Souk's Notes - Unofficial Summaries
GeoHussarOctober 19, 2024
- A $70 billion deposit outflow from US banks is not alarming. He sets it against about $18 trillion in total deposits (around 65% of a roughly $29 trillion GDP, by his figures), which have risen steeply since the late 1990s despite poor interest rates. He argues outflows can be good news, signalling people are spending or investing.
- Deposit surges signal fear, not health. He points to the US personal savings rate: low in 2005–06 amid overconfidence, jumping when the recession hit, and spiking again in 2021 during COVID shutdowns. He disputes claims that household savings are at record lows, saying his chart of savings versus GDP shows average levels.
- China's swelling deposits reflect deflation and consumer caution. He says Chinese household deposits have climbed steadily since 2018, quoting an unnamed article calling this bad news that signals consumer caution as the recovery loses momentum. He puts household plus corporate deposits at more than double China's GDP and blames deflation, which makes people hoard cash expecting lower prices and leaves all but the wealthy losing out.
GeoHussar#BRICS nations test launch a new payment system #brazil #india #russia #china #southafrica
- BRICS Pay is a SWIFT alternative, not a BRICS currency. He reports a blockchain-based payment system test-launched at a Moscow business forum on October 17, open to 159 participants and running on the members' native currencies. Attendees got cards loaded with 500 rubles, about $5 at roughly 100 rubles to the dollar. He notes the dollar index held at about 103 that day.
Scott HanselmanCoding while Blind with Dominic St Pierre
synopsis
Dominic St Pierre, host of The Go Podcast and a Go developer since 2014, ends up describing blindness as a constant tax, about 30% of each day by his estimate, that he has reduced by finally committing to a screen reader and by choosing tools, languages and long-lived codebases that do not surprise him. Programming, he says, is who he is and not something he would give up.
The cost of the unfamiliar. The episode itself began 20 minutes late because the usual recording tool would not work with his setup. Hanselman compares this to his own type 1 diabetes and eating the same known meals; St Pierre agrees that every uncontrolled variable drains him, so he prefers stable jobs and maintaining software.
Losing central vision. Legally blind from birth, he was told as a child he would be blind by 20, and has lost his central vision in the last few years. He stresses that sight is a spectrum, which teachers did not believe when he was young.
Learning the screen reader. He resisted it, took about a year to accept it, and now listens at a high speed, reading documentation faster than he ever did by eye. He no longer ends the day with headaches. A tiny field of view always forced him to memorise code, so he holds files in his head.
Tools and languages. Go suits him for its compiler, enforced formatting and tabs; linters stand in for visual scanning, and YAML whitespace is miserable. He moved from Linux to Windows and WSL because the Linux screen reader failed him. He does not use phone-based scene description.
Bootstrapping. After a small exit when a company he built systems for was acquired by Equifax in 2023, he is self-funding Kiwipolis, a homeschooling planner with an inaccessible canvas game he debugs with shortcuts. He skips conferences, which he puts down to his own temperament.
- Every unfamiliar tool is a fight, so he values stability. The recording started about 20 minutes late because St Pierre's mic and camera would not work with Hanselman's usual recording tool, and they never learned why. He puts blindness's daily cost at about 30% of his capacity, citing a replacement headset that changed how his screen reader pronounced things, and says this is why he stays long at companies and likes maintaining software.
- Adopting a screen reader late cost him; now it speeds him up. Legally blind from birth with a degenerative disease, he was told around age five he would be blind by 20, and lost his central vision in the last few years; he has used a screen reader for about three to three and a half years. He says he should have started five or six years earlier, took a year to accept it, and now runs it at 30% of "boost" speed, reads documentation faster than ever, and ends days far less exhausted.
- A pinhole field of view trained an unusually strong working memory. Even when he could see, he took in only two or three letters at a glance, so he learned to guess words and hold code in his head. He says he can answer questions away from the computer with "that's in that file near line 500", which Hanselman calls keeping the code's object model in his brain.
