I really need to come up with a better name if I'm going to stick with this.

Imagine my surprise waking up today to find that it is now the year 2023. Despite having a theoretical understanding the constant and inevitable forward march of time, I still wouldn’t say I have a working knowledge of it and end up being absolutely blown away by it continuing to happen. I guess I’m just really good at being a frog boiled slowly in a pot or whatever, especially in the sense that realizing too much time has passed will probably happen when I’m already dead. Anyway, happy new year!

Making important financial tools is pretty easy, why isn't everyone doing it?

This is the story of how my online-addled brain misfired some neurons and an objectively dumb and bad idea was created. That idea would bounce around inside my skull much like the DVD logo screensaver on an old TV for the better part of a week before I decided it needed to be removed, the only way I knew how: by making it a reality. This is the story of Stonks.info - Info about Stonks.

Yes, "HTTPS Everywhere" includes your dumb server. That's what everywhere means.

It’s hard to pretend that privacy isn’t important these days when every other day there’s another story about a data breach leaking millions of peoples’ private data into the public when they were really meant to be shipped off to a government surveillance program, or that Facebook was again lying and selling your account security phone number to every company who had spare change to spend on it, or some other equally dystopian nightmare. Unfortunately there’s not a lot any individual person can do to prevent that sort of stuff (except maybe deleting your Facebook, which you should definitely do), but you can limit what you do out in the open by encrypting everything.

I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the internet to Sweden. Old openVPN did it in less than twenty.

In this week’s installment of Extremely Justified TBH Privacy Paranoia Theater, we’ll take a look at making sure one of the most popular download tools isn’t broadcasting to everyone in between your ethernet port and your peers in Estonia what kind of weird torrents you’re into.

I mean, kind of. Only the low-res versions. So low-res theft. It's like a misdemeanor at best.

The web is a wild, untamable mass of infinitely shareable information. It was designed to be entirely open; anything on it would be downloadable by anyone else with a connection. This is the reason your browser has a “Save image” menu option when you right click a photo and not even the most proprietary-focused, litigious, IP-clutching companies can do anything about it. So when I headed over to the album that my friend’s wedding photographer had posted, and saw that right clicking was blocked, I was filled with the spirit of Free Software and a self-righteous drive to free these photos from their DRM-ish prison.

Unauthorized users will be force-fed mom's spaghetti.

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I have a PLEX server full of delicious, nutritious content. Thanks to an update some time ago, I can easily share this content with my friends and family via their own PLEX accounts, so that I don’t have to go handing out my server admin login info, or deal with seeing suggestions for all the stupid crap they watch.

Maven? Adding totally unnecessary complexity to what should otherwise be a very simple task? No way!

In my real job, we use Jenkins to build our junk. Actually, two instances of Jenkins (don’t ask). Actually, two instances of Jenkins that write artifacts to a Maven repository and also to a special location in Perforce (seriously, don’t ask). We live in a strange world somewhere between a number of build tools and processes standardized within the company and usually end up using some combination of them that we duct tape together with some python code, shell scripts, and happy thoughts.

Now that I can see how hot my server is, I want to see what the hell is causing it.

Previously, on Graphs and Other Nerd Porn: Part 1 So here I am, with a bunch of graphs showing me that once in a while on my server, the load average goes up and the temperature follows. Big damn deal.

I got bored and decided I wanted to know how hot my server gets. Spoilers: I installed a bunch of shit and I still don't really know.

There’s a guy named Alonso who lives in my living room, and lately he’s been making a lot more noise than he used to.

It's my new blag, so check it out or whatever.

When I started doing this, I thought the point was to give the internet at large some vastly unique, indescribably earth-shattering content that would draw you all in for some reason, much like Christopher Walken reading Goodnight Moon, begging all you children to scooch closer.

If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know that I like to run and I’m trying to do more of it these days. You would know this, because the Nike+ Running app I use to track distance, time, and pace of my runs likes to force-feed your news feed with all the same details whether I ask it to or not. You might assume that disabling the automatic sharing options in the app preferences, along with never opening the “SHARE THIS RUN!” pane would result in my runs never being shared. But you would be completely wrong. Idiot. You obviously have no idea how the Nike Social Marketing strategy works.

Today I’d like to address a serious and growing concern, becoming especially prevalent among college students who are now, just as I was a few years ago, too cheap/poor/cool to have proper furniture: Burning down their dorms by leaving laptops on their beds. This is a trend that is destroying lives and student housing across the country, but could be easily stopped if we all just took a moment to become educated about the issue and the devices we often spend so much time using.

A dark cloud had surrounded me, blocking out the sun. Every move I made only seemed to make the darkness more dense and take the bright rays of hope farther from my reach. My situation was becoming more and more claustrophobic and dire every day. I knew I wouldn’t be able to go much longer on in this way, and was determined that if this truly was the end, I wouldn’t be going out without a fight. So I tried something. Something foolish and crazy; something dangerous and possibly indicative of a serious mental condition. I tried the only option I had left. I disabled nativeEvents in Internet Explorer.

After using the solution I detailed in my last post for about a week, I found that more often than not, even with spawning entirely new VMs every night, on one or both of the IE machines, while a test was running, iexplore.exe would be using 99% CPU.

After dealing with Selenium testing on Internet Explorer for some time now, I’ve learned one thing in particular: IE is horrifically self-destructive.

Once upon a time, I was the proud owner of a PLEX Server, Transmission Server, and a fondness for a whole bunch of TV shows that were on at different (and sometimes the same) times and days out of any given week.

Turns out Jekyll is pretty cool.