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My job is managing being interrupted

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Last year I turned off all my notifications. I stopped booking meetings. I started living asynchronously.

Source: Live asynchronously.

My job (and that of my coworkers) is being constantly stopped from finishing the task we are working on. I’m told that I’m really, really good at it, but I only got that way by working in the kitchen, where the job is, again, being interrupted.

But the cognitive load is immense, and intense. I often get home feeling more tired from working at the office job for 6 hours than from working in the kitchen for 12 hours.

And no, I don’t get breaks at either job unless it’s slow.

You’re just having a taco de ojo at this point

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Services like Tinder and Hinge are no longer shiny new toys, and some users are starting to find them more frustrating than fun.

Source: The Rise of Dating-App Fatigue – The Atlantic

In my case it’s not app fatigue, it’s more of a life fatigue. My work schedule doesn’t help any, as the kind of gal I like usually has a work schedule that is exactly opposite mine.

It is one of the things that killed my last relationship, after all. The upkeep is just so, so hard.

Other than the film term

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We are all just drab lumpy root vegetables, jumbled together in a bin with all the other drab lumpy root vegetables, secretly hoping someone will see how very special we are. Ah! THIS potato! I pluck you from the pile of other potatoes, and cherish you for all time.

Source: mimi smartypants – something in the air

She is an angel for explaining to SOME IDIOT BRO what it means.

Someone get me her book?

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Since we seem to agree on the fact that Trump is a garbage monster, there’s no need to even go there. Instead, let’s talk about Hillary. First, allow me to reframe your assertion that she is monumentally corrupt. No, no. The system is monumentally corrupt, and Hillary is masterful at gaming it. I respect that. I don’t see it as a character flaw, because despite what Fox News would have you believe, Hillary really does have a conscience. She is a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who still manages to get shit done in this grotesque plutocracy of ours.

Source: Dear Coquette

Coquette is the best.

This is really scary stuff

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Source: The Short Life of a Vulnerable DVR Connected to the Internet – SANS Internet Storm Center

I’ve set up DVRs and the UX/UI on most of them is appalling, along with the entire setup and configuration process. Then to find out the moment you connect them to your network they just become another attack vector, one that cannot be easily closed off.

These are pretty pricey devices that I believe can be replaced with a Raspberry Pi to obtain more flexibility and better recording quality. It’s just the software that’s needed.

No money for all these things!

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Source: FIXED: Xbox One losing TV signal error message with DirectTV – Scott Hanselman

This is why piracy wins. You buy all the expensive toys, then you run into issues that require you to buy even more crap that consumes more power that then you have to remember to manage.

You know what doesn’t fail? Some HD or 4K torrent that you can just push to any display over any physical media. Plug and play, as it were. Funciona aqui, en China, y en la chingada.

No additional devices required. No matter where you are.

You cannot beat that.

A Debian Wifi Router: Kernel tuning

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So it turns out that if you go with the default kernel parameters on the device you won’t get much throughput. I’m currently paying my ISP for a 25Mbit/s pipe both ways, which is bloody awesome.

I was having problems with throughput and network jitter, though. I was able to have a fast connection from my devices to the router and the router had the full connection available to itself; problems were the router was not able to make the full connection bandwidth available to its clients and the bandwidth would go from 25Mbit/s all the way down to 5Mbit/s all the time.

This is really damn annoying when you’re putting in a good match on Unreal Tournament, let me tell you.

Thinking it could be something related to hostapd I played around with a few more settings but nothing really made a difference. I’m having problems with reception and throughput in my bedroom but that’s for another post, I guess. Suffice to say that with a direct line of sight to the router everything works about as expected.

So it wasn’t hostapd. Played around with iwconfig and iw but neither made much of a difference. That left the network interfaces themselves and the kernel.

Dug around and found plenty of links and articles on what settings to adjust and how to adjust them but all of them are geared towards servers of some sort. There isn’t much information that a home/office IT guy would be able to use for tuning the kernel for bandwidths of less than 100Mbit/s, which is what I’m attempting to do here. The most popular post (which I basically copied into my configuration) is using settings for 1Gbit/s connections that I then changed with the one entry that matched from the Ars Technica post.