- Tooling, not syntax, makes a language accessible. He moved from .NET to Go after a year of Node, and credits Go's simplicity, helpful compiler and enforced formatting with tabs, because spaces must be heard. Since he cannot scan a stack trace or a block of JSON, he relies on linters; YAML whitespace has cost him hours. He left Linux because its screen reader did not work for him and now uses Windows with WSL, calling Windows Terminal and VS Code very accessible.
- He is bootstrapping a SaaS business after a small exit. He built the main system at a company that grew from 10 to about 35 people and was acquired by Equifax in 2023, and has been trying to self-fund a product since 2008. Kiwipolis is a homeschooling planner with a 2D game element; the game is a canvas and not accessible, so he debugs it with shortcut keys that skip collision detection. He says reluctance to travel, not blindness itself, has kept him from conferences.
GCastUsing M365 Copilot with Microsoft OneDrive [GCast 186]
- A Copilot icon beside each OneDrive file summarizes it unopened. Giard presents this as a new M365 Copilot feature. Clicking the icon next to a file in a OneDrive folder gives a quick overview of the document; he can then ask a follow-up question about it, or copy the result into another document or an email.
- Create FAQ turns a document into questions and answers. On the same file the Create FAQ option gives a Q&A-format summary, and a direct question ("what did I do last week?") is answered from the document. Giard says this is especially useful for long documents.
- Selecting several files lets Copilot summarize and question them together. With four status reports checked, the Copilot button gives one summary per document, and a question asked across them ("did I have any issues?") picked out the one report that listed an issue.
- Compare files shows the differences between selected documents. Again without opening them, Copilot laid out how the four reports differed; Giard chose files with the same structure for the demo, and calls this "really useful". The comparison can be copied out or questioned further.
GeoHussar#Indians have heen saving America for almost 60 years. Watch the rest on TT
- Indian immigrants have propped up US science for decades. He cites their top income among US nationalities and STEM contribution: the US produces about 35,000 scientists a year on its own, India 200,000–300,000 science graduates and China 500,000–1 million, while the US attracts 15,000–22,000 of the world's best scientists annually.
GeoHussar#saudiarabia and #iran have struck another deal #oil #china #usnavy #navy #miltary #middleeast
- Saudi–Iranian détente is good for the whole region. He reports the two cooling tensions, with Saudi Arabia leading other Arab states in declaring neutrality toward Iran. He argues it matters because both have powerful economies, militaries and regional spheres of influence.
GeoHussar#greenscreen an actual #economist @Christopher Clarke gave a breakdown of our #Debt
- US debt should be judged by interest cost relative to GDP. Relaying economist Christopher Clarke, he puts debt at $35 trillion against $29 trillion annual GDP and interest at about $1 trillion a year. Measured that way the burden is 2.37% of GDP, which he says is lower than in the 1980s.
GeoHussar#greenscreen an actual #economist @Christopher Clarke gave a breakdown of our #Debt
- US debt should be judged by interest cost relative to GDP. Relaying economist Christopher Clarke, he puts debt at $35 trillion against $29 trillion GDP and interest at about $1 trillion a year, or 2.37% of GDP, lower than in the 1980s and 1990s. Clarke warns it could exceed those levels depending on who is elected.
- Projected deficits are far larger under Trump than Harris. He cites expected deficits of $1.2 trillion under Harris, with expanded child tax credits and the corporate rate restored to 28%, versus $5.8 trillion under Trump with broad tax cuts. He notes 2020 brought the largest deficit ever and deficit-to-GDP is trending up.
- He blames Trump's tax cuts for much of the 2020 spike. His reading is that the cut from 35% to 21% (which he describes as for the top 1%) forced several hundred billion dollars of borrowing on top of COVID. He asserts that it is always Democrats who reduce the deficit.
