Getting the New Pi Zero W Talking to WiFi Without a Monitor
A walkthrough for getting the new $10 Pi Zero W onto WiFi with no monitor, keyboard, or ethernet cable involved, plus some griping about actually finding one to buy.
The Best Part of Yesterday's AWS Outage Was the Status Page That Couldn't Admit It
Half the internet broke yesterday when S3 fell over in us-east-1, and the funniest part was AWS's own status dashboard, whose little health icons live on S3 too.
Two Envelopes, One Bad Night
A late night watching the Oscars envelope mixup live, and some thoughts on how redundancy in a process can still fail when it's built to catch the wrong kind of mistake.
Same Pad, Different Rocket
SpaceX launched from Kennedy's Pad 39A on Sunday for the first time since the shuttle program ended, and I watched the whole thing instead of doing literally anything productive.
A Rocket Left From Apollo's Old Pad This Morning
SpaceX launched a Dragon resupply mission from Kennedy's Pad 39A this morning, the first flight from that pad since the last Space Shuttle mission in 2011, and I set an alarm to watch it buffer.
What GitLab's Bad Weekend Taught Me About My Own Backups
GitLab's database disaster last week turned out to be a backup problem, not a deleted-files problem — which sent me to go check my own, with predictably embarrassing results.
The Part of Snap's IPO Filing Nobody's Talking About
Snap Inc. filed its IPO paperwork this week, and the detail that stuck with me wasnt the loss, it's that the shares going public dont come with a vote.
Deleted Uber Off My Phone This Weekend
Uber turned off surge pricing at JFK during Saturdays taxi strike and it read as strikebreaking. #DeleteUber blew up all weekend and I finally pulled the app off my phone too.
Missed the Switch Preorder, Have Thoughts on $299.99 Anyway
Two weeks after the Nintendo Switch reveal, some thoughts on the $299.99 price, the missing launch-day Virtual Console, and why I still don't have a preorder.
Finally Turning On Two-Factor Everywhere
A step-by-step walk-through of finally locking down email, Dropbox, and everything else with two-factor authentication, plus the one dumb mistake that almost locked me out of my own inbox.
Vine Camera Killed Vine and Nobody Even Noticed
Vine quietly turned into a dead-end camera app last week, and it's strange how little anyone reacted to four years of six-second culture actually ending.
Nobody Backdoored WhatsApp (Calm Down)
The Guardian's WhatsApp "backdoor" story is technically accurate but the framing is off - siding mostly with Moxie Marlinspike here, with some real annoyance at WhatsApp's buried settings.