Modern Linux Distribution Defaults Are Stuck in 2009
Modern Linux still ships with sysctl defaults that make no sense on real hardware. Before calling yourself an admin, learn what your kernel actually does, or enjoy debugging packet drops and half-baked TCP stacks the hard way.
What We Built Before the Cloud
A reflection on what