This isn’t an action shot. The boys are just sitting like this. #Caturday
Remote
Tekniquelly correct
@tek@freeradical.zone
mastodon 4.7.3Politics ∪ tech ∪ security ∪ privacy ∪ O_o
Several-time EFF Tech Trivia champion.
Sysop of Free Radical.
I blog about this at https://blog.freeradical.zone/.
I’ve got your back.
Very approachable. Bring treats.
6202 Followers
2030 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 07, 2017
Avatar:
Me, at night, with music
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Keyboard:
Cherry MX Blue
Pronouns:
He/Him/Hey you
Last time I bought a new phone a few years ago, UPS lost it. I had to go physically pick one up from the store while Apple and UPS argued about it.
This year I bought another new phone. UPS lost it. They’re not saying that yet, but originally it was supposed to come between 9:30 AM and 3:30 PM yesterday. At 3:45 PM they bumped that to 9 PM. At 10 PM they bumped it to between 11:30 AM and 3:30 PM today. At 3:15 PM, that turned into 9 ... https://honeypot.net/2026/09/19/last-time-i-bought-a.html
Coworker: I’m going to squeeze in 1 more quick prod deploy.
Me: If you push to prod after 5PM on a Friday, I’m going to make you on-call all weekend.
Coworker: Hehehe! *deploys*
Slackbot: Notice — Updated the on-call rotation.
Coworker: Haha, very funny. Can you put it back? Hello? Anyone?
Office: …
RE: https://masto.hackers.town/@Wrewdison/117283850689193900
And we found the secret to Zeitgeist. Life changing, but you’ve gotta find out for yourself.
Quoting
About to meet up with a @tek@freeradical.zone in the wild… I’m not sure the universe can handle so much awesome in one place, but we’re doin it anyway!
Pretty sure some pizza is gonna get slaughtered.
Open quoted postI saw a guy wearing a nylon shirt and matching cargo shorts, both clean but faded from too many washes, a plain non-matching ball cap, black sneakers, about 30 tools clipped to his belt, and a couple of ID badges. He was a phone lineman, maybe an electrician, perhaps a fiber optic engineer, with a broken in outfit he’d worn to work every day for months.
The perfection nearly caught my breath. Guy dressed like that, there’s not a room in the country where a security guard wouldn’t buzz him in.
Way back when, a friend told me to buy a GL-iNet travel router (I got model https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/products/gl-axt1800) and now I am passing this advice along to you.
- Hook it to the hotel's Internet.
- Hook your 43 other Wi-Fi devices to the router instead of paying for each one individually.
- Tell it to VPN back to your house and router all your traffic, encrypted, through your trusted network (or watch your local streaming TV channels from abroad).
Seriously, just buy one. I won't travel without it.
Q: Why do you like living in the Bay Area?
A: It's a million little things.
I'm hiring an IT staffer, FTE, onsite in San Francisco. We're transitioning from tiny startup mode to small business and hiring lots of less-technical staff. I need someone to manage onboarding/offboarding, deploy Okta across the SaaS products we use, service requests from employees, and otherwise help automate All The Things so that doubling headcount doesn't mean doubling the amount of manual work.
You'll report to me and we'll tackle these things together. DM for more info. Please boost!
Replying to
Because of Cloudflare, I'm investigating how to block whole websites from work laptops. Congratulations, dipshits. I haven't had a business need to install censorware on our devices before today.
When someone sends me a link to a Youtube video explaining how to configure something, I confess that my first instinct is to ask if they have a version of the instructions for adults.
It perks me up when right here in the middle of the city, in the middle of a major metropolis, every now and then a bunch of wild turkeys just move in and take over the place.
I’ve had fun building Scrapwire. Lately I’ve had fun playing with OpenClaw, too. I didn’t like its communication channel options, though. Signal is great but the integration is a little flaky. Same with iMessage, and that could be a privacy risk. WhatApp? LOL no. So I made a Scrapwire channel for OpenClaw, and now I’m talking to my little AI cat via Scrapwire, Veilid, and cypherspace.
There’s no central server to spy on me ... https://honeypot.net/2026/06/26/ive-had-fun-building-scrapwire.html
I was trying to remove a Li-ion battery from a thing, and accidentally got its attention. Now the enspicified pillow is sitting inside a pyrex casserole dish on my concrete driveway, far away from anything else excitable.
