In some ways it seems like a small thing, but learning that my employer was making Juneteeth a global holiday felt important.
We want everyone at 1Password to have the opportunity to reflect and learn about racial inequality, so we’re making Juneteenth a paid holiday for our team of 400+ people, across the globe – our (virtual) offices will be closed on Friday, June 18, 2021. In an effort to educate and inspire action, we shared information on the history/heritage of the holiday and ways 1Password employees can make a difference in their communities.
It has been a decade since this experience and given the state of social media I cannot really say this person was wrong.
listening to a man from bell aliant tell me about how web 2.0 will end the world
Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are the face of Silicon Valley’s hubris.
Poorly addressing problems that don’t really exist and crushing the environment to do so. All in the name of generating value for the early adopters, yet another form of gate keeping in tech. Twitter Source
Today we had a symmetric gigabit internet connection installed giving us far more up speed at home.
Jumping from 10Mbps to 1Gbps is exciting because it means we don’t have to worry about Zoom bandwidth and as a bonus I can also reliably run my own VPN
This xkcd is immediately one of my all time favourites
I still need to dig in to the details more but the Apple M1 announcement and the updated Mac Mini definitely seems like a candidate to replace my elderly 2012 Mac Mini as a home server at some point in the future
I am always astonished by how applying some artificial constraints to my regular work routine always leads to a surge in creativity. I am feeling pretty jazzed about work potential today.
Step one in my 2020 home backup strategy is complete. Drives acquired, now I just have to wait for the RAID enclosure.
This week marks 3 months at 1Password and last night I received a “swag” package. They definitely went all out.
I am not usually keen on Buzzfeed quizzes, but this one gave me some good chuckles this morning. Answer Some Questions About Git And We’ll Tell You Which Disney Princess You Are
<img src=”https://unsupervised.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/fe3002fbab.png” alt=”Elsa with the description “You’re disciplined and a total ice queen, but your heart has warmed to open source. You are definitely Elsa.”” title=”Screen Shot 2020-07-21 at 9.37.55 AM.png” border=”0″ width=”560″ height=”295″ />
I changed jobs a little over a month ago and yesterday I received a belated welcome pack!
This past week marked two months of working from home full time so I made the choice to improve my workspace by replacing the desk I have been using since grad school.
A decade ago I felt like a black metal desk with a glass surface was super cool and the sort of thing that a computer programmer definitely should have.
Unfortunately, the side effect of a glass desk is that no amount of effort put into running cables will actually hide the mess. You see it every time you look down.
Today I assembled my new desk from IKEA, just something small but with a lot of storage and cable management potential.
No more mess of wires visible all the time and as an added bonus all the hardware that used to be visible all the time is now neatly sorted into some storage.
Spending more than an hour running cables can seem silly, but it felt good to organize my long term work space.
A 24 hour update on my homework experiment with using Cloudflare for my domain.
Most of the traffic is to my micro.blog site and the photo posts I made last night.
The 93% cache rate is awesome and the Cloudflare speed tool is reporting a 30% reduction in page load time!
This past week I did a few homework projects applying some of the “best practices” from work to my home technology setup. My goal was to improve the security of my home network and the reliability of my hobby project infrastructure. Like any good homework it felt like I should “show my work”.
DNS Setup
Working for technology security companies has definitely led me to be a bit on the paranoid side of device and home network security. I have run content blockers on my mobile devices, little snitch on my mac with block lists, and even experimented with running a Pi-hole setup on my Mac Mini last year.
All of these options have resulted in different pain points:
– The Pi-hole would need to be rebooted regularly and broke my Guest Wifi network
– Content blockers
– only work in Safari
– only on my devices on the network (not my partner’s or things like a smart TV)
– Little snitch was WAY overkill for my use.
For the last year I had mostly settled on using a combination of Quad9 DNS and Cloudflare DNS (First 1.1.1.1 and more recently their malware blocking 1.1.1.2) configured on my Router as the solution the got me the most benefit while producing the fewest headaches. It didn’t do much for me around ad or malware blocking per device, but it was something.
Last weekend I found out about a startup, NextDNS, that might just be exactly what I wanted. First, this is my favourite kind of startup, one whose monetization plan is “charge people money”. It brings all the benefits of the Pi-hole DNS server without me having to run a DNS server in my house, plus the block lists I was using with Little Snitch were available in NextDNS. Early this week I configured my home network to use NextDNS and the graph below shows the early results.
Overall I am very pleased with the service as it has meant that I have to do less per device configuration, and I have also gotten to play with some DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS configurations.
Terraform
For over a decade I have managed too many domains and run servers manually, assuming that nothing would break and that I wouldn’t forget anything. Technically this bit of the homework didn’t happen this week, I actually started this 4 or 5 months ago and just tied a bow on it this morning. For those that don’t know what terraform is, it is a way to describe Infrastructure as Code and make any updates by editing the configuration files.
I run a small server using Linode that hosts a few websites and is a place for me to run some little experimental side projects. The server itself is nothing complicated, but it felt good to move it from beings something I created in a web dashboard, to something that could be reliably recreated if I needed to.
The more impactful use of Terraform was moving all of the DNS configuration into configuration files for all of my DNS configurations. Over the last decade I have moved Nameservers used for all my domains a few times and every time it involved copying all of the entries by hand from one website to another. This was also the only time when I would check for old entries and remove anything not useful. Not really the best process for me to manage anything. Having all the DNS records in a single file per domain makes it much easier to review and update.
Cloudflare
The final bit of homework was that I decided to experiment with using Cloudflare’s CDN product on my domain. I have heard lots of good things about their ability to efficiently cache requests and responses so I thought it would be interesting to see what sort of impact that will have on this blog and on various videos, silly gifs, and random images that I host on my Linode instance.
It will be interesting to see how this performs over time. The early results are interesting, in less than 2 hours I am already seeing almost 30% of all requests being cached and served from Cloudflare. Unlike with NextDNS or Terraform I don’t have a specific goal in mind with this experiment, this one is definitely more of a “just for fun” experiment.
Let’s hope I didn’t break my email setup. 🤞🏻
This week I finally got around to checking out this collection of upscaled macOS wallpapers and using the Tiger wallpaper on my computer for some nostalgia.
Last night I set it on my iPad as well and it is deeply satisfying.