GeoHussar#Nigeria is going to leap ahead #ai #africa I butchered your name Dr Tunji, forgive me
- Nigeria has the fundamentals to be a leading economy. He cites 85 of Africa's 618 tech hubs, over 40 in Lagos, the only African city in the global top 100 startup ecosystems. Its population is 234 million, 60% under 25, with a birth rate of 33 per 1,000. It is Africa's largest oil producer; he says sixth-largest exporter, possibly fourth or fifth with more infrastructure.
- Connectivity is the missing piece, per the digital-economy minister. Interviewing Dr Bosun Tijani at a UN summit, he asked what would most speed progress; the answer was fiber-optic connectivity and AI access. Nigeria has about 35,000 km of fiber, needs at least 125,000, and has 90,000 km due soon; $2 billion was secured this year to link 774 local government offices.
- He predicts an African renaissance led by Nigeria. This is his own forecast, building on an earlier post where he argued something was holding Nigeria back. He notes a rice and grain shortage that he says the Feed the Future initiative is making progress on.
GeoHussarForeign adversaries are trying to make you doubt our elections. Don't let them win
- Russia and Iran seek to erode American trust in elections. He argues adversaries are running a misinformation campaign to defeat the US from within by convincing voters their vote does not matter and the system is corrupt. He counters that security measures operate before, during and after elections, and urges viewers to contact their local election official via a .gov website or tour their office.
GeoHussarhas america chosen #hyperinflation over #deflation ? @Financial Boffins made a great post about this
- A fellow creator argues the US has chosen inflation over austerity. He relays Financial Boffins' view that America will keep printing money rather than cut spending, devaluing the dollar long term, with a crisis nearer 2040 than now. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments are all treated as untouchable, and the path was set in 2008.
- That forecast assumes a linear path history rarely follows. He counters that resets or a deficit-balancing president, as Clinton did in the 1990s, usually intervene. The US debt rose about 1,000% around World War II, from roughly $29 billion to $330 billion at 120% of GDP, yet growth from 1942 to the early 1970s paid it off.
- Infrastructure investment could avert the outcome. His opinion is that Biden's $1.2 trillion-plus infrastructure spending will grow GDP, since infrastructure carries a multiplier of up to three. He also cites the 1971 end of the gold standard and the 1974 petrodollar deal with Saudi Arabia, and urges voting for the party that invests in ordinary people.
GeoHussarhas #america chosen #hyperinflation over deflation ? @Financial Boffins made a great post about this
- A fellow creator argues the US has chosen inflation over austerity. He relays Financial Boffins' view that America will keep printing money rather than cut spending and debt, devaluing the dollar long term, with the crisis nearer 2040 than now. He finds the reasoning sound given CPI growth since the 1970s, but says it assumes a linear path that rarely holds for generations. The clip ends there.
GCastUsing Copilot Pages [GCast 185]
- Copilot Pages keeps responses that otherwise vanish when Copilot closes. Giard presents Pages as a new feature of Copilot for work. The Edit in Pages button moves a response into a new window where it can be edited, and a Page Link saved from it lets him return later to the same page.
- Pages runs on Microsoft Loop and embeds in other apps. Giard notes that Pages uses Microsoft Loop under the hood. The Copy Components option gives a link for supported applications such as Microsoft Teams, and edits made in Teams and in a browser show up immediately in the other, because they are the same page.
- A shared Page Link carries audience and permission settings. Before copying the link he can share with people in his company, only those who already have access, or specific people, and choose between edit and view-only access. He picks company-wide view and edit.
- Collaborators edit the same page in real time. A colleague who opened the shared link edited the page, and Giard saw those changes appear in his own view as they were made.
Scott HanselmanEPISODE 2 - Scott & Mark Learn To... How Not to Ship the Org Chart
- Visible inconsistency makes customers assume the internals are worse. Hanselman walked out of an EV test drive after spotting three chained Android tablets, each in a different font, which to him exposed which group shipped the map, the climate controls and the speedometer. Mark agrees the visible experience is what people infer the rest from, and says that inconsistency lost the carmaker a sale.
