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.
Well, that was short-lived. After setting up a second Insta account for the Travelall, and having it deactivated for “violation of community guidelines” with no further explanation, I couldn’t find a way to either contest the deactivation or restart the account. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get back into the account at all through Instagram’s backend, and it didn’t recognize my cellphone number as a valid cellphone number (?). This could be because I don’t share my cell number with Facebook, which owns Instagram. Maybe the robots decided I wasn’t me, even though they probably know more about me than I do. So I deleted the whole thing, and I’m going to try to build it again.
What is still unclear to me is why it was deactivated in the first place; neither of the images I shared there had appeared in my main feed, and the text in the description was new. Did someone flag my account? Did the robots decide I was a clone of myself? Have I pushed humanity one step closer to the Singularity? We will never know.
I fucked around with Instagram the other day to add another account to my profile (or profile to my account?) for the Travelall, figuring I’d build up some followers there and see if I could funnel traffic to the YouTube channel. I’m experimenting with how all this stuff works based on things I’ve learned at work, and if I can keep making $20/mo. on T-shirts, I can at least pay for my hosting bills. I made the account and posted two pictures, both shots of the truck I don’t think I’ve shared on my regular channel before.
Anyway, I got a notice this evening that the new profile was deactivated. What? But I could reactivate it by logging an appeal. So I followed their steps: I entered their CAPTCHA code correctly. They asked for my email address, and they sent me a code; then they wanted my phone number—and the system broke. It didn’t recognize/didn’t like my cell number for some reason. The help pages are less than helpful and basically just point back to the app and tell you to verify through that, so I’ll wait until tomorrow to see if I can get it to work then. In the meantime, I changed my Meta/Instagram password, figuring someone may have tried to brute-force into my account for some reason; hopefully that doesn’t break their system further.
File this under my paranoia is increasingly justified: New cars are increasingly spying on us and reporting our driving habits to insurance companies. Some of the carmakers don’t want you to disable this reporting feature, and make it difficult to shut off. This article details how to shut off the reporting for most modern makes; apparently Honda is of medium difficulty, but this is something I intend to take care of this weekend.
I called the dealer. He talked to some people at Honda and called me back. If I wanted to shut off the data sharing, I’d have to download Honda’s HondaLink app, which came with its own 14 pages of unreadable terms and conditions.
That was my only choice, he said. He also said I was the first person to ask him how to do so. I reluctantly downloaded the app, but couldn’t figure out how to shut it off from there. Finally, a day after downloading the app, I was able to shut off the data sharing in my car (confusingly, I had to do so in the car and not on the app, but only once I downloaded the app). It only took me a month.
I paid for the product, yet I have become the product.