Letters of Recommendation: Where to start with Peter F. Hamilton, Mastodon iPhone apps, and Domain Registrars

Friends have sent me a few questions related to my “Now” post from yesterday, and I have one other service I’d like to mention. Do I have a Peter F. Hamilton recommendation to start? Good question. For a good sci-fi space opera, I think I would start with his …

Now, Jan. 2021

For a while now, I haven’t felt very much like blogging. This isn’t unusual; looking at my posting history on this site it’s clear that I tend to post in spurts lasting somewhere from one to four years. In the past this was largely because I got …

A lightweight service health check tool written in Bash

cdzombak/lightweight-healthcheck is an easy-to-use (and deploy) service health check tool, written entirely in Bash.

Simple programs that make Things.app better

Introducing two small programs which I use to improve my daily life with the personal task manager, Things.

Introducing Runner: a lightweight wrapper for cron jobs

Part of the Project Announcements series. It’s been a while since I blogged anything here, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t done anything in the past couple years! Over the next months, I’m going to try to make some posts about the various projects I’ve …

Letter to Ann Arbor City Council regarding the failed Y Lot vote

Last night, ahead of publishing on Damn Arbor this morning’s editorial on the role of campaign contributions in Monday’s Y Lot vote, I sent the following email to all members of City Council: I was disappointed that Council failed to pass this resolution last night. In my view, …

Ann Arbor iPhone X Wallpaper

Using Alvaro Carto plus some Photoshop, I recently made some nice Ann Arbor-themed wallpaper for my iPhone X. There are two parts: a blurred version for your home screen, and an unblurred version for your lock screen. It looks like this: New #annarbor-themed iPhone wallpaper. (Thanks to https://t.co/ …

Dashcam & Crash Report from March 2017 AAPD Diag Crash

A while ago, in spring 2017, I filed FOIA requests with U-M and the AAPD to retrieve a crash report and two dashcam videos of the March 16, 2017 incident in which an AAPD vehicle collided with a light post on the Diag while pursuing a suspect. The crash report …

Deploying Let’s Encrypt with Nginx on Ubuntu 16.04

This post will (tersely) walk through the steps required to deploy Let’s Encrypt for TLS, including automatic renewals, on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS1 server running Nginx. This will allow Let’s Encrypt to fetch and renew your certificates transparently, without interfering with whatever application you may be reverse-proxying …

Takeaways from Vox’s post on malicious ads

You can pry my adblocker out of my cold, dead hands.

Reading List: Meltdown and Spectre

* Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel * Meltdown Attack and Spectre Attack * Paper: Meltdown (PDF) * Paper: Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution (PDF) * ARM Whitepaper: Cache Speculation Side-channels (PDF) * Negative Result: Reading Kernel Memory From User Mode Mitigations * Paper: KASLR is Dead: Long Live KASLR (PDF) * Google: Retpoline: a software …

What Ali Ramlawi Gets Wrong About Development and Quality of Life

Ali Ramlawi is running as an independent for City Council this year, in Ward 5, against Chip Smith. I happened upon Ali’s Ann Arbor Votes profile today, and I found some of his stated positions very problematic.1 He says that opponents to the project are often inaccurately labeled …

API Design Reading List

A friend recently asked if I had any recommended reading on designing APIs in general. I found some time today to dig through my Pinboard, and these are the relevant links I found. Many/most of them are language- or technology-specific, but I think it's useful to read …

Recommended Equifax Breach Resources

I’ve re-typed the same advice and links a few times now for various friends, so in the interest of saving time here‘s a blog post. Quick takeaways: * Equifax's tool for checking whether you were affected has been notoriously flaky. If you’ve ever participated in the …

Failing Actors Reading Series

Brief thoughts on lessons we can learn from Erlang when designing reliable actors in Swift.