Here’s sysctl.conf as I have it right now:

# /etc/sysctl.conf - Configuration file for setting system variables
# See /etc/sysctl.d/ for additional system variables.
# See sysctl.conf (5) for information.
#

#kernel.domainname = example.com

# Uncomment the following to stop low-level messages on console
#kernel.printk = 3 4 1 3

##############################################################3
# Functions previously found in netbase
#

# Uncomment the next two lines to enable Spoof protection (reverse-path filter)
# Turn on Source Address Verification in all interfaces to
# prevent some spoofing attacks
#net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter=1
#net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter=1

# Uncomment the next line to enable TCP/IP SYN cookies
# See http://lwn.net/Articles/277146/
# Note: This may impact IPv6 TCP sessions too
#net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies=1

# Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv4
net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

# Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv6
#  Enabling this option disables Stateless Address Autoconfiguration
#  based on Router Advertisements for this host
#net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1


###################################################################
# Additional settings - these settings can improve the network
# security of the host and prevent against some network attacks
# including spoofing attacks and man in the middle attacks through
# redirection. Some network environments, however, require that these
# settings are disabled so review and enable them as needed.
#
# Do not accept ICMP redirects (prevent MITM attacks)
#net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0
#net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0
# _or_
# Accept ICMP redirects only for gateways listed in our default
# gateway list (enabled by default)
# net.ipv4.conf.all.secure_redirects = 1
#
# Do not send ICMP redirects (we are not a router)
#net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0
#
# Do not accept IP source route packets (we are not a router)
#net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0
#net.ipv6.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0
#
# Log Martian Packets
#net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1
#
# Kernel parameter adjustments
# 2016/09/12 02:59:32: http://www.nateware.com/linux-network-tuning-for-2013.html
# http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-building-a-linux-router-from-scratch/
#
kernel.sem = 250 256000 100 1024

# Increase system file descriptor limit
 fs.file-max = 100000
#
# # Discourage Linux from swapping idle processes to disk (default = 60)
 vm.swappiness = 10
#
# # Increase ephermeral IP ports
 net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 10000 65000
#
# Increase Linux autotuning TCP buffer limits
# Set max to 16MB for 1GE and 32M (33554432) or 54M (56623104) for 10GE
# Don't set tcp_mem itself! Let the kernel scale it based on RAM.
net.core.rmem_default = 4194304
net.core.rmem_max = 4194304
net.core.wmem_max = 4194304
net.core.rmem_default = 4194304
net.core.wmem_default = 4194304
net.core.optmem_max = 40960
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 4194304
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 65536 4194304

# Make room for more TIME_WAIT sockets due to more clients,
# and allow them to be reused if we run out of sockets
# Also increase the max packet backlog
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 25000
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 4096
net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets = 200000
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 10

# Disable TCP slow start on idle connections
net.ipv4.tcp_slow_start_after_idle = 0

# If your servers talk UDP, also up these limits
net.ipv4.udp_rmem_min = 8192
net.ipv4.udp_wmem_min = 8192

# Disable source routing and redirects
net.ipv4.conf.all.send_redirects = 0
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0

# Log packets with impossible addresses for security
net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1

Everything in here I’m sure can be tuned further and the file itself is so damn ugly to look at but for now at least I have a starting point I can use.

All this tomfoolery is turning me into a network wonk.

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I really don’t want to be writing this. Well no, that’s not true. I don’t want to have to write this, but sex education is lacking as it is and far too many people are being rather lackadaisical about the whole thing. Because I can’t in good conscience let condoms which can’t reliably condom be on the market […]

Source: A Pox On Your Box: The Problem of LELO Hex – Lorax Of Sex

It’s makes all the difference whether something fails silently or something fails and explodes in your face.

For most programming code written out there, you want some indication that it failed (that is, it sets off a small explosion or it sets off a big explosion) so you can know something is wrong and can fix it. When something fails silently you don’t even know there’s a problem until something happens that you literally cannot fix. Like your backups silently failing until you need to recover something… to find the information has been lost. Forever.

In the case of this condom design, the consequences of it failing silently are literally of life and death important:

  • You could get an STI and not know.

    • You would then become one of those asshole people that don’t even bother to get tested for STIs because “it could never happen” to them.

  • You could get pregnant, or get someone pregnant.

    • When a regular condom fails you know it failed and you can take measures. In this case the only alternative will be to have the baby, or have an abortion.

These things are important and fact people are falling for the hype means sex education is simply not keeping up with the reality of the world.

How Things Work

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One of Gawker’s most cherished tags was “How Things Work,” a rubric that applied to posts revealing the sausage-making, the secret ways that power manifests itself. The phrase has a children’s book feel to it, bringing to mind colorful illustrations of animals in human work clothes building houses or delivering mail. Of course it also carries the morbid sense of innocence lost, and the distance between the stories we tell ourselves about the world and the way it actually works. Collapsing that distance is, in many ways, what Gawker has always been about.

And so Gawker’s demise turns out to be the ultimate Gawker story. It shows how things work.

Source: How Things Work

Much lauded, much hated. So long.

Confusion and mayhem

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Source: Gordon’s Notes: Systemic failure in American medicine: combining ICD-10-CM with “leaf code” reimbursement rules

It’s confusing and quite abstract if you don’t work in healthcare, but it does make sense when you think about it in terms of money, as I did. The only times I’ve stepped in a hospital in the past five years are when I buy coffee from a store inside of one.

The system as described by Gordon lacks something crucial when talking about illness, disease and health conditions: specificity.

When you can’t properly code something in a very specific way, everything else built on top of it goes out the window.

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