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Cake day: April 7th, 2026

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  • I (mostly jokingly, but also a little bit really and sentimentally) believe that physical baremetal computers/servers have souls, and must therefore have hostnames that are names, because names are powerful and soulful and you should have respect for things that have souls. Which is why I kind of hate the “cattle, not pets” model in my own practice.

    Stick identifying categorizing prefixes on it, of course, and you can group clusters under the same name with a numeric suffix, but it’s gotta have a real name in there somewhere.



  • A friend of mine was once the organist at a cathedral with a grand pipe organ. He invited me to see it one day and hear him play, and for the finale he had me climb up into the forest of towering pedal pipes, crouching between the rows, dwarfed by their looming height, while he played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

    The sound hit me like a wave, so vast and tremendous and perfect. I felt utterly annihilated - tiny and shaken apart into nothing, a speck swept away in a cascading ocean of music, like the whole world was exploding in cataclysm and fractal rebirth all around me. Dazzling and enormous.

    And when the fugue peaked, I think that’s the closest to nirvana I’ve ever been. Just blown clean off the face of the earth.


  • A partial solution to this evil-maid attack vector is Heads firmware (a replacement for the bios/uefi itself), which lets you sign the contents of your unencrypted boot partition using a gpg key on a hardware token, and verify the integrity of the firmware itself using a totp/hotp key stored in the tpm.

    All the benefits of secure boot, but you get to control the signing keys yourself instead of relying on a vendor. It’s great stuff.