DEFCON and the Delta Variant

We're a week out from DEFCON 29. Clark County, Nevada just decided to re-implement the 100% mask mandate. All of the DEFCON talks are pre-recorded. While DEFCON was "Vaccinated-Only" this year (and required proof of vaccination), I made the decision a few months ago to forgo the trip to Vegas…

My PiDP-11 Experience

I've been wanting to get my hands on one of the PiDP-11's that Oscar Vermeulen has created.  The PDP-11 was my second computer, thanks to the Broadcast Engineer at the radio station that I worked at when I was 16/17/18, John McCance (John probably deserves his own post,…

Weather Resources for Nerds

It's thunderstorm and hurricane season, so, in the spirit of finding your eternally amazing storm to chase this year, let me share with you some of the neatest tools for tracking your favorite storms. * I use RadarScope [https://www.dtn.com/radarscope-4-0/] for the Radar products on my iPhone/iPad.…

Actions have Consequences, Jonathan Pentland...

I have the utmost respect for the Armed Forces.  I've worked on many a government contract that involved the military, and while I've never had a bad experience, I've had plenty of experiences with white supremacists in the armed forces – both personally and professionally. Unfortunately for Mr. Pentland, the entire…

US Bank; or, why I should have moved banks a LONG time ago.

I've had Personal Checking and Business accounts with US Bank over the last ten years: * Personal Checking * Personal Savings * Personal Credit * Business Checking x 2 * Business Line of Credit x 3 In July of 2020, US Bank decided that they no longer wanted my business for my business account.  This…

COVID Sucks

That is all. Ok.  Maybe a bit more. I wasn't really feeling hot on Thursday, but, after the persistence of a few folks, I went and got a COVID-19 test on Friday. Welp.  Of course it was positive.  Because, why not, right? This new variant really fucking sucks.  I've been…

My thoughts on Tony Hsieh

If you haven't heard, Tony Hsieh [https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tony-hsieh-zappos-luminary-revolutionized-045239863.html] tragically passed away from a house fire this holiday.  I met Tony in 2011 at the Zappos Holiday party where one of my former coworkers from Eucalyptus invited me to the Holiday Party as his +1.  Tony…

iStatMenus, or, lessons in leaving autoupdate turned off

I've been a fond user of iStatMenus for a long time – I've been using them on my macbooks for at least 3 years;  I generally keep autoupdate turned on for my applications on my mac – just do it automatically, I'll deal with the config changes later.  I do this because…

Let's keep your boxes updated!

I have a few different P25 capturing stations across the country.  My main one is in Cincinnati [https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz], however, I also have stations capturing and parsing data in Miami and Austin. These machines were running on a Ubuntu 18.10 (cosmic) build.  No big deal – cosmic is…

My only political post this year

> "It's obvious that none of you have ever ran a business.  Trump understands what it's like to be a business owner." – one of my friends, talking about how he's voting for Trump in 2016. I just voted absentee this year for Ohio.  Suffice to say, it was basically up-and-down the…