- Consistency at scale comes from shared standards, not one tastemaker. Mark rejects relying on a Jobs- or Gates-style figure and points to Azure Resource Manager, whose plug-in resource providers must follow API guidelines published on GitHub, checked by an API review board and tooling. He concedes Azure is not perfect and its older API surfaces are less consistent.
- How much an inconsistency matters depends on whether it can be undone. Hanselman's example of Copilot shown as a bot, a sparkling pencil and a magic wand in Visual Studio can be fixed next release; Mark says inconsistent APIs are locked in by backward compatibility, cause developer mistakes, and force every improvement to be built several times. Azure moved fast at first and standardised once a better pattern emerged.
- Backward compatibility is the enterprise promise, at the cost of polish. Mark is the arbiter for breaking-change and service-deprecation approvals, under published policies and formal announcement channels, because breaking an enterprise app costs money and blocks upgrades. Hanselman, stressing this is his own opinion, argues Windows keeps compatibility and so sometimes ships the org chart, while Apple breaks things unapologetically; Mark calls Hanselman's roughly 20 years of running his blog on Windows Server 2003 "incredibly insecure".
- Enforce standards with guardrails, not documents. Mark lays out a spectrum from no rules to written guidelines, to auditing, to controls that make non-compliance impossible, such as TypeSpec, whose inherited top-level definitions make new resource providers compliant automatically. Controls are costly and must not add too much friction, so he reserves them for high-stakes areas; Hanselman sums it up as "Word documents don't break the build".
Scott HanselmanEPISODE 1 - Scott & Mark Learn To... Influence Without Authority
- Even with authority, you must sell the vision to lead. Mark says he learned this as co-founder and chief software architect of Winternals, founded in 1996 and sold to Microsoft in 2006; as Azure's CTO he lacks direct authority over most of what he drives. His influence has grown since he joined Azure in 2010 through a track record of being right, and he still has to explain why each thing matters.
- Customer advocacy should occasionally get you in trouble. Hanselman says that if you do not get in trouble twice a year for advocating for the customer you are not pushing hard enough, and that he uses his seniority to shield team members who irritate others for the right reasons. Mark qualifies it: some advocates come across as constantly abrasive, so there is a line to find.
- Stalled priorities usually lack an owner, not agreement. Mark says that when he escalates to senior engineering leaders it is rarely because people ignore something; everyone agrees it matters but no one is accountable, or no one can reprioritise without someone who owns the resources reallocating them. He relays Satya Nadella's message to Microsoft's executive staff that your job is to fix your complaints, not voice them, and Hanselman recalls his boss Scott Hunter telling him that "someone should do something" now means him.
- Understand at least one level below where you operate. Mark says writing Windows Internals taught him to go a level deeper than his subject so he could be accurate and abstract it, which is why he digs deep in meetings. He offers Nadella forwarding Hacker News threads and technical blog posts, and Hanselman offers Hunter finding product gaps while preparing keynotes, as leaders doing the same.
- Engineers in silos lose the standing to influence the product. Teaching internals with Dave Solomon, Mark found the owner of one Windows component knew little about memory management or scheduling, and he says many Azure engineers have never seen their own service's portal or SDK experience. Knowing how a component fits the end-to-end customer experience, he argues, is what lets people propose improvements credibly; Hanselman calls this being a T-shaped developer.
GeoHussar#greenscreen #Mexico #peso has been crashing against the US dollar since the election
- Sheinbaum's election has erased the peso's gains. He says the peso has given back all its gains against the dollar since early 2023. He attributes this to the election of Claudia Sheinbaum, whose leftist policies he expects to run against US interests; the clip cuts off mid-sentence.
GeoHussar#China central bank hasnt printed money like this in a while…
- China is printing money at its fastest since the pandemic. He says China tripled its money supply over ten years while the US doubled. The central bank is making Treasury bond purchases unseen in nearly 20 years, cutting rates, lending for stock buybacks, and is accused of printing money to prop up the stock market.
- China is sliding toward deflation. He shows inflation hovering just above zero and producer prices down at -2.8%, a predictor of further deflation he links to depression risk. The currency is falling too low even for the People's Bank of China's comfort, yet goods are getting expensive for mainland consumers.
