Internet

I’ve recently volunteered to help with a website for a local organization that I participate in. The website (which is quite good and serves the organization well) is created in WordPress and hosted on WP Engine. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked with WordPress. My old website was on WordPress for while, but I discontinued that in about 2011. I’ve been doing some background reading on it and associated technology (e.

I received my used eero and switch to set up a network connection for my to-be BSD server. Adding the eero to my existing network was easy. It did require a reset of the new-to-me eero and then an update of the entire network to the latest software version which took a few minutes. After that, I shutdown the Raspberry Pi I had setup the other day and put the eero in its place.

I used to complain about cable TV. Mostly because it was obscenely expensive to get the channels that I might want to watch from my local cable monopoly. But it mostly worked and didn’t change much. At this point, I just want that simplicity to come back. There are never ending problems and channel churn with the Internet based TV providers. Last year, I switched from YouTubeTV to fuboTV because that latter had both MASN for Orioles games and Monumental sports for Capitals games.

I got an email from a service that I used to use on a daily basis but had completely forgotten about: OBItalk. This hardware device allowed free use of Google Voice from a homephone. I think we got it about ten years ago and used it as our primary home voice number for at least five or six years. After that, our home line fell into disuse. I think the service still worked until we sold our house and moved a few years ago, but nobody was using it.

Sometimes, the world seems to hang together with bailing wire and duct tape. Like today when a botched update by a key internet security provider caused Windows systems all over the world to go into a boot loop. Really fun stuff. The direct impacts to me are a cancelled code review meeting because Azure DevOps was unavailable and a flight delayed by a couple of hours. Not too bad in the scheme of things, but annoying nonetheless.

I’m a big fan of Chelsea Troy. I watched a great presentation by her on O’Reilly the other day called Product Thinking for Engineers(need a subscription). The presentation was a bit different than I had anticipated. I was thinking it was going to be fairly tacitcal stuff about how to work within a product team as an sofware engineer, and there was that, but it was so much more. To me, the most interesting part was a wide ranging and insightful discussion about how we got to where we are with the current oligopolistic state of play in Big Internet.

In yet another example of why Ticketmaster should be broken up 404 describes how scalpers game the system. Essentially, scalpers are pros at buying up high-demand tickets and they are much smarter and more motivated than Ticketmaster who throws up some weak-sauce barriers to them. It’s an interesting discussion of the techniques used and how they short-circuit efforts to prevent multiple ticket sales. I can’t say that I’ve got a brilliant idea off the top of my head to prevent this abuse but with the money that Ticketmaster rakes in, you would think they could come up with something.

This article in WaPo by Brian Merchant makes some very good points about how tech has changed over the years and mostly not for the better. In the 1990s, the internet was so interesting and fresh and fun. There were a lot of crazy things that happened and most of it was driven by real people. Fast forward to the 2020s and the internet as it was is gone and replaced by the semi-walled gardens of content and information hosted by big tech companies.

I’m really glad I stopped using Lastpass and deleted my account. It sounds like even after the security issue, they were misleading to customers and have done nothing to improve matters. Bitwarden continues to work really well for me. I’ve used it on iOS, Mac and Linux and it works great everywhere. The Firefox plugin is handy and does what it’s supposed to. No complaints at all. I hope they don’t get acquired.

The Great Backyard Bird Count is taking place now. I’ve always liked birds and can identify a few common ones so this year I decided to participate in the event. It’s really nicely done. They have an app called Bird ID that helps you identify the birds and collects the data. It’s very easy. There is also a place to view the collected data that you need to have an account to access.