China Story · I re­cent­ly read Do Not Say We Have Noth­ing by Madeleine Thien. It was short­list­ed for, but didn’t win, the Man Book­er. It’s won­der­ful but it’s not her best; Dogs at the Perime­ter from 2011 is I think the best nov­el I’ve read this cen­tu­ry. Here­with notes on both ...
 
トリコ and Me · I’ve been send­ing few­er words out on­to the Net so far this year, and one of the rea­sons was The Last Guardian, which I fin­ished last night. Now I’m miss­ing it and maybe writ­ing about it will help ...
[1 comment]  
Florida Gothick Fun · I re­fer to Ra­zor Girl by Carl Hi­aasen, which I en­joyed more than any oth­er sin­gle book I read this year. Not say­ing it’s the best book of the year; but in late 2016, read­ing some­thing that makes you re­peat­ed­ly laugh out loud over a span of hours is not to be sneezed at ...
 
Network Storage · A cou­ple days ago in New Home Net­work I post­ed a re­quest for ad­vice on a home NAS box and net­work­ing hard­ware. Now I have the stor­age box, and boy was it ev­er easy and straight­for­ward and anxiety-relieving. If you haven’t done this al­ready, you might want to ...
[11 comments]  
Snow Studies · Vancouver’s last two win­ters had no snow, and nev­er even got very cold. Just now we’ve had a week of white pre-Christmas, with lows down to -8°C. But tonight the rain starts and we’ll hit 9 above to­mor­row. So I went out to take snow pic­tures ...
 
New Home Network · Hol­i­day pro­jec­t: Redesign the do­mes­tic in­fas­truc­ture. Look­ing for: Net­work and stor­age gear. Got any ad­vice? ...
[22 comments]  
On Loving Rock and Roll · Put an­oth­er dime in the juke­box, baby. I like more or less all the mu­sic, at least all of it’s that writ­ten by hu­mans and per­formed by mu­si­cian­s, which ex­cludes most mod­ern in­dus­tri­al. But Rock is the mu­sic of my time and tribe, and while oth­er kinds can make me dream and weep, it’s the on­ly one where the first gui­tar chord makes me smile and be­fore long I can’t not dance ...
[2 comments]  
Things about re:Invent · The AWS­palooza took me to Ve­gas for four night­s, with thir­ty thou­sand or so oth­er cloud-heads. Here­with notes and spark­ly Ve­gas pic­tures ...
[2 comments]  
Validating State Machines · This morn­ing we re­leased AWS Step Func­tions, a Server­less Distribut­ed Cloud Mi­croser­vices Poly­glot Work­flow Orches­tra­tion Co­or­di­na­tor thingie. It’s cool; you want to read about it, vis­it Jeff Barr’s joint. Step Func­tions us­es state ma­chines spec­i­fied in a JSON DSL called the States lan­guage. This piece is about the two val­ida­tors I wrote for States doc­u­ments, one of which is in­ter­est­ing ...
[1 comment]  
Achromat Photowalk · On a re­cent cold and damp (but not ac­tu­al­ly rainy) evening I was in­vit­ed on a Fujifilm-sponsored pho­towalk on Vancouver’s Granville Is­land. The day be­fore, I’d re­ceived the fruits of a whim­si­cal Kick­starter splashout from months and months back: a Da­guer­rotype Achro­mat 2.9/64 Art Lens from Lo­mog­ra­phy. It was great fun among the sparkles in the dark ...
[1 comment]  
Fujifilm Photowalk · On Sun­day, I bought new shoes. On Mon­day, I got my Kickstarter-backed long-delayed Da­guer­rotype Achro­mat 2.9/64 Art Lens. Thus, on Tues­day I was well-prepared for a Fujifilm-sponsored pho­towalk on Vancouver’s Granville Is­land ...
 
Big-Show Tech · I’m all stressed out get­ting ready for re:In­vent, Nov 28th through Dec 2nd this year, in Ve­gas. I’m at­tend­ing, and may even be speak­ing if cer­tain pieces fall in­to place. I’ve seen this movie be­fore ...
[1 comment]  
Pixel Abuse · What hap­pened was, I went down to the dock in the dark, and took pic­tures that no phone-cam should ev­er be asked to take. You might be amused ...
[3 comments]  
Software-Defined Cameras · When I pull out my Pix­el for a pic­ture, I have to pick which app to tap: Google’s An­droid cam­era (which odd­ly seems to have no link) or Adobe Lightroom’s. The choice isn’t hard, but is in­ter­est­ing ...
[1 comment]  
How to Give Away an Android · You take your nice mod­ern An­droid, you factory-reset it, and you give (or sel­l) it to a rel­a­tive (or friend, or stranger). (In my case, “give” and “son”.) But when they turn it on they see a screen la­beled “Verify your account” with text read­ing “This de­vice was re­set. To con­tin­ue, sign in with a Google Ac­count that was pre­vi­ous­ly synced on this device.” Here’s one way to fix the prob­lem ...
[3 comments]  
Sold My Google Shares · I want the au­thor piece linked in the side­bar to be a full dis­clo­sure of the fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests of the per­son who’s writ­ing what you’re read­ing. I think on­line writ­ing with­out such a dis­clo­sure is trou­bling. Any­how, my fi­nan­cial dis­clo­sures no longer in­clude Google, be­cause I sold all my shares last week ...
[1 comment]  
After Mac? · So, there are new MacBooks and many peo­ple are un­hap­py. Tl;­dr: Ap­ple thinks thin-and-light is more im­por­tant than well-equipped-and-powerful ...
[25 comments]  
Pixel Notes · I pre-ordered the ba­sic Pix­el (5", 32G, Sil­ver) be­cause the 5X was get­ting on my nerves (more be­low); here are early-days notes. Tl;­dr: Ug­ly, solid, fast, cool cam­er­a ...
[3 comments]  
Message Processing Styles · Re­cent­ly I’m think­ing about how we pro­cess mes­sages in net­worked soft­ware ...
[4 comments]  
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