- Further easing could worsen the currency problem. He says quantitative easing could release another 10 trillion yuan (about $1.37 trillion), which might ease deflation but crash the currency further. That would hurt the world's second-largest importer.
- Only America can rescue China. Russia cannot help, he argues, since its oil revenues have fallen 30% since June with oil near $70. He concludes the US is the only country China can turn to, an assertion he does not develop further.
GeoHussar#China central bank hasnt printed money like this in a while
- China is printing money at its fastest since the pandemic. He says its central bank has printed far more than the US: over the past ten years the US doubled its money supply, which he calls unsafe, while China tripled its own.
Crosstalk SolutionsOpenVPN Access Server Complete Setup - Easy and Secure VPN!
- Access Server is the self-hosted option; CloudConnexa is the managed one. OpenVPN sponsored this video, and the host's description link pays Crosstalk a referral. He prefers self-hosting on his own hardware, and names two use cases: remote users reaching internal resources, and remote sites (a restaurant chain's point-of-sale) on always-on, split-tunnelled router connections.
- A $6-a-month DigitalOcean droplet and a domain name are enough to start. The host used DigitalOcean's one-click Marketplace image, an SSH key, weekly backups and a Cloudflare DNS A record. OpenVPN gives two concurrent connections free; more are bought as licences. The admin GUI runs on port 943 by default, and he redirected it to 443, noting a separate admin port is more secure behind firewall rules.
- Update the image immediately and enable DCO when asked. The one-click image shipped version 2.11.3, against 2.14.1 current as of recording; the upgrade requires un-holding the openvpn-as package first. The upgrade offers data channel offload, which moves tunnel encryption to the Linux kernel, and the host says to accept it in most cases for performance.
- Use a real SSL certificate for the server's domain name. The host bought a Namecheap PositiveSSL certificate for $5.99 a year via a certificate signing request, uploading the CA bundle, certificate and private key. Let's Encrypt is a free alternative that renews every 90 days, set up on the server with certbot following OpenVPN's guide.
- Site-to-site access needs a static IP, routing and a VPN gateway flag. The host added a 172.27.240.0/20 static subnet beside the default 172.27.224.0/20, gave the GL.iNet Slate AX router 172.27.240.22, and marked it a VPN gateway for its 192.168.22.0/24 LAN, with split tunnelling. The router must also allow VPN traffic into its LAN; he then reached a speed test server there. He recommends TOTP MFA, also available alongside RADIUS, LDAP or SAML.
GeoHussarwill the US soon overtake #China as the world’s too exporter? #export #exports #gdp #learn
- US exports have recovered from COVID faster than China's. He asks whether the US will retake the top exporter spot from China, pointing to a chart showing a steeper US recovery slope after COVID hit both countries. The clip ends before he answers.
GeoHussarIran,Russia have dunked on America with the (possibly unintentional) help of Trump’s side of the GOP
- Foreign misinformation has succeeded in eroding Americans' trust in government. The speaker calls Iran and Russia's campaign a "major victory" against the United States, and argues that it coincides with and reinforces what Trump's side of the GOP is saying. The title hedges the GOP's role as "possibly unintentional".
Polis Pandit$3 Weeks Until November 5th and I'm Nauseous
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Mr. GlobalI Need To Speak With Dennis Quaid
- US oil exports are higher now than in Trump's final year. He answers Dennis Quaid's claim that America was energy independent and exporting oil under Trump but now begs Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, using charts that show exports up about 20%. He also contrasts Russian production and US imports of Russian oil across administrations.
- Russia's oil windfall came from the OPEC 2020 deal. Prices reached $120 a barrel because of Trump's OPEC 2020 deal, he argues, so Russia earned more despite cutting output by 10%. Prices fell once the deal ended.
