November 2023

Here comes the downtime. As my NBN connection regresses to 4G home internet, expect this site to be down for at least a few weeks while I get my head around carrier-grade network address translation, or CG-NAT for short. Unlike the NAT in my own router, this one lives in... Continue reading

A quick look at HTTP requests on really old browsers. HTTP/0.9, originally just HTTP, was a very simple protocol: essentially a one-line GET request with no version token and no request headers. Mozilla has a great write-up on it. One correction to my earlier theory though: the old browsers themselves... Continue reading

Exactly one month ago, on the 18th October 2023, I came to the realisation that I am transgender. Two weeks later I had an appointment with an endocrinologist. And one week after that a prescription for estradiol valerate 6 mg a day. Thank you informed consent. Gender identity is an... Continue reading

7th October 2023. Picture the date, picture the time. Walking along a major arterial road. Out of the corner of my eye, a monitor. E-waste? Maybe. Dumped? Definitely. 10th October 2023. It’s still there. There’s a nagging inside me that won’t go away. 16th October 2023. My god, no one... Continue reading

Oh my sweet WD Blue SA510 M.2 SATA 2280 blade drives. You are such trash. I had two of these for GeoCities, one master and one backup. However, since I took GeoCities offline I thought I’d erase and sell the drives. But look at what I found when looking at... Continue reading

For the past three years I’ve been vegan. A junk food vegan. Processed foods have always been my friend. They’re cheap, full of energy and bad for you? Meat Loaf had it right when he said two out of three ain’t bad. I’ve dusted off my old cognitive dissonance from... Continue reading

Silos needed. I used to love Command & Conquer as a teenager. My Athlon 500 MHz sure did clock a few hours as did Andrew’s PC. While his PC wasn’t as fast as mine, it was my gateway to getting my own PC. Then came Red Alert 2 and the... Continue reading

A few months ago I decided I was finished with donating blood. A few things went into that decision. The way our blood service ran in Australia. Australia collected plasma locally as well as importing plasma-derived products made from overseas donations, including paid donors. That difference in how donors were... Continue reading

I have been listening to my three or four drives go clunk, clunk, clunk for the best part of a year. Initially I thought it must have been something in TrueNAS as these drives, WD Red Pro 16TB - Model WD161KFGX, were silent while running badblock scans on them. Someone... Continue reading

The latest update in a series of updates it seems! Recently I had the fun of being injected with a gadolinium-based MRI contrast agent. The gadolinium is bound in a chelate; once injected it changes the magnetic properties of nearby water and can make blood vessels and some tissues or... Continue reading