An Open Letter to Most Email Notifications

Abstract: You suck, and do not know not to manage many of the security aspects of email.

Temperatures as You Like

So here’s a short one for you: Do you like your temperatures expressed as °F, or °C?¹

Well, there’s one fundamental issue with me writing like the way I have been. I can put, say, “I decreased temperatures by 20°F by cleaning the fans,” but if you’re a °C person, then you need to take a quick detour to convert that to units that you’re more familiar with. A common way to do this would be to notate that as “20°F (11.11 °C)”, which works, but I’m effectively stating myself twice, and hoping that I actually got my numbers right. Plus that opens up the possibility for writing °F (°C) one time, and °C (°F) another. So for basically no benefit except me getting to be proud of myself, let’s improve on that.

Making Footnotes More Accessible With Littlefoot

You all know how footnotes work here, right? A little superscript number at the end of a sentence, and a list of numbers at the very bottom of the article, usually little remarks or extra details that are useful but not worth interrupting the flow of the article as a whole (or references). There’s just one problem: the notes aren’t anywhere near their associated text, meaning if you do want to read them, you might need to do some bouncing back-and-forth to understand everything. Well, no more!

Adding proper TOCs to my posts (AKA theme update)

How Git Efficiently Transmits Your Changes

So here’s a fun one. Have you ever noticed that even for huge changes to a repository, a git push only sends over a few kilobytes, maybe a few megabytes at most? If you’re familiar with the internals of git, you know that git stores an entire copy of the new file on commit. So how are these changes so small?

Spanning Tree Protocol(s) Explained

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the BPDUs.

Spanning Tree Protocol, as mentioned previously, is a protocol used by switches to build out a loop-free logical topology of an Ethernet network. The protocol itself is built off of a concept called, well, a spanning tree.

How does this work? Well, that’s what I’m here to explain.

Moving From Sophos UTM 9 to pfSense

Yeah I figure why not, at the same time that I’m replacing another key piece of network infrastructure, I might as well just replace the (second) most important piece, right? So cue the music, because…

Now, this is a story, all about how my life network got flipped, turned upside down, and I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air the owner of a… just… just cut the music. Let’s begin.

BorgBackup: (TODO: Insert Borg Joke Here)

I was really fighting with my inner self to have a straightforward title for this one, but alas, resistance is futile.

BorgBackup, or, for short, just “Borg”, is a relatively fast (more on that later), efficient, secure, and authenticated way of backing up multiple devices either on a single network, or even across networks (you’ll see, again, later). This is currently what I use for backing up my stuff, and, well, it’s just cool, and definitely something you should take a look at.

MacOS Bundles (and Packages) Explained

When is a file more than just a file? When it’s actually a folder that Finder is lying to you about. Every program, every kernel extension, and everything Time Machine creates on a network share is.. a bundle. Even the Photos Library file in ~/Photos… well you get the point. Let’s unpack these things, shall we?