- Biden asked the Saudis once, to end OPEC 2020. By contrast, he says Trump spent his whole administration pressing Saudi Arabia for more oil and also authorized a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Dwarkesh Patel$Sarah Paine & Dwarkesh Patel Lecture Series
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Scott HanselmanIs it always DNS? with DNSimple's Anthony Eden
synopsis
Anthony Eden, founder of DNSimple, ends the conversation content to keep running a bootstrapped "boutique" DNS company for the foreseeable future, arguing that focus on one thing, not size or growth, is what lets it keep innovating in a market that treats domains as a commodity. Hanselman discloses he has been a paying customer for about 15 years and stresses the episode is not sponsored.
Origins. Eden got into domains by chance in 1999, building in five days the system that got a new registrar accredited during the deregulation of .com, making it one of the first seven. He later ran the .mp registry. DNSimple's first code was written on April 1, 2010, it launched that July, and he went full-time around 2012 or 2013.
Domains as risk. Eden says DNS was designed in the 1980s for a gentler internet and is a constant DDoS target. On Microsoft's move to .microsoft, he infers that owning a TLD removes a dependency and lets the owner impose rules, as Google did with HSTS on .app and .dev. Most takeovers, he says, are social engineering, so he avoids SMS two-factor, and advises strict registrars, automatic renewal and shared access.
Focus over growth. Bootstrapped firms can stay narrow; VC-funded ones must bolt on products. He sees customers choosing on price or habit and losing domains when the one person with access leaves.
How DNS works. Eden walks through resolvers, caches, root and .com name servers, and DNSimple's authoritative servers, pointing listeners to his site How DNS Works.
Why changes are fast. He credits an internal sync system feeding eight points of presence, constant measurement, repeated redesigns and low default TTLs. He has written three DNS servers, the current one in Erlang, whose bit strings suit DNS packets and whose fail-fast design matches DNSimple's infrastructure.
Living with other providers. The domain control plane, under a year and a half old and still early, manages zones across Route 53, Azure DNS and on-premises DNS side by side.
- Staying bootstrapped keeps the company focused on DNS alone. Eden says DNSimple has never taken outside money, whereas VC-funded or public rivals must keep adding hosting, email and marketing products to grow. He argues customers undervalue domains as a commodity, partly because big players commoditised them, and that focus is how a small firm keeps innovating; he is happy to keep running it as a boutique, while conceding "there's always a price".
- Domain takeovers mostly come through social engineering. Eden names social engineering as the most common takeover route and says DNSimple offers two-factor through hardware keys or one-time passwords rather than SMS because of SIM swapping. His advice is a registrar with strict policies against acting on a caller's behalf, automatic renewal, multi-year renewal for important names, and access for more than one person so a domain is not lost when someone leaves.
- Owning a top-level domain lets its owner set the rules. Asked why Microsoft is moving cloud services to its .microsoft TLD, Eden infers it removes a namespace outside Microsoft's control and lets it impose requirements from the top level, as Google did by enforcing HSTS across .app and .dev. He notes DNS was designed in the 1980s for a gentler internet and remains a regular DDoS target.
- Fast record changes come from custom sync and low TTLs. Hanselman, a customer since about 2011 who notes this is not a sponsored show, says changes on DNSimple appear almost at once. Eden credits an internal system instead of the standard DNS transfer protocols, pushing changes to eight points of presence with Australia as the benchmark, constant measurement and several redesigns, plus low default TTLs where registrars often default to a day; he wrote the core name server in Erlang, built to fail hard and restart cleanly.
- The domain control plane accepts that customers use several providers. It connects DNSimple to Route 53, Azure DNS or on-premises servers such as CoreDNS and manages zones bidirectionally, so they can be moved between providers. Eden says it was built within the last year and a half, is still early, and exists because DNSimple is "too small to force people to do anything".
Scott HanselmanScott & Mark Learn To... (Trailer)
- The show aims to record nuanced disagreement, not loud opinions. Hanselman says his conversations with Mark sometimes leave him better off and should have been recorded, and that tech discourse lacks people who disagree and end at "I see why you think that", unlike streamers broadcasting a loud opinion about JavaScript. Mark says the format grew from the tangents in their joint conference presentations.
