248 posts from 1996 to present
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Cyrinx is now open source and live at cyrinx.org. It's a research modem that moves real data through the air as sound, from a laptop speaker to a phone microphone, with no radio, no pairing, and no network. Byte-verified at 36.6 kbps between a MacBook and a Pixel 7a.
Continue readingA phishing email landed on a mailing list I'm on. Google had scanned the attachment and called it safe. It wasn't: behind it was a live Browser-in-the-Middle kit that steals your Google session in real time and walks straight through two-factor. Here's what was hiding behind the blob URL, and how it builds on what other researchers have found.
Continue readingA new Vendor Spending page, under Budget, indexes a decade-plus of district checks: search any vendor, see year-by-year totals, browse by category. And it answers the obvious question — did we really triple our spending? Mostly no: the big swings are bond construction and pass-through, not baseline operating.
Continue readingThe board's 619 policies now have searchable Spanish titles. Every school page shows who teaches there. The site behaves on a phone. And two bugs in our own data — doubled English Learner counts and 22 broken Spanish transcripts — that we found and fixed.
Continue readingThere's a search box now. Type a school, a topic, a dollar figure — it searches six years of public record in English or Spanish, and links straight to the document, not just the meeting that mentioned it.
Continue readingWe just shipped the first fully symmetrical, closed-loop 2x2 MIMO acoustic transport protocol. By combining analytical SVD spatial solvers, orthogonal Zadoff-Chu pilots, and dynamic Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) sensing, we are laying the protocol and signal processing groundwork for 24 kbps over sound.
Continue readingI want to chat with my family finances without handing the data to anyone, and without abandoning a decade of Quicken history. Here is how, plus why Agent Skills are beating MCP servers as the shape of these integrations.
Continue readingThree RCSD-authorized charters were a 404 on the site for months because a branch never merged. Tonight they're live, the /schools/ index has three sections instead of one, and the MCP tool can finally see what each board item actually proposes.
Continue readingA while back my home network started acting strange. Not broken, exactly. Just a low-grade wrongness. Video calls would glitch for a few seconds and come back. Large file uploads would stall and resume. Speed tests mostly looked fine. Occasional ones didn't. Every tool I pointed at the problem said "looks ok to me."...
Continue readingI was pulling apart a Netgear Orbi WiFi 7 mesh system for Network Weatherhttps://networkweather.com and found an undocumented 31-byte Qualcomm vendor IE in the 5 GHz beacons from each mesh node. In these captures, one six-byte field appears to encode the node's current upstream parent, another matches the BSSID of the radio sending the beacon, and the parent field changes when the mesh re-parents...
Continue readingWe analyzed 1,586 rental rates from flight schools across America to map the true cost of renting the world's most popular training aircraft.
Continue readingWhat changed between launch day and the first public announcement of rcsd.info.
Continue readingWhy I built rcsd.info, an open data portal for the Redwood City School District, and how you can adapt it for your own district.
Continue readingI connected with a friend yesterday about his job search. He's a scientist with 20+ years of experience leading drug development teams, recently laid off because his company is winding down. Tough market right now. Biotech capital has gotten scared and shifted toward late-stage assets, which means a lot of very qualified people are looking....
Continue readingPSA: consider pulling in charitable contributions to the next few weeks that you were considering making next year....
Continue readingA great leader inspires a team with possibility, vision, agency, and genuine caring for their people at every level. They are willing to fearlessly dive into the details and roll up their sleeves alongside their team when needed to get the job done. They actively solicit feedback and critique to improve and create a culture where it's safe to speak up. When a hard call needs to get made, they own...
Continue readingThe new iPhone is here! And yes, to cut to the chase, I am going to get it because it is bright orange, thank you very much....
Continue readingI re-coded a Rust library in Swift 6 this week and was surprised to see it was a third the size. It ended up with no third party dependencies beyond the system Frameworks, whereas the Rust crate pulled in several third party crates that in turn pulled in innumerable other libraries - creating a situation with multiple versions of the same library ultimately needing to be included....
Continue readingFolks; thanks for all the kind comments on my transition last week. It's time to start sharing what I'm working on now - fixing employees' remote & hybrid connectivity....
Continue readingToday is my last day at Capital One....
Continue readingAfter seven+ months of work, studying my ass off for my written, and a retest after I went long on my first power-off 180, I've finally achieved a life long goal of becoming a Commercially-rated airplane pilot....
Continue readingTrust is an interesting thing. Who do you trust when you scan a QR code on the side of a McDonald's Happy Meal? McDonald's of course, but the list is a lot longer and stranger than that......
Continue readingAbout a year ago, I started thinking seriously about running for the school board. As I eased in, it became clear that I had an enormous amount to learn. While I had served on for-profit and non-profit boards for 20 years, being an elected official on a school board was a whole new thing. New regulations, new standards, incredibly complex budgeting processes.. I started my learning even as a candi...
Continue readingFolks; Hacker Dojo is looking for an Executive Director....
Continue readingHuman adaptability is one of the most remarkable and fascinating attributes of our species. Paradoxically, while we are fantastic at accommodating change, we often resist it. Yet, when we are forced into an adaptation, we end up enjoying aspects of it and keeping those adaptations with us even beyond the circumstances that required them....
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