Living With Stage Manager (And Other iOS 16 Beta Notes)
Three weeks into the iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 public betas: lock screen widgets are better than I expected, Stage Manager is still fighting me, and passkeys are almost here.
Tutorials
Tutorials
Making My Own Version of the JWST Carina Nebula Photo
I downloaded the raw JWST data from MAST and tried to make my own version of the Carina Nebula photo. It did not go as smoothly as I expected.
Two Weeks of Letting Copilot Finish My Sentences
A holiday-weekend writeup on two weeks of actually using GitHub Copilot since it left preview and went generally available, warts and all.
Four Log4j Patches Later, Here's Where Things Actually Stand
Log4j just shipped its fourth patch of the month (2.17.1, December 28th) and I spent part of my holiday break re-checking every server I run. Here's where things actually stand and what to check first.
My MSHTML Workaround, One Day Before Patch Tuesday
A walkthrough of the manual registry workaround for the MSHTML zero-day (CVE-2021-40444) being exploited in the wild, one day ahead of the patch.
A Month With GitHub Copilot
A month into using GitHub Copilot's technical preview: when it nails a whole function on the first try, when it quietly hands you a broken regex, and why the GPL licensing fight has me keeping it off my work laptop for now.
Two Days Into the Android 12 Beta
Flashed the Android 12 Beta right after the Google I/O keynote and spent two days living with Material You's wallpaper-based theming, warts and all.
A Weekend Spent Patching Other People's Exchange Servers
A personal, in-the-weeds account of patching small business Exchange servers after Microsoft's emergency ProxyLogon fixes, including finding an actual webshell on a client's box.
Three Months Into the M1 Switch: What Still Doesn't Work
A three-month check-in on daily driving an M1 MacBook Air: what's genuinely fast now, and which dev tools (Homebrew, Docker, Python builds) still need the Rosetta workaround.
Three Weeks Into the Great Signal Switch
Three and a half weeks after ditching WhatsApp for Signal, here's the unglamorous reality: no import tool, half your contacts won't switch, and you end up running both apps anyway.
Refresh, Refresh, Refresh: My Xbox Series X Launch Day Survival Notes
Notes from a chaotic Xbox Series X launch day: why stock tracking is broken, what actually helped, and why the $219 storage expansion card still bugs me.
An Evening With a Raspberry Pi and Too Many DNS Requests
I finally set up Pi-hole on an old Raspberry Pi to deal with our overloaded home wifi during remote school week, and found out just how much junk traffic ads and trackers actually generate.