- It will ship as video and audio, starting a week later. The podcast was to be released on Hanselman's YouTube channel and wherever podcasts are available, with the first episode due a week after the trailer. They joke that most podcasts die around nine episodes after a run of apologies for irregular releases.
Crosstalk SolutionsWe Tested It! Starlink Mini in Motion and EMF Levels
- A Starlink Mini inside a sunroof works at highway speed. On a Striker mount with upward-facing suction cups, powered from a power bank over USB-C, the host got 45 Mbps down and 4.18 Mbps up parked under heavy tree cover, and 142 Mbps down and 11.8 Mbps up at 60 mph, even facing the wrong way. The video promotes his Starlink referral link.
- The host sees little evidence that suction cups crack sunroofs. He has not had it happen, knows no one who has, and the Striker mount's maker told him he had heard of no cases. He says online warnings rarely come with firsthand accounts. The cups also flip to mount on the roof, where he drove over 8 hours with a Gen 3 dish.
- Front-face EMF exceeds the public limit, but the back is shielded. On his own EMF meter, the host measured a baseline of about 17–18 V/m, about 480 V/m directly in front of the dish and about 77 V/m behind it. He compares these with ICNIRP's public limit of 83 V/m and occupational limit of 420 V/m, and judges the Mini in a car relatively low risk.
Polis Pandit$The Main Issue is Democracy
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Crosstalk SolutionsFirst Look! UniFi Device Bridge Extends your Network Wirelessly!
- The UniFi Device Bridge brings wired devices onto wireless mesh. It picks up a mesh signal from an access point and feeds one PoE RJ45 port, usually for a camera, though a Flex Mini switch could serve more devices. Both models ship October 25: the indoor UDB at $99 MSRP (internal 5 GHz antenna, omni antenna included) and the outdoor, longer-range UDB Pro at $199.
- The host found the UDB simple to set up. He tested only the UDB, not the Pro: it appeared in UniFi for adoption on power-up, the external antenna needed a settings change, and a G4 Bullet camera plugged into it came online in Protect.
Scott HanselmanCreating The Crimson Diamond with Julia Minamata
synopsis
Julia Minamata, an illustrator turned solo developer, built The Crimson Diamond as a new game that plays the way people remember Sierra-era adventures, not the way they actually played. It launched in August after six years, mostly part-time, with what Hanselman describes as overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam. She ends committed to a sequel, and probably a trilogy, in the same EGA style, keeping the text parser.
Why EGA. She calls the late-1980s to early-1990s 16-colour era her golden age. EGA art was designed for the screen, so backgrounds, characters and objects share one crisp look, unlike early VGA games whose painted backgrounds were scanned and downsampled.
Making it feel handmade. She avoids mirrored faces and perfect symmetry, which read as artificial. Studying Sierra screenshots taught her that their perspective is an illusion, since sprites do not shrink with distance, and at 320x200 the limited angles force choices she embraces.
The parser. The project began as an art exercise; a positive response to an early demo turned it into a game. She chose typed commands because they are her favourite way to play, making players read closely and question characters without dialogue trees, while accepting a smaller audience and no console version. Player feedback added abbreviations, and she offers an optional notebook, a hint book and two inventory styles.
Artist as developer. She identifies more as an artist, contrasting the artist's tolerance for grind with the programmer's search for shortcuts, but concedes when Hanselman pushes that she is a developer. Adventure Game Studio, an open-source community engine, made it possible where Sierra's teams had to build their tools as they went.
Shipping. Contract art for other studios kept pushing the game back until she committed for the final two years. Steam's back end nearly broke her resolve. Bugs arrive by forum and email into a spreadsheet, and she credits a launch free of critical bugs to about 75% luck and 25% hard work.
Setting and what comes next. A 1914 northern Ontario lodge gives a Christie-style cozy mystery without phones, set against frontier mining towns that later emptied. The sequel is already planned.
