I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on an ICANN cross-constituency working group that’s taking a look at the risks to the DNS. Our gang just posted a major report today and I thought I’d splash this up here so I can brag about our work on Twitter and Facebook.
Grinnell Reunion 2012 — a life of happy accidents
I gave a talk at my Grinnell College reunion last weekend and decided to build this post to share a bunch of links to things that I talked about. This ain’t a’gonna make any sense to the rest of you. But the stuff is interesting. 🙂
This is a story of rivers of geeks. I described the rivers that I swam in during my career, but these are by no means all of the species of geeks that ultimately built the Internet. I was lucky to be a part of a gang of 10’s maybe 100’s of thousands of geeks that came together in the giant happy accident that resulted in this cool thing that we all use today. But don’t be confused — it was a complete accident, at least for me and probably for all of us. Here’s a diagram…
Frac sand mining
Pore old Haven2. ‘lil old blog’s being neglected. I was going to blog about frac sand mining here but the issue kinda exploded into such a big deal that it needed a URL all its own and I forgot to cross-post a link to the new site back here at the ranch.
So here’s a link for those of you that follow me on this blog. Sorry about that. Things got a little crazy there for a while and I’m just now circling back to do the housekeeping.
Adding capabilities to Mac OS X Lion Server
UPDATE:
I never converted to Lion Server. You can sortof see things unraveling in the middle of this post. I’m taking another run at it now that Mountain Lion Server (now renamed back to OSX Server) is getting stable. I sympathize with what Apple is trying to do. If you’re kindof the power user in the office, the newer version of Server is much better for you. But for those of us who were using the server to do slightly more complicated stuff, it’s been a long hard road.
I’ll write another post pretty soon that summarizes how I put stuff back into Mountain Lion Server. It’s still not easy, but it’s going better — at least so far. For now, just ignore the rest of this post. It’s out of date, and it didn’t result in a working server. Continue reading
omni
Omnisphere and Omni TR in Logic Pro 9 — notes to myself
To introduce Omnisphere into a project — just instantiate it the regular way (forget all the Environment stuff, not required). So 1) create a software track, 2) select Omnisphere (way down at the bottom of the list of software instruments is “all instruments”, Omnisphere is in there). I’ve been using the “stereo” version rather than “multi output” because I like to freeze the tracks, can’t do that with multi-output version. Continue reading
The Cadillac
Dearly beloved, once I was young. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. And once I owned this Cadillac…
Taking out a beaver dam
Uh oh… That swirl in the water? That’s a beaver. That grass at my feet? That’s our culvert. Beavers like to build dams just on the upstream side of our culvert, which leads to trouble like The Big Flood. So this beaver-project must be removed…
Fold-out circular table
This is a series of pictures of our dining-room table. The cool thing about it is how it folds out — so most of the time it’s a modest little table that four people can sit around. But folded out, we’ve crammed twelve people around it. Also great for poker. This series of pictures shows how it’s put together.
Here’s the table, in it’s 4-person folded-up configuration.
Broadband connection improvements — avoiding DNS-interception and “buffer bloat”
This whole saga started when I read an Ars-Technica article called “Small ISPs use “malicious” DNS servers to watch web searches, earn cash.” Here’s the lede that got my attention:
Nearly 2 percent of all US Internet users suffer from “malicious” domain name system (DNS) servers that don’t properly turn website names like google.com into the IP addresses computers need to communicate on the ‘Net. And, to make matters worse, the problem isn’t caused by hackers or malware, but by the local ISPs people pay for access to the Internet.
Mikey in the high branches.
This is a post that most readers of this blog are going to scratch their heads over. I volunteered a fair amount of my time to ICANN (the organization that works on the domain-name and numbering systems that underpin the Internet). Until yesterday. I got pretty cranky over an email exchange that I (as a working-group member at the bottom of ICANN’s bottom-up policy-making process) had with a couple Big Kids on the Council that manages our working-group-based policy-making process. I loudly resigned over this — here’s a link to my grouchy email to the community. Continue reading
Music workstation
Here’s a series of photos of my music workstation evolving into my music studio over the years. Click on the photos for ginormous versions.
Cool Picture – Aug 5, 2019
This is a chronicle of the music workstation. It begins with a picture in 2005 and continues up to… who knows when?
August 5th, 2005
I started podcasting with a site titled Sex and Podcasting, which was a blatant lift from Lorenzo Milam’s Sex and Broadcasting (seen, just peeking into the far-left corner of the picture, right where Lorenzo would have wanted it). My idea was to explore how my experiences with community radio might map over into this new “podcasting” thing. Imagine my surprise when the attention-getting “Sex” in the title catapulted me into the Top-100 podcasts ranking for a time. Marcie just came across this photo (in early 2022).
January 14th, 2011
Six years later, podcasting had faded into the background (although Geezercast, my sequel to Sex and Podcasting ain’t dead yet, it’s just sleeping) and I was on the upward slope of keyboards and midi gizmos…
WordPress gallery can’t save or link to external URLs
UPDATE: Several years have passed and this problem still exists. However now there is a nice simple plugin that fixes it. It’s called WP Gallery Custom Links. It’s working for me. Hopefully it will for you too. I updated the first of the three images in my broken example gallery to an external URL as a test.
Sorry about this lame-o post right in the middle of my blog, but this is a bug that’s best documented with a post so’s the WordPress folks can see what’s going on.
I’m running the current version of WordPress here (3.1.3 as of this writing) Continue reading
Online privacy tips
A friend asked Marcie about reducing her exposure to ads on Facebook and I decided to write up the answer as a blog post so it would be easy to send to others (and update with new stuff). So here is a list of stuff that I do — your mileage may vary. I update this about once a year with new/improved plugins/tips. Continue reading
Fiber to the farm
Hooray! Our local phone company, good old Nelson Telephone Cooperative, is plowing fiber into our house at the farm over the next few weeks! You haven’t lived until you’ve seen me, an aging 60 year old geek, doing cartwheels in anticipation. So here’s a post to document the process as it unfolds.
Carlos and Susana
Our friends Carlo and Susana came to visit the farm over the weekend. Carlos rode his bike 102 miles to get here.
