I’ve got a bunch of open browser tabs here so it’s time to clean up.
After years of litigation, a fleet of abandoned surplus planes went to auction in Greybull, Wyoming, including a pair of KC-97 freighters (essentially a B-29 with an extra deck), a trio of C-199 Boxcars, and a pair of P2V Neptunes, as well as multiple fuselages of other models. Oh, to have the money and space to save one of those planes.
Brian started a build thread about his EV project, and our video already has more comments than any of the others I’ve posted over the last two years (sniff!) We’ve got a couple of leads on how other people have wired up their projects, and I’m currently diving into those threads to learn as much as I can.
And in musical news, Alex and Geddy from Rush announced yesterday that they’re going back out on tour ten years after the death of Neal Peart. I’m happy for them; they’re working musicians and deserve to be playing live, which they both excel at. They’ve recruited a drummer who has been playing with Jeff Beck and teaching for over ten years; she looks like she’ll be an excellent fit.
We’ve been buying renewable energy for over fifteen years through a program Maryland’s legislature put together, which allows for consumers to choose who their provider is (as long as that provider is part of the program). I just got a letter from our longtime supplier saying they’re withdrawing from the program based on Maryland Senate Bill 1, which imposes stricter regulations on retail energy suppliers to protect consumers from misleading practices in the competitive energy market. So I have to go shopping to see if there’s someone else we can buy clean energy from.
We’ve also gotten several notices from the Johns Hopkins Medicine group, which informed us that as of today they are no longer in UnitedHealthcare’s network, because they “have been unable to get United to agree to a contract that puts patients ahead of profits.” Johns Hopkins took absolutely world-class care of my family and I when I had cancer, and UnitedHealthcare’s coverage came through for us. But that was almost eight years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. I’ve only got one more checkup scheduled with Hopkins before they cut me loose, but now I’m considering skipping that because I don’t have the money to pay for all of those tests out of pocket. Greatest healthcare in the world, etc. etc.
Tired of dealing with a pair of wired headphones for my work computer, and unwilling to use my AirPods with that machine, I bought a pair of Anker Soundcore P20i headphones from Amazon for $20 a few weeks ago, and I’ve been very happy with their performance. I’ve got a handful of Anker products here, and I have to say I haven’t been disappointed with any of them. As far as inexpensive Chinese brands go, they have had the highest consistent quality.
Here’s a great article on how to curate your own feed with RSS: Find a good reader app and connect to the sites you like the most through their syndicated feeds. Most modern platforms have RSS built in; it’s just a matter of digging out the URL and hooking it up. I haven’t played with an RSS feeder in years, but this is a great idea.
The Verge goes over the current state of travel in the U.S. and risks to data privacy; basically the advice is to leave your devices at home and travel with a dumb burner, or at the very least, disable all biometric logins like Face ID, delete all sensitive information, and make sure it’s been securely wiped from the devices.
If you’re a US citizen, “you have the right to say no” to a search, “and they are not allowed to bar you from the country,” Hussain said. But if you refuse, CBP can still take your phone, laptop, or other devices and hold onto them.
John Gruber does a deep dive on the current state of bootable Mac cloning software in 2025. It’s been a minute since I’ve had a bootable backup drive for any of my machines, and while he recommends SuperDuper, I was always a fan of Carbon Copy Cloner. I used to diligently keep a bootable backup of my primary laptop, and kept another drive handy for catastrophic recovery back in the days when I was a freelance Mac support guy. With the switch to Intel and then to the Apple Silicon architectures (not to mention various flavors of OS and file systems) it got hard to stay current with all the required flavors needed. Apparently the last update of Sequoia blew everything up, but this was a bug and has now been rectified.
I don’t remember where I stumbled across the link for this, but it’s a web-based reconstruction of Activision’s famous Pitfall. In the summer of 1982, I spent hours at my friend Mike’s house trading the Atari joystick playing this game; we didn’t have this for our Intellivision. Mike had spent long hours learning the game and thus knew which way to go, while I was still mastering the art of not being eaten by crocodiles. Be warned: you will lose hours on this site.
Every six months or so, I look at the bins of antique computing hardware stored in the basement, and wonder whether I should continue to keep them, or pull the pin and recycle everything after wiping the drives. Then I stumble on an article like this one from the Harvard Law Library, and I feel better about having kept everything.
With digital storage there will always be two separate but equal battlefields of maintenance to consider: maintenance of the digital holdings and software environments in which they live, and the simple physical maintenance of the hardware and architecture that contain them.
It’s a really well-written and well-designed article, and worth reading if you nerd out on stuff like this. Now, to think about a secondary data backup for the server in the basement.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: a guide to Surveillance Self-Defense.
Surveillance Self-Defense is a digital security guide that teaches you how to assess your personal risk from online spying. It can help protect you from surveillance by those who might want to find out your secrets, from petty criminals to nation states.
I’ve got some reading and some configuring to do this Thanksgiving break.
I set up another account for the Travelall on Instagram last night, wrote an entirely new post, picked a completely different picture, and added completely different links to the profile. It wouldn’t let me use the account name from my first try, so I used a slightly different one. I wrote a long description for my second post and put it up with a new picture this afternoon. Checking the account later, I got an ominous notice from the app that said they noticed suspicious activity on my account that may have come from a bot, or something. So I’m fully expecting to have the fucking thing shut down a second time.
I mean, fuck’s sake, I’m not selling meth or boner pills; I’m posting pictures of a rusty truck. What the hell?
I had the opportunity to buy a piece of hardware for the office that I’ve been looking at for a long time and figured I’d write up an initial review of it here. We’re on a Microsoft tech stack at work, and most of it works well enough. However, we’ve been fighting against Sharepoint’s inexplicable habit of corrupting media files larger than 1GB, which makes any kind of file sharing useless for my team. I’ve been a Dropbox advocate for as long as I remember, and I’ve threatened to quit if they took it away from my team. But Dropbox is a cloud-based service and relies on your local hard drive for local storage; when you have ~10TB of working video files, you can’t fit that all on a laptop.
Because my team is half-remote, I need to have a central local file server with media files available for people to check in and out when they get to the office, backed up to Dropbox seamlessly. So I bought a Synology Diskstation DS1522+, which is basically a box with four hard drive sleds and an operating system. With five 8TB drives the whole bundle came to about $2,300, which is not cheap, and which is why I don’t already have one of these sitting in the basement.
Setup was easy. I’m used to pulling/swapping hard drives, so the new units went into the box pretty quickly, and after I buttoned it up I found an out-of-the-way counter to hide it on with power and a network drop. Once it booted up I followed the quick start instructions to find a web interface and stepped through account creation and basic configuration of the box. Within about 10 minutes I had it formatting the drives into a hybrid RAID configuration, allowing for 2-drive fault tolerance and netting 20TB in total storage. It was easy to set up SMB and AFP services for sharing, build out user profiles, and add a cloud services package to connect to Dropbox. From there I set it up to sync with our huge video folder overnight.
This morning I logged into the box as a network drive and all of our stuff is right where it’s supposed to be. Instead of dealing with hours-long download times via the cloud, our files now take minutes via the local network, and it’s much easier to dump folders back to the local drive instead of uploading via a web browser and bogging down a working machine for hours at a time.
Overall I’m really impressed with it so far, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it over the next year to see how well it holds up. Eventually my ancient Mac Pro towers will need to be replaced, and a simple box like this looks like a great option. I’m glad to be able to test-drive it here.