alance

For many years I used an EC2 server for my personal email (running Debian and Postfix) but I recently decided it might be better to have one less internet-facing server to worry about. This article do…

Ha, it suddenly sounds like trouble. Eg: one could piggy-back an entirely new file onto an existing file (it might have to be text encoded?). It looks like the kernel might impose a limit of 64KiB on …

Yes concerning. The possibility of losing them between filesystems is worrying too. One rule of thumb is `mv` will keep the attributes by default (given similar filesystem) and everything else needs t…

My recent journey sorting through years of files and categorizing/tagging them with the built-in Extended File Attribute functionality.

Uhh? I didn't ask anyone for an explanation.

Except my 1-sentence comment was not an AI callout that said: "Hey this is AI slop". I validate the content of the article but express personal disappointment in the AI writing style. I a…

Yeah not helping you design your next "be more human" prompt.

I liked del.icio.us, it was online bookmark sharing, but with actual people I knew, and it had genuinely useful category tagging. I guess it was basically replaced with https://old.reddit.c…

Worth remembering it was the Microsoft partnership with Nokia that intentionally killed it.

Felt like a ramble: I've gone through a few different incarnations of self-hosting email and web over the years. - Used to have a little rack machine sitting in a data center (that I would occasi…

I'm wondering how access controls play into this. Team A manages VPCs and Security groups, for example. Team B manages autoscaling groups, EC2, etc. It's great that now the two teams can loo…

Is that a real thing?

> Signal doesn’t let me donate Mobilecoin from the wallet right inside Signal. What’s the point of having a payments feature if I can’t use it to pay you? "Grift for thee, but not for me"…

There's a version of it hosted over here: https://www.crazygames.com/game/10x10 (I thought at first it was a bit like tetris, but there's a sort of key difference in th…

Btw that 10 by 10 game is crazy addictive. It's sort of like tetris but it's not. Would love to know whether the game code intentionally gives you the blocks you need, sometimes .

Bit of a yarn going over a recent bit of creative work that made me feel good: creating a janky client management system to help with the Dibs slack app. You can probably get a feeling for where my pr…

https://dibsonstuff.com a Slack and Discord app to help take turns (i.e. queue) with your teammates, overwhelmingly used for sharing tech resources like staging servers. It's crazy so…

Dibs On Stuff is a Slack bot (and now also a Discord bot) that was built to help developers take turns with server hardware, so that they could demo their changes to various stakeholders. After publis…

Wondering if this is FB's attempt at a toothy grimace towards the UK's Online Safety Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023 …

For secrets or credentials, I've had a reasonable experience putting the name of the secret into a terraform resource, but then setting the secret's actual value outside of terraform (i.e. v…

Still an interesting read: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/ …

The licensing changes seem to imply that if they have a service and you also build a similar service, but offer it for cheaper, then (if they want to) they can price you out of the market with licensi…

oh hey - I too made a password manager - and it's named paw! Pronounced however the heck you like. https://github.com/alexlance/paw It's a wrapper around gpg symmetric …

Three things recently: 1) I made a Slack app in my spare time to help with a thing at work. Jumped through the hoops in the Slack marketplace, and then it was live (Dibs On Stuff). A few people at wor…