I’ve been cooking with Mindful Chef for about two years. For those who don’t know, it’s sort of yet another meal kit service — you can probably think of similar names — but with a focus on nutrition and balanced meals.
If you’ve been thinking about trying it out, I can heartily recommend it, but it’s not going to suit everyone. Read my (too extensive?) thoughts to see if it’s right for you.
I left Twitter not long after it rebranded to X. At the time, I didn’t write about why — I simply walked away. But recent developments have prompted me to finally put my thoughts down.
For those who aren’t from the UK, the “High Street” is what we call the shopping parade in a typical town or city. It lies at the heart of the town, quite different to a mall, and is more of a European concept. “Cascade failure” is what we say when one part of a system causes another part of the system to fail, often like a set of dominoes falling. Putting two and two together: I believe that the UK High St is in such a failure mode right now, and that over the next five years we’re going to see some very rapid changes.
On social media right now, strong rumours are spreading that the WPA2 encryption scheme has been broken in a fundamental way. What this means: the security built into WiFi is likely ineffective, and we should not assume it provides any security.
The current name I’m seeing for this is “KRACK”: Key Reinstallation AttaCK. If this is true, it means third parties will be able to eavesdrop on your network traffic: what should be a private conversation could be listened in to.
This has happened before with WiFi: who remembers WEP passwords? However, what is different this time around: there is no obvious, easy, replacement ready and waiting. This is suddenly a very big deal.
There’s a great demo from the recent OpenStack Summit (wish I had been there):
OpenStack is a known massive pain to get up and running, and having it in a reasonable set of containers that might be used to deploy it by default is really interesting to see. This is available in Quay as Stackanetes, which is a pretty awful name (as is Stackenetes, and Stackernetes, both of which were googlewhacks earlier today) for some great work.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been engaged in a Twitter discussion about serverless. The trigger for this was Paul Johnston‘s rather excellent series of posts on his experiences with serverless, wrapped up in this decent overview.
First, what is serverless? You can go over and read Paul’s explanation; my take is that there isn’t really a great definition for this yet. Amazon’s Lambda is the canonical implementation, and as the name kind of gives away, it’s very much a function-oriented environment: there are no EC2 instances to manage or anything like that, you upload some code and that code is executed on reception of an event – then you just pay for the compute time used.
Not that long ago, I did a switch on my Android phone: against all the promises I made to myself beforehand, I switched on the Google account and allowed it to sync up to GCHQ/NSA the cloud. I did this for one main reason: I had just got an Android tablet, and I despised having to do the same stuff on each device, particularly since they weren’t running the same versions of Android, and one was a Nexus – so not all the UI was the same. The benefits, I have to say, were pretty much worth it: I don’t have too much sensitive data on there, but the ease of use is incredible. What was particularly good was that when I broke my phone, and had to have a new one, once the new one was linked up everything was basically back how it was. That’s tremendously powerful.
In my previous post about virtualenv, I took a look at a way of making python environments a little bit more generic so that they could be moved around and redeployed at ease. I mentioned docker.io as a new tool that uses a general concept of “containers” to do similar things, but more broadly. I’ve dug a bit into docker, and these are my initial thoughts. Unfortunately, it seems relatively Fedora un-friendly right now.
Last night, we decided to order pizza – we don’t do it often, it’s lazy but sort of a treat. However, out of the three local well-known places, only one was open: the other two had shut down early. Now, we don’t live in London per se, but Croydon (where there were major fires and a member of the public was shot just a night ago) is only a few miles east, and Clapham a few miles north. Sutton, the local town, had some windows broken by youths, but to be honest this isn’t exactly exceptional behaviour in Sutton.
For some reason, Google have decided to put large images as the backdrop to their search engine. Not only are they large and grating, but they change over time and it’s horrible.
I’ve turned this off by putting the following in Firefox’s userContent.css:
This gets rid of most of the nasty. However, sadly, the file you need to edit may or may not exist, and could be in a variety of different places, and of course there doesn’t seem to be any good way of doing this easily. First, you need to find your profile folder – and once you’ve located that, the userContent.css file goes in the chrome directory.
