Posts in Category "tech"

Something I miss a lot on macOS is a fast way to enter Unicode characters. macOS does a pretty good job of handling combining keys so that you can type é and ö, and it's got a fancy emoji picker, but if you want to enter ∫ or ⚠, you're stuck using the terrible character picker window¹:

Well, no longer. If you, like me, use Alfred 4 on your Mac, you can download the following Alfred Workflow to get a new "unicode" Alfred command. This uses a fast index² to look up unicode characters by name. The first time you …

I've been on-call for most of the last 11 years. I was on-call for the CS Department at Mudd¹. I was on-call at Yelp, in a rotation that at times contained as few as three people. I was on-call at Uber in rotations ranging from one to twenty people. And I've been on-call at EasyPost — initially in a rotation with one other person², and currently with two other people. I have responded to tens of thousands of pages. I have been woken up in the middle of the night hundreds³ of times. For the last seven or …

Everyone who even casually follows the tech industry knows, intellectually, that Google builds an enormous dystopian profile of everything you do in order to sell ads¹. But I think there's a difference between knowing that Google Analytics is a shameless back door to do cross-site tracking and actually coming face-to-face with your own profile. Yesterday, CNBC featured a story about a new Google UI which shows you a list of every purchase that you've made in the last few years: https://myaccount.google.com/purchases. For me, wide variety of commercial activity — every purchase I've ever made at a …

My current PGP/GnuPG key is expiring, so I've rolled a new one. The ID of the new key is 0x3C7775DD37811E62 (full fingerprint: 1ED5 E5A3 01C3 D109 9040 2289 3C77 75DD 3781 1E62) and it should be in your favorite keyservers, cross-signed by my old key. You can also find it at https://files.roguelazer.com/roguelazer.gpg. It has also been attached to my keybase.io account and my Github profile. My previous key (0xAEE8F2454A41B87D) has not been revoked and has not been compromised, but you should still stop using it if possible. The new key is a 4096-bit RSA key with SHA-2 digest signatures — I'm not quite bold enough to switch to ECC for a long-lived key yet.

My signed transition document is below, and can also be found at 2019-04-27-key-transition-statement.txt.asc if you prefer to download it directly.

Additionally, I have generated a separately-signed key with ID 0x233E5EAF0EC3ABA9 (full fingerprint: 14E8 9660 188D BC9B 2C17 67AA 233E 5EAF 0EC3 ABA9). This key should not be used for communication, but will only be used to sign VCS commits/tags/&c (in Git and perhaps in Pijul¹). It's going to be on my [managed] work computer², so treat it with a grain of salt.

Here's a quick post on how I use and configure Firefox on my Macs. The last time I posted about any of this was in 2011, and things have changed a fair bit since then. First, a screenshot (from my new iMac):

Key extensions for this setup:

Vim Vixen

Vim keybindings for Firefox. Not quite as good as Vimperator, but works with modern Firefox, and getting better all the time. The only thing I really miss is macro recording, which I used all the time in Vimperator.

Tree-Style Tabs

Our monitors are widescreen; why would you try to stack tabs …

For the first time since early 2010, I have a desktop computer again!

It's a 2019 5K Retina iMac with an Intel Core i5-9600K (9th Generation, 6 physical cores), 16GB of RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 580X, and a 1TB SSD. Geekbench isn't exactly scientific, but it reports this computer as 50% faster single-core, 150% faster multi-core than the computer it's replacing.