If finally happened. My cats broke me down.

After years of spotty internet, in which I couldn't resolve websites, to which the solution always was to reach down and push the RJ45 jack with the broken off clip that connects my router to my pihole back in, because my cats pulled it out once again.

They made me do. They finally made me do it. After all those years. Today, my cat pulled it out like ten times in a row... So I finally did it. I walked over in the other room, grabbed a new cable and plugged that one it.

Try that again, cat. I dare you. Try it again!

I just realized that I subconsciously believe more lines of code means slower code.

It's not intellectual. I understand that little lines of code often are just calling other code. That this is not how Big O works or does not replace benchmarking and that some data structure requires a lot of code for immense speed up. E.g: B-Trees with sizes at page size for big amounts of data read from a secondary storage location.

But still, when I see a function with just 3 to 5 lines, my inner monkey believes it must be fast.

Know your biases, I guess.

Fucking hell, writing browser addons is annoying.

I just wanted some small addon for myself. But first did it in tampermonkey. It was supposed to take a screenshot of the website and upload it together with the link of the website to my server. First used html2canvas. Terrible performance. But addons can take direct screenshots.

Reason, when I listen to something or watch something while holding my little daughter, I cannot copy links over. But I can quickly slap a key combination and save for later what I just saw.

Anyway. Addons are terrible. The error messages makes no sense. Missing permission active_tab... Fucking hell, it was missing host permissions. Permissions has to be one of. Documentation sucks on MDN.

And then, you can not even install unsigned addons. I do not want to share my addon with mozilla. You have to install Firefox Dev or ESR for it. Switched to Firefox Dev.

But I feel sorry for everyone having to write browser addons professionally.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

My DNS provider does not have an API. They do have one... That is wrong... But on the description page, they say we have to open a ticket to be given access. No requirements. Nothing...

And then I am told "they do no longer offer dns for private hosting". I don't even host with them, I only have a domain with them.

But the magical word is no longer. That means they did offer it. In the description of the API it still says "and for everyone who feels comfortable interacting with a REST API." Oh, and they asked anyone who works on it to be so nice and share any SDK's they might have coded up. Would have shared my SDK. Would have... If no Rust SDK was available yet.

So, what the fuck...
The problem with that is that I need a wildcard certificate for my homelab with DNS validation. So, I need to dynamically set a txt record. Now I wonder... Was this done on purpose? They are selling wild card certificates. Letsencrypt are giving them out for free. I bet they deactivated it, so they can sell more...

Anyway. Solution time.
Short term: I make my own API with black jack and hookers... And selenium.
Long term: I need to fucking move my domains to a different provider.

But what the fuck... What the fuck?

Shower thought of the week...

Cell phones raised strongly the relative probability of being bitten by a toilet snake...

I just got the dna test.
I am the father. My daughter is now 3 weeks old.

No surprise there. I expected to be the father. I had no reason to distrust my wife. But, after all, I know my IT security.

The relationship I had with my daughter was transitive. I trusted my wife and my wife had my daughter, ergo I had a connection with my daughter. Or in clearer terms: from a => b and b => c follows a => c.

The problem I was thinking about: What if I will stop trusting my wife in the future. At some point in the future... Something might happen. And I would stand there and wonder how long it went on. Maybe a month? Or before my daughter's birth? Maybe more than 9 month before my daughter. Would I be able to hide it from my daughter or would she notice...

If anything ever happens now, I know it has nothing to do with my daughter...

That's the same reason why we use end2end encryption. Sure, we have to trust that the application provided is not manipulated. But we only have to trust today. If it lands on their severs, we have to trust until the end of eternity.

I don't need any trust right now. And I am fucking happy about it.