- EGA was chosen because it was made for the screen. Minamata says the 16-colour palette of the late-1980s to early-1990s DOS era gives a crisp, unified world, where early VGA adventure games scanned painted backgrounds that clashed with their sprites. The game runs at 320x200, and she rules out moving a sequel to VGA because she sees EGA as the format she wants, not a stepping stone.
- Deliberate imperfection makes digital pixel art feel handmade. She avoids mirroring faces or objects because perfect symmetry looks stiff and uncanny, a rule she also gave artists as art director on Recommendation Dog. Dissecting Sierra screenshots showed her that their perspective is "a magic trick", since sprites never scale from front to back, and she copied it; she drew in Photoshop only out of habit and says beginners do not need it.
- The text parser is a deliberate choice despite costing audience. She says typing forces players to read and gives a sense of limitless possibility, with no dialogue trees, though it rules out a console port and made programming harder than point-and-click would have. Player feedback led to abbreviated commands for people with dexterity limits, plus an optional notebook, an online hint book and a choice of graphical or text inventory.
- An artist-first developer shipped it on community-built tools. A former magazine and newspaper illustrator with work in the New Yorker, she contrasts artists' acceptance of grind with programmers' shortcuts, citing pasting a link 71 times by hand for her newsletter. She built the game in Adventure Game Studio, a free, open-source, community-maintained engine with a built-in parser; it was part-time from its first demo in November 2018 until the last two years before its August launch, and getting builds onto Steam was the closest she came to giving up.
- A frontier mining-town setting suits a phone-free cozy mystery. The game is set in northern Ontario in 1914; she chose the golden age of Agatha Christie-style detective fiction, a single lodge setting and an era without pocket cameras, and tied it to Canada's push into resource-rich frontiers that left mining ghost towns. She has extensive notes for a sequel, hopes for a trilogy with the same EGA look, MT-32-style music and parser, and expects, warily, that it will take less time.
Polis Pandit$"Did He Lose the 2020 Election?"
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Technology and FriendsJoe Sharmer on Migration, Modernization and Entra [EPISODE 829]
- No two migrations are alike, and old directories hide unknown policy. Sharmer, a pre-sales principal solutions architect at Quest Software who talks to five to 10 organizations a week, says nearly 20 years of migration work has never shown him two identical projects. Twenty years of Group Policy Objects layered on each other leave customers unsure what the policies do and afraid to remove them, so the environment must be found, cleaned up and catalogued before any path to Entra.
- On-prem and cloud administration demand different skills. Sharmer describes friction between long-time AD administrators and cloud administrators, and a knowledge gap at C-level about what moving to the cloud means. He says Microsoft no longer offers an Active Directory certification, which he reads as a sign that AD is aging.
- Passwords alone are no longer secure enough. Sharmer credits the point to Giard's roadshow presentation and says Entra brings multi-factor authentication and conditional access that on-prem AD lacks. He says on-prem AD's vulnerabilities have been public for 20 years: a web search shows how to crack the directory file holding everyone's passwords. He says about 95% of the organizations he talks to want to adopt the cloud security model.
- Cloud-only is unrealistic for large organizations; start with endpoints. A CIO at a financial institution of about 130,000 employees mandated moving all of AD, workstations and identities into Entra in 12 months, which Sharmer says was not possible. Above roughly 500–1,000 seats, on-prem applications using NTLM or Kerberos, or homegrown code with hard-coded IP addresses, block a full move. He advises cloud-first for new applications, managing identities in the cloud, and moving endpoints off on-prem and hybrid join, where Intune is "bolted onto" an AD-joined device.
- Devices can move to the cloud without being wiped, he says. Sharmer says Microsoft's Autopilot route wipes the device, reinstalls the OS and can take up to five hours, and waiting for hardware refresh means about four years. Quest's tool, as he describes it, combines its long-standing re-ACLing of data and SID insertion with the bulk enrollment package from Microsoft's Windows Configuration Designer, keeping user data intact and taking about five minutes per device. He points viewers to Quest.com's AD modernization and migration pages.
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