024 Dec 11
In Windows 11, when you right-click in the interface or file explorer, you are by default given the new "streamlined" context menu. This new menu, in Microsoft's infinite wisdom, hides the text labels for many of the more common operations, making them accessible only through their icons.

This is terrible. Luckily, a quick creation of the registry entry Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32\ with a blank default key is enough to restore the "classic" context menu. Thanks, HowToGeek.

A photographer fixed the light rendering math in the 3D graphics industry 2024 Dec 5
The linked PC Gamer article explains the whole situation, but briefly: early Valve employee, computer engineer and photographer and animator and creator of the G-Man Ken Birdwell was working on Half Life 2 when he noticed something off about the way light interacted with curved objects. He put in the effort to solve the bug, but then realized that the fundamental lighting math was wrong on the 3D graphics accelerator chips, something far out of the purview of Valve's video game software world. Birdwell says:

I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me. ...

The problem was, when I pointed this out to the graphics hardware manufacturers in '99 and early 2000s, I hit the 'you've just pointed out that my chips are fundamentally broken until we design brand new silicon, I hate you' reaction. That wasn't a fun conversation. It went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera, all in rapid succession with each new manufacturer.

This reddit explains the technical side of things.

Ctrl-F in Outlook is "Forward" instead of "Find" because of Bill Gates 2024 Oct 22
Literally. Ctrl-F in Outlook is broken because billg himself told them to do it this way.

Don't email Don Knuth 2024 Oct 21
Don Knuth (now 86 years old) is a (the?) preeminent computer scientist who's famous book "The Art of Computer Programming" is massively influential, and he considers it rude if you send him email. He says:

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.

Love live the fantasy of the scholar cloistered in their tower library, a hermit buried in their arcane work. I hope I can one day rise to the level of no-fucks-given that I have relegated receiving communication to something done only as whimsy, when all other entertainment avenues have run dry.

Knuth, at least, promises not to email you, either.

Uber Greyball Conspiracy 2024 Sep 25
That time that Uber's app would use your behaviors and habits and location data and whatever else they can get their hands on to determine whether or not you were a government regulator and, if so, show you only fake cars with no available rides, therefore preventing you from investigating the company. Oh wait, that's still happening now. And yes, Uber actually openly admits to doing this conspiracy bullshit.

eBay stalking scandal 2024 Sep 25
That time in 2019 that eBay staff literally gangstalked and gaslit a couple of people critical of their policies. This really happened. eBay staff were really arrested for this unbelievable shit, including a senior director.

The Hyperlink is under attack 2024 Sep 19
The big non-branden.me platforms (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook) out there have set their sorting algorithms to discourage content with links to other places on the web, instead encouraging LLM-generated summaries of those places. That's why big branden.me-based websites contain huge troves of hyperlinks. I am fighting back! ...even if nobody but bots reads this website.

AT&T Long Lines 2024 Sep 9
How did a long distance phone call work in the era before satellites and fiber optics? AT&T Long Lines is how: a series of microwave repeaters linking together our country. And as they were built at the height of the Cold War and carried critical military information as well as regular phone calls (and television) their remnants serve as another of the many monuments left in our country to the threat of nuclear annihilation.

"I recently had to implement my disaster recovery plan." 2024 Aug 25
Perhaps not every organization backs up their data and has a plan to mitigate system outages and recover from a disaster, but just because the organization as a whole doesn't have a plan, doesn't mean that their IT workers don't.

The Print Shop 2024 Jul 31
In 1984 the best-selling computer software was Broderbund's The Print Shop – a program which could create signs and greeting cards and letterheads. Now, through the bliss of the internet, you can relive the best part of the 80s and print out (to PDF) your creations.

How to design telephone switching stations that survive a nuclear attack 2024 Jul 31
In Cheshire, Connecticut is buried underground an AT&T phone switching facility from the 1960s, with all the equipment (including toilets) mounted on springs so as to survive when the Russkies inevitably lob a nuke at America. The facility not only includes massive power generators and air filtration systems, but a suite for the survivors to live in for up to 30 days, including brand new pairs of Converse shoes so they discard their old, fallout-contaminated pairs.

Crowdstrike's impact on aviation 2024 Jul 29
When Crowdstrike did a whoopsie a couple weeks back, exactly how many flights were canceled? This guy did the research.

jwz 2024 Jul 23
Is it an exaggeration to say that jamie zawinski invented the modern web? Probably. But I can think of few less inspiring in the internet's history than jwz.

