The UniFi controller update reset my DNS filtering profile to “default” without a word. Twenty minutes of very confident debugging later: it was the router, and the router had told nobody.
The Stream
The most recent 100 posts
39 entries
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Troubleshooting by smell: noticing what’s off before you know why
The useful part of experience isn’t the answers, it’s the flinch you get a half-second before you can explain it. Here’s how I try to teach that.
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Spent twenty minutes convinced a switch port was dead. It was the cable, which I had personally labelled “good” in 2021. Relabelled. Trust nothing you wrote on tape five years ago.
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Fix It Shack — Swapped the puzzle grid to SVG. Instantly legible on a phone; instantly slower on a Chromebook. Two steps forward, one Chromebook back.
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Everyone’s router is on the balcony here, strung up beside the washing, and honestly it works better than mine. Nobody asked a consultant. They just put the antenna where the signal needed to be.
Porto, Portugal -
Airport wi-fi that works for everything except one app is almost always a captive portal that has expired quietly in the background. Load any plain HTTP page and it will admit it.
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Quizbowl — Got the scoring screen working on a projector at 1080p; phones still lag about a second behind on the reveal. Suspect the websocket fan-out, not the render.
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Why your Wi-Fi is fine and your DNS is not
Four commands, in order, that tell you which half of “the internet is down” you are actually standing in.
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A multimeter with a continuity beeper is worth three without one. You can keep your eyes on the probes instead of the display, and that is the entire job.
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Quizbowl — Rewrote the buzzer path to trust the server clock instead of the phone’s. Ties dropped from “constant” to “twice in forty rounds”.
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Whoever aimed that dish did it by feel and they were right.
Lisbon, Portugal -
Every time I have said “it can’t be the power supply” out loud, it has been the power supply. I have started saying it deliberately now, as a diagnostic.
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Writing the runbook while the thing is still broken produces a much better runbook than writing it afterwards, when you have already forgotten which step was the confusing one.
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Quizbowl — First real run: 38 people, one projector, one very hot laptop. It held.
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Sidequest — A builder for scavenger hunts and self-guided walking tours. Drop pins on a map, write the clues, hand people a link.
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A flat grey coastline outside Reykjavik under low cloud.
Reykjavik, Iceland -
The oscilloscope is not the hard part
On buying test gear you don’t yet know how to use, which I recommend doing.
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What I learned building a quiz app for 200 people in a noisy room
Everything that broke was something I had already been warned about.
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A narrow Tokyo alley between two buildings, vending machines glowing at the far end.
Tokyo, Japan -
A cluttered electronics bench with an oscilloscope, a soldering iron and three half-finished boards.
The bench -
From POTS to TOTS
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A function room before a quiz, projector warming up against a blank wall.
A function room -
Back in Blog
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On the surface he looks calm and ready …
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How I label cables
Read again this spring; still exactly what I do.
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The case for running your own mail server
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I enjoyed Michael Lopp’s article An Introduction to You, specifically this part:
We are in an incredible hurry building important things and have no time for nuance. We’re impatient. We’re busy. We want everything to move faster, so we make huge, comforting assumptions and slap easy to understand labels on complex concepts.
Though I’ve been thinking little about the idea of oversimplifying and therefore over or under estimating the contribution of a new employee. Rather the quoted section made me think about how much is often missed in the “incredible hurry” when building products and the systems and processes to support a business.
It would have resonated more with me if he had written the exact same article but if it were not about an employee, but a new technology being integrated into the same busy-worshiping company culture.
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A great example of someone paying close attention to reality while experimenting with changing their way of working to achieve success they didn’t believe possible.
Definitely worth a read.
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Tomatoes for strength
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One Calendar to rule them all
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AC Sludge
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The reason for being
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fixing email
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actually cleaning up a bit.
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Buying a van.
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Online software purchases
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Perpetually getting organized
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Soffit Vents
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PIX-to-PIX VPN via a Lucent Pipeline 75