Category: General Tech

Tom Strickx and Celso Martinho at CloudFlare:

Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

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Adam Savage and Fon Davis have a video up, looking through the late Grant Imahara’s workshop. I didn’t expect to feel this sad about someone I watched on TV for years, but here we are.

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Last week, Dr. Drang was on MPU, and among other things, we spoke about this homemade wiki for dealing with information he needs handy. He’s followed up on that episode with a pair of blog posts:

David and Stephen recently had me on the Mac Power Users podcast and teased me (gently) about rolling my own wiki instead of using one of the many off-the-shelf systems. I explained on the show the various trials I went through before landing on my current system and—to some extent, at least—the reason I prefer what I’m doing to Obsidian/Craft/Roam Research/Notion/Whatever. In this post I’ll give some details on how my system works.

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Alphonse Eylenburg has created something wonderful:

In this post you’ll find a family tree and timeline of operating systems. I have tried to include all operating systems, no matter how old or obscure. Of course, a complete list is virtually impossible, as there is no way to catalogue all the tiny hobby and embedded systems that may exist somewhere.

Please also note that I only included a few selected Linux/BSD/Solaris distributions (it is arguable whether these should count as an OS on their own or not).

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The AP:

An unopened copy of Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 has sold at auction for $1.56 million.

Heritage Auctions in Dallas said that the 1996 game sold Sunday, breaking its previous record price for the sale of a single video game.

A spokesman did not immediately respond to an inquiry about who purchased the game.

Holy moly.

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I can’t really do this article justice with a single blockquote.

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Geschke was one of those early Silicon Valley pioneers whose name probably isn’t as well known as it should be.

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Jean-Louis Gassée has gathered a decade of writing about Intel, and it was a lot of fun to back through his old columns. I think Intel’s next chapter could be one of the most interesting stories in the technology industry, and this is good background to have when thinking about the company.

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This post by David Sparks reminded me that I haven’t written about my backup strategy in some time.

The basic tools I use are unchanged from the last time I wrote about the topic. Time Machine is still my first line of defense, with Carbon Copy Cloner and Backblaze handling off-site backups.

However, the Drobo outlined in that 2018 post has been decommissioned, with its files now residing on my Mac Pro.

Thanks to the tower’s expandability, I’ve been able to add an internal clone, which updates nightly via Carbon Copy Cloner as well. That clone, the Time Machine drive and the Archives volume are all internal to the tower:

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Charles Fishman, writing at The Atlantic:

Dry ice often helps save Thanksgiving, even if the beneficiaries of its special magic may not notice. But this winter, it will help save the world from the coronavirus pandemic. A senior salesperson for Noble, which routinely supplies the pharmaceutical industry, had just taken a call from an official with the state of New York, assessing how much dry ice Noble might be able to supply, on short notice, in order to get the first coronavirus vaccine out to every corner of the state once it is approved.

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It’s that time of year, so I’m happy to present the 512 Pixels Holiday Gift Guide for People Like Me:

• Vintage Dogcow Watch: Currently $425 on eBay
• Apple III: Currently $699 on eBay
• Relay FM “Now Playing” Shirt: $30
• “I Want to Believe in RSS” Enamel Pin: $11.55 on the Diesel Sweeties Store
• Anything on Draplin’s website
• Lisa Introduction VHS Tape - $199.95 on The Missing Bite
• NeXT Cube and Megapixel Monitor: Currently $2,400 on eBay
• IBM PCjr to use as a boat anchor: Currently $256 on eBay

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A new Raspberry Pi model is out, and it looks fantastic:

We’ve never been shy about borrowing a good idea. Which brings us to Raspberry Pi 400: it’s a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard. Priced at just $70 for the computer on its own, or $100 for a ready-to-go kit, if you’re looking for an affordable PC for day-to-day use this is the Raspberry Pi for you.

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