The hardest problem to solve when implementing money is striking proper balance between a person’s need for privacy with society’s need to limit bad activity. I have chosen my words very carefully here. A person has a fundamental interest in maintaining their privacy. …

There are 2 main differences between when money was digitized in the 1970’s and now: cheap, fast, always connected computers and essentially the entire field of cryptography. When money was first tracked by computers in the 1970’s, the only way to supply digital money was via monolithic centralized databases. In…

How to make Apple TV work across network boundaries using iptables and mdns-repeater. The Apple TV exists in somewhat of a gray area in a home network. It is both a media player which you might screencast to and a hub for HomeKit IoT devices. If you happen to segment…

Wireguard is insanely great. Modern crypto, lightweight, in-kernel, UDP for everything and seamless roaming if your IP changes. What’s not to love? But if you are just starting out with it and have a strong TCP/IP and Linux background, you might appreciate a concise explanation. This attempts to be that. All it Does …

Let’s just start this off by saying ziplines are dangerous and I’m far from an expert. Don’t attempt this on your own. However, if you choose to ignore this warning, don’t blame me if you hurt yourself or others. This is dangerous — you have been warned. When I was…

Since the 90’s I’ve had a filesystem which I call “Vault”. It contains all the bits I really don’t want to loose. It includes documents, code, (including my first efforts from the 80's) audio and video recordings and most importantly my photo archive. (both digitally originated and scans of film…

Some media players handle subtitles well and others… not so much. Rather than leaving it to chance, I like to render the subtitles right into the video. ffmpeg is an excellent tool for this. Grab ffmpeg if you don’t already have it. In OS X you can use brew. brew…

I spent some time overhauling my home network. There was no way I was going to settle for the default WiFi access point you get from an internet service provider. (Verizon in my case) My house is big enough to need more than one access point anyway and I run…

If you build Node.js HTTPS servers as much as we do, you’ll know how easy it is to get things going. But we were surprised to find that we could quickly add client x.509 certificate checking in just a few lines of code. Typically HTTPS servers do a basic TLS…