Today, I learned.
Quick vent:so many running advice articles talk about "the" right cadence, or range of cadences.
That's ridiculous.
I'm 6'0. Mrs Tek's 4'9. There is no plausible world in which we'll have the exact same stride length, meaning we can't possibly have the same cadence at a given speed.
Runners: find the cadence that works *for you*. Ignore idiotic unpersonalized advice telling you how fast your own legs should move. You know better than they do.
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Reminder: TSA doesn’t say jack about travel routers or Flipper Zero or lockpicks or ham radios or mini servers. Do be prepared to explain them to a bewildered agent though.
Also, memorize a short speech like “I’m authorized by the federal government, license [ham radio call sign]”, which said authoritatively can gloss over a lot.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0x00string/116877647176964601
Yes, that's an excellent idea. We should punish the people we largely agree with but annoy us in some ways by electing actual nazis instead. That's worked out fucking delightfully this year. I love seeing Roe v Wade overturned, trans people getting trampled, birth control under attack, more stupid wars of distraction, DEI rollbacks, a FUBAR Supreme Court.
Yeah, we really taught 'em a lesson. That was a brilliant plan and I'm delighted we threw everything way for... something? I guess?
Quoting
when the DNC tells you to vote for a shit candidate or else youll get the nazis... just do my a favor and look back over the last forever or so and tell me... who has the real villain been? the overt bad guys, or the people who keep serving up corporate desires and insisting you vote for them or else? who swaps out candidates for ones who werent nominated and screeches at you for not liking that? who let epstein go, was it just republicans? who keeps siding with the nazis against the people democrats keep voting for and electing?
when they come again to tell you that your choice is between their corporate darling who will compromise with nazis, or the fucking nazis... ask yourself what difference it made before to capitulate to this, and what difference it might make to actually punish the DNC for doing this even for once.
Open quoted postReplying to
@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space No, it wasn’t. I was there and you’re wrong about it. You had to deliberately plan to share stuff. It was exceedingly hard to accidentally share your whole life’s data to the whole Internet, unauthenticated, for free, with a single drag and drop.
Peer to peer publishing is great. The same with no guardrails at all is not great.
Replying to
And now, I’ve shared these VPN configuration instructions from a site — this one you’re reading this on — that is almost certainly “harmful to minors” in the eyes of the chucklefucks in Utah’s government.
Look at me over here being all felonious and stuff by linking to an Apple howto. I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel.
Stupid consultant request of the day:
We're being blocked by your SSO. Can you turn that off on your [giant critical vendor] account? Thanks!
No. No, we can't. Well, we *can* but we're *not gonna*, and frankly, your asking has lowered my opinion of you.
If you develop tools for use by salespeople, I probably hate you personally. Every single one I've ever touched is a fractal of bullshittery where nothing works as it's suppose to.
Like today, one tool we use just decided to stop enabling new accounts when we grant them access via Okta. Worked yesterday. Zero has changed. It still creates the accounts, but they're marked as disabled in the tool. We have plenty of licenses. It just stopped working.
Thing is, this is typical for the ecosystem.
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Come to think of it:
Hey, Utah, this is a challenge. I’m a commercial website: I have some Amazon affiliate links on it. I say pro-LGBTQ, anti-right-wing stuff you say is harmful to minors. Either:
- Come and get me,
- Explain how my site is either non-commercial or non-harmful so that others can follow your guidelines, or
- Explain why you’re ignoring flagrant scofflaws and letting them violate your totally Constitutional laws with impunity.
Ball’s in your court, Utah.
And tagging #FediHire and #GetFediHired for visibility. Hi, IT gang!
I logged into one of our vendors for the first time to make some urgent changes. Every third time I tried to click on something, instead of going to that thing, I got an obnoxious full-screen onboarding screen with no way to close it:
If I hit my browser’s back button, half the time I got a “submit this form again?” popup.
If you really want to thank me because you really value me as a customer, please stop asking me stupid questions and let me use the site I logged into.
Mrs Tek's out of town. That means it's time to hit the gym like it owed me money, then have dinner foods she loathes.
Replying to
@jamesvasile@fosstodon.org There's a cold beverage of your choice waiting for you whenever you want to tell the rest of that story.
I’m on a bus reading “Accelerando” on a cheap Chinese ereader hacked with open source firmware. Siri in my ears periodically interrupts with a spoken summary of a Slack message from the company lawyer and I shake my head to dismiss it; I’ll be at the office soon anyway. The two guys in Patagonia vests next to me are one-upping each other with AI opinions that aren’t quite based in reality.
Just a regular commute in the Bay Area.
I like the program Hookmark Pro. It's nifty and wonderful in many ways. It's also $70/yr for something that doesn't seem all that terribly complicated.
Tonight I've mostly replaced it with Keyboard Maestro, a SQLite DB, and a small shell script. It's not an *exact* replacement, but for $70/yr, it's pretty darn close.
I'll publish it once I have it supporting a few more programs.
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@thegibson@masto.hackers.town Actually, that won’t work because they put it on the main cloudflare.com domain. I’m adding it as a custom IOC in CrowdStrike.
Replying to
@jamesvasile@fosstodon.org You're doing a god's work.
I have a hard enough time keeping my cool when I'm accessing things via keyboard. I'd probably be either trembling or giggly if I pulled it off IRL.
I just social engineered my way into one of our sensitive vendors in front of my boss.
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"Amazing, good job, thanks for getting us back in."
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"And also, that support person should be fired."
Replying to
@zwol@masto.hackers.town Holy cow, to have that for Costco runs and the occasional helping kids move. Like 99% of suburban dwellers, a full-size pickup would be ridiculous for me. But this? Aw yeah.
Blue Stahli, "Crimewave" from the album "Quartz": https://song.link/us/i/1833997296 #NowPlaying #FediPlay
Work out with me. 1’/1’ run/walk intervals, starting at 4.5mph for run and adding .1mph every 3 intervals, for the next hour.
Replying to
Replying to
@wortezimmer @signaleleven @Kir @infobeautiful I don't buy it. A cow has about 1 million kilocalories[0], or 1000x(1000-kilocalorie) units. That'd be 119,000 square meters by that graph, or about 30 acres. Cows normally get around 1 acre[1].
I believe the underlying premise. Plant calories are obviously much more efficient than turning them into meat calories and then eating those instead. I don't think the actual numbers are right though.
[0]https://caloriehealthy.com/how-much-calories-is-a-whole-cow.html
[1] https://biologyinsights.com/how-many-acres-do-you-need-per-cow/
Made it through today’s short ruck. 25lbs in the backpack, great music, and cooperative lungs. Felt good. https://strava.app.link/BAfhK0QPd3b
Edit: Replaced the Strava link with an accurate one.
Replying to
@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange His brother is a clever, funny little guy. This one’s a sweetie, but there’s nothing in his eyes but a constant confused expression.
Heaven help me, I've having to care that FIPS 140 exists.
Rando: Huh, I wonder if DHH ever calmed down?
DHH: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
Rando: *backs away slowly from the racist frothing piece of shit*
Dude in the office is about to break me of my enjoyment of CK One perfume.
Replying to
@attoparsec @wortezimmer @signaleleven @Kir @infobeautiful Different source, same end result: https://nutrixu.com/how-many-calories-are-in-1-cow-a-complete-nutritional-breakdown
Given approximately 1000Kcal per pound of beef, and a 1500 pound animal, I think 1Mcal/cow sounds plausibly correct.
Replying to
@light@noc.social Since I moved here many years ago, I’d say I’ve averaged one BART ride per working day. Sometimes twice, sometimes zero, but probably once per office trip overall.
I felt sketched out once that I can remember. Sometimes it’s grimy or loud, because people are grimy and loud, but dangerous? Nah, not in my opinion.
They also added new fare gates that make it harder to leap over them for free. It got markedly less Wild West immediately afterward.
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@paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange I described it as MongoDB as a service, and I stand behind that assessment.
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@deepthoughts10@infosec.exchange @badsamurai@infosec.exchange But that only blocks viewing the uploaded data, not the upload portal.
I’m pretty sure. I haven’t looked into the details.