Thought Bricks

I’ve been doing some reading about web3 recently to understand what it is and what it might mean. There is plenty of skepticism about web3. The thing that bothers me the most is the premature annointing of these specific technologies as being the 3rd iteration of the web. The first (html) and second (web service, JavaScript, etc.) weren’t named until well after they had demonstrated their usefulness in practice. Maybe this specific assortment of tech will create a new decentralized web that empowers regular users.

I’m not talking about the band, but the switch to eco-friendly lighting in Pittsburg. A switch to lower wattage and less blue bulbs is a great idea. It saves money on energy and provides some real human and non-human benefits. LED lighting is one of those technology advancements that is better than the technology it replaced on almost every reasonable criteria (and yes, I’ve read the arguments about energy savings in cold climates).

Reusing the last argument is something that I frequently do when working in bash. I’ve more or less committed the !$ history expansion to memory. This makes it really easy to do something like touch myfile.txt and then immediately edit it with vim !$. I learned about another way to do this using escape-dot today. It works the same way. It’s nice to learn new stuff but i’ll probably stick with !

Once again, YouTubeTV is in a battle. This time, they have a disagreement with Disney over the fees for carrying their channels. The channels include stuff I don’t watch (Disney Channel, ABC News, Freeform, etc.) as well stuff I do (the ESPN family of channels). One of the reasons I cut the cord was to pay (at least a little) less and deal with less of the nonsense hassles you have to with cable (call them once a year and threaten to cancel to keep your payment the same).

I was glad to see Hashicorp go public the other day. They make some really great tools and I love Terraform. Packer and Vagrant are also very useful tools. It’s nice that an open source company is getting this kind of a splash. I’m thinking about buying some shares but I might wait for a little bit of a pullback. A $15 billion dollar market cap seems steep. I’ll revisit in early 2022 to see what it looks like then.

TechRepublic has some nice things to say about Firefox 95 and it’s RLBox technology. I talked about it the other day. It isn’t a fix for all possible browser security issues it is a step in the right direction to insulate the browser from problems in software supply chain and keep the baddies at bay. In general, TechRepublic likes Firefox so the positive press isn’t too surprising, but it’s good to see Firefox get some coverage for making important security improvements.

The first run of the backup to iDrive Cloud took about 24 hours for about 90GB of data. That’s pretty slow. The good news is that I won’t have to do that very often and the subsequent run was less than an hour. By Speedtest, I should be getting a little over 9Mbs. So, the backup time roughly makes sense. An hour is fine for the incrementals so this should be OK.

I’m searching for a new backup solution. I got rid of my Synology NAS and want to have a cloud based backup. On my main Linux system, I’ve got about 90GB of data in my home directory that are at least somewhat important to me. The leading contenders are Borg and restic. They both seem good but restic has more flexibility with respect to backends so I’ll try that first.

Bass Pro Shops called off the aquisition of Sportsman’s Warehouse after it was challenged by the FTC and various state attorneys general. This is a good sign that the FTC is back in the business of challenging mergers that are anticompetitive. We would be much better off if we still had four major mobile phone companies, five major network airlines and more competition in Big Tech. It’s the rampant mergers and anticompetitive behaviors in the latter than has really killed the Good Internet as we used to know it.

One of the new features in Firefox 95 is component sandboxing in RLBox. The idea is to provide some level of protection across functional boundaries within the application. This is done by using WebAssembly to create a sandbox where modules can be called without exposing the memory space to attacks. It’s an interesting concept and the documentation on the RLBox site describes it quite well. I haven’t used Firefox 95 for long, but it doesn’t seem to have had any deleterious effects.