How not use box-shadow 2024 Jul 21
And I thought I had a decent understanding of CSS... here's someone who built a ray tracing 3D rendering engine using nothing but box-shadow. Fun watching my CPU melt, tho.

Windows 98 Disk Defrag Simulator 2024 Jul 15
A simulator of the classic Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter tool. Relive the nostalgia of defragmenting different disk drives!

Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres 2024 Jun 10
Much has been written about the surveillance state we now live in, where one can now reasonably assume that if they are in any inhabitable location they are now being recorded on video. But less noted has been the emergence of universal loudspeakers – how every public social gathering place is under a layer of ubiquitous sound projection. The muzak is one thing, but did you know that these loudspeakers play constant and ambient broadcasts of tones outside the range of normal human hearing? I certainly did not. What is the purpose of these tones? What inadvertent physiological effects do they have on us? What about on animals? Why are we making these sounds in the first place?

The Forged Apple Employee Badge 2024 May 16
Apple (the computer company) has inadvertently created a market in memorabilia, apparently, to the point that sellers on eBay are forging old company documentation and selling it for (in this instance) $950. Good lord.

The Man Who Killed Google Search 2024 Apr 23
I've spent a lot of time complaining about Google in the past few years, specifically because Google used to be so good and lately it's been so bad and getting worse. And in this blog I've found a kindred spirit. This man hates what Google is becoming, and with a passion.

Why did chemical company 3M make floppy discs? 2024 Apr 3
This IEEE/Tedium article titled "The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk – The high-profile creator of magnetic media gave it up nearly three decades ago" talks about exactly that. The history of magnetic storage is reviewed, including its unexpected serendipity that brought the chemical company famous for its adhesives into prominence as the premiere maker of this once-vital computer peripheral.

How document copying led to flextime and world citizenship 2024 Mar 29
Another Computers Are Bad post, this one weaving the thread through the history of the xerographic process, how those xerographs were accounted for, and how that inventor later went on to create the flextime schedule and then renounce his citizenship from Germany and become a "citizen of the world."

Apple is facing Monopoly charges because of the iPhone 2024 Mar 23
I'm tracking this story because it feels relevant to me even though I neither work in the industry nor have any stake in its outcome. But this article, titled "A few thoughts on the Apple DOJ antitrust case, from someone who isn’t riding his first rodeo" helps explain why – tech anti-trust cases such as this have historically been hugely impactful on technology itself in ways that aren't immediately apparent. And I especially appreciate this line: "So, based on my specific expertise, I can tell you: Be prepared, over the coming months, for some lousy punditry."

a history of the tty 2024 Mar 11
This is the story of how society went from typewriters and telegraphs to computers, and why the term 'tty' (acronym for teletypewriter) continues to persist in computing.

WebTV Shrine 2024 Mar 5
Back in the mid-90s, a new gadget came out that let you -- without a computer -- use your TV to browse the world wide web! I never used it, as my household was privileged enough to always have computers around, but I certainly remember it. So here's some nostalgia, someone collecting parts of it and narrating the journey for those who never experienced it in the flesh.

How the Pentagon Learned to Use Targeted Ads to Find Its Targets 2024 Feb 28
The short version of this article is that the government doesn't have to spy on all of us because the advertising companies already are doing that via geolocation data in phone apps, and then they sale said information to anyone, for cheap! But in my experience, I wouldn't even worry about geolocation data, since your phone location can be tracked simply by which WAPs it's near.

the top of the DNS hierarchy 2024 Feb 26
This link is a meandering, plaintext description of the core of the internet's DNS and which nonetheless gives a good summary of the technology and its history. I learned some things, some of which are even about DNS.

Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished 2024 Feb 23
FedEx is increasingly terrible to work with, but the linked example of abhorrent business practice is a new egregious low. Is FedEx circling the drain?

Every Default macOS Wallpaper 2024 Feb 16
This is a collection not so much of the wallpapers – since I don't think most of them are very good at being desktop wallpapers – but of macOS versions, and how it felt to walk by the Apple store and see machines glowing with these big, bright, colorful images on them, welcoming you in like a big invitation to come and touch the shiny thing.

Setting up the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange 2024 Feb 12
One of the three Internet Exchange Points at Hurricane Electric's FMT2 datacenter in Fremont, California is FCIX – the completely volunteer-run sponsor-powered internet exchange. It's somewhat fascinating to learn about, if you're interested in internet backbone systems.

Ready100! to call it 2024 Feb 5
Three years ago, in February 2021, I backed a Kickstarter promising a cyberdeck-style PC featuring a mechanical keyboard, a retro-style case, and a bunch of expansion ports both internal and external. It was called the Ready100! and it had some sleek marketing on the internet cyberdeck communities. Shipping was predicted to begin in April 2021, only two months after the Kickstarter campaign finished. With a turnaround that quick, the project must've been nearly done, right?

Well, here I sit Ready100!-less, three years later, and the last anyone has heard from the project's creator was six months ago, when he posted a series of rambling, hard-to-follow updates about loans and landlords, making reference to past conversations that seem to have happened behind closed doors, or perhaps only in his head. And with radio silence ever since and the subreddit now restricted to "authorized posters" only, I'm now, personally, calling this project "dead." If I ever receive anything from it, even just an explanation of what went wrong, I'll consider it simply a bonus.

Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany 2024 Jan 31
How big can a PDF really get? How do PDFs work in the first place?

Marginalia Search Engine 2023 Dec 29
Crap websites such as this one rarely show up in search engine results, or at least those from major search engines. It's worth considering, "Maybe your site is just unappealing and has bad UX? Have you tried adding adsense, tracking scripts, cookie consent banners, auto playing videos, scrolljacking, newsletter popovers and put the content after a long GPT generated background story at the bottom of the site to make it more appealing to PageRa.. I mean users?" Or maybe we should start searching the web with engines like Marginalia, which focuses on non-commercial content and tries to link you to sites you didn't already know existed?

In 2024, please switch to Firefox 2023 Dec 29
I've been opening websites entirely using Firefox for years now and while I don't really care what web browser other people are using to do the same, there are people who do care, and care passionately. So, whatevs, on behalf of my fellow Firefox users I'll proselytize the cause.

How to shuffle songs? 2023 Dec 28
When people want their music player to play them a "random" song, do they really mean random? Turns out, no, they do not. What they actually want is the next song to be different than what is currently playing, whereas pure, mathematical random does in no way guarantee this.

Black Triangles 2023 Dec 26
What is a project milestone which appears insignificant to the outside world but which insiders understand to be the most important achievement in the entire cycle? That, per this author, is a 'black triangle,' named after the time their video game development team cheered a simple black triangle being rendered to screen. It wasn't the triangle they were cheering, exactly, but rather that the 3d engine was, for the first time, drawing that triangle.

It's a different situation, but I feel there are parallels with the IT world, how some infrastructure is flashy and draws attention, whereas others are just as essential but entirely without sex appeal. I remember, when working at a school, arriving in the building one day to find that a donor had sponsored the naming of the classroom robot charging station, a nothingburger shelf with a power strip and some robots on it. This, while meanwhile I was in the midst of upgrading the school clock-PA system without the funding of donors, budget eked from wherever I could scrape it, despite this being a system which saw far more day-to-day improvement in school operation than the ephemeral collection of robots. But such stories likely abound in every profession.

Every new Kindle is worst than the previous 2023 Dec 14
In 2020 I ranted about how each new Kindle I got was worse than the one before it, each "improved" version I'd gotten improved only in superficial ways but became worse at performing it's primary task. And now, looking back 3.5 years later, without doing so consciously I've held true to what I predicted, having replaced my Kindle not with the latest version but with an iPad.

Anyway. Preserved here in time is my original rant.

w32tm time resync doesn't always instantly resync 2023 Nov 20
In the "so nobody else struggles for an hour with this same stupid problem" department, I share this link to serverfault which explains that sometimes, in an Active Directory domain situation, w32time /rescync doesn't instantly resync time and that's by design. Not that it's noted by the application in anywhere obvious. As the Q&A explains: "If the local clock time of the client is less than three minutes ahead of the time on the server, W32Time will quarter or halve the clock frequency for long enough to bring the clocks into sync. If the client is less that 15 seconds ahead, it will halve the frequency; otherwise, it will quarter the frequency. The amount of time the clock spends running at an unusual frequency depends on the size of the offset that is being corrected." There's no official explanation as to why it does this, but the best guess is that this is to avoid disrupting software which expect time to flow in a linear manner and not jump around erratically.

c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\quotes 2023 Nov 14
There exists on some versions of WIndows a file at this location with a collection of quotes, one from A. A. Milne, seven from George Bernard Shaw, and four from Charles Dickens. Why? Not many on the internet know, and some suspect it to be the evidence of malware. But this ancient forum post from 2002 contains the key: "Windows NT (and its derivates) have a service called Simple TCP/IP services that starts by default. When it's active, if you telnet to port 17 on your computer you'll get a quote. I have quotes by George Bernard Shaw, Charles Dickens, etc." This no longer works, Telnet being long-disabled on Windows, but the quotes file persists at least on my computer.

When Blindness Hits A Hundred Bucks A Share, Then Who Will Be Laughing, I Ask You, “Doctor” 2023 Nov 6

You remember the Bored Apes. Maybe. These were the dumb ugly worthless JPEGs of, like, dressed-up cartoon apes that various suckers and dolts were buying—or, like, investing in?—very loudly a couple of years ago. This was in 2021, back when NFTs (non-fungible tokens) were only a laughingstock among people capable of critical thinking.

Chesterton's Fence 2023 Oct 25
In sysadmin work and IT in general, I find myself reference the concept of Chesterton's Fence on a near-daily basis. Yet, many people are unfamiliar with the name, even though the concept rings instantly true. This short blog post talks about the origin of the term and also some of the implications of the dilemma.

The Apple "screenshot" sound is a Canon AE-1 2023 Oct 14

Apple's camera click sound ... comes from Reekes' old 1970s Canon AE-1 that he purchased in high school. He recorded his camera and then slowed down the shutter speed in order to build the custom sound. ... He said he has attempted to use it as a pickup line in a bar as well. 'Hey, I made that sound!' But Reekes said it mostly just results in a strange look.

Windows' Shortcut to Linkedin 2023 Sep 12
Here's a feature of Windows that nobody wants. Holding down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+WIN and tapping "L" opens up your default browser to the site https://www.linkedin.com/?trk=Officekey – a residual old workaround for some keyboards being sold with an "Office" key which secretly just held down every other modifier.

Installing Windows to con 2023 Aug 10
Did you know you can install Windows into a folder other than C:/Windows/? Did you know that the keyword "/CON/" is reserved from use in Windows folder names for backwards compatibility with DOS? Did you know you can install Windows in C:/CON/ anyway? So here's a video of the worst way to install Windows...

Soundblaster Audigy on Linux 2023 Aug 9
Thanks to the anonymous reviewer commenting back in the web's middle ages of 2008, I was able to figure out why even though my Linux Mint system clearly detected and installed my new SoundBlaster Audigy SB1550 internal card, there was no audio coming out. To anyone facing a similar situation, here's the meat of the puzzle, blatantly copy/pasted from the referenced link:

So, for those using the ANALOG output, open a terminal window and type 'alsamixer'. Use the right arrow to move all the way to the 'Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack' (keep an eye on the Item value in the top left of the window). Now, hit the 'M' key to toggle the value between On and Off. This switches the digital output on and off. Since I was using the Analog output, I needed to have this OFF so I could listen to stuff. Worked like a charm!

Decrease Virtualbox .vdi size by compressing it 2023 Aug 5
Straightforward instructions on how to shrink a .vdi file (virtual disk image, used in a Oracle VirtualBox among others) was confusingly hard to find, with many over-complicated red herrings along the way. Here is a short microblog with the only necessary steps.

Kevin Mitnick dead at 59 2023 Jul 21
I supposed that every profession has its celebrities. The thing with my profession of IT, though, is that our celebrities tend to often be as infamous as famous. Kevin Mitnick is a prime example – hacking his way into telecom systems and then subsequently pinned by government prosecutors as a scapegoat for society's growing fear of life dominated by poorly-secured corporate and government systems. Fortunately, his reputation remained intact and his life recovered. Unfortunately, he just died of Pancreatic cancer at the far-too-young age of 59. This piece in Time offers a very fair depiction of his life.

Infinite Mac 2023 Jun 22
What if MacOS 9?

ASCII by Jason Scott 2023 Jun 14
Since the ancient days of the web, Jason Scott's blog is always fascinating. And it looks like he's in no danger of slowing down. I could link you to a specific post, but I don't need to – they're all good.

I don't want to log in to your website 2023 Mar 7
The Verge has published yet another quick hit piece chronically new and exciting ways in which the web is getting worse to use. The whole venture is maybe a touch ironic, considering the source.

LED Matrix NHL Scoreboard 2023 Mar 7
How to create a bright and colorful scoreboard with a Raspberry Pi. It only took him five years.