Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Technology. Show all posts

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Princess Leia shared "Death Star Plans" with you

I've also thought that 99% of the plot driving problems from Seinfeld would be eliminated if they had mobile phones.

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

PSA: Don't Buy an Amazon Echo Dot

Don't buy an Amazon Echo Dot. It is a gateway drug. Now I want to buy Alexa-enabled outlets and switches. And maybe I need this battery pack, so I can move the Dot from room to room with me.

It'll cost me a few bucks up front and it will be great when it works. It also means, invariably at some point, I'll have to troubleshoot something that never fails like an outlet or light switch.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Zero, One, or Infinity

An interesting tidbit from a NANOG/DNS post:
"But needing “multiple” DNS Root Zone Servers and coming up with the number 13 appears to be somewhat curious. It seems such an odd limitation in the number of root servers given that a common rule of thumb in computer software design is Willem van der Poel’s Zero, One or Infinity Rule, which states a principle that either an action or resource should not be permitted (zero), should happen uniquely (one) or have no arbitrary limit at all (infinity). For root servers, it appears that we would like more than one root server. But why set that number to 13?"
Leading to:
"The desire in the design of the DNS priming query and response was to provide the longest possible list of root name servers and addresses in the priming response, but at the same time ensure that the response was capable of being passed in the DNS using UDP. The largest possible set of names that could be packed in a 512 octet DNS response in this manner was 13 such names and their IPv4 addresses - so there are at most 13 distinct root name servers to comply with this limit." 

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Needs Another Stamp

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Pinewood Derby Telemetry

Just like a mini F1 car...

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

High Tech

Well, in any case, it was tech back in the day.


Saturday, September 17, 2016

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Amazon Echo Dot

I resisted buying an iPad for a long time, because I wasn't sure how much we would use it. I'm quite certain we've gotten our moneys worth and more out of the iPad 2 over the years.

Likewise, I'm wondering if the Amazon Alexa voice activated personal assistant service would prove to be a good value over time. I really didn't want to pony up $180 for the Amazon Echo to try it out.

With the Amazon Echo Dot, I can dip my toes for only $50, so that makes it a little more tempting.

(If you wanted to really commit, you can buy 5 get 1 free or buy 10 and get 2 free with codes DOT6PACK or DOT12PACK.)

Monday, September 12, 2016

A Beowulf Cluster of TRS-80 Computers

Okay, not quite...

Friday, September 9, 2016

Security Questions

Coincidentally, my first pet's name was 90 2e 04 70 1e 41 89 2b ad 53 96 86 99 d5 65 e5 83 5a 5b 51.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

GlocalMe

I'm not traveling internationally much at all anymore, but the GlocalMe device/service would have been really handy.

Friday, August 5, 2016

Amazon, Sunspring, and Skynet

Apparently Amazon's algorithm doesn't know all of your deepest, darkest desires since no one bought anything yesterday.

That failure along with this movie created by an AI that was fed bunches of sci-fi scripts makes me feel like we are safe from Skynet for a while yet.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Raspberry Pi 3 Cluster

A very professional install (and video) of a Raspberry Pi cluster...

Friday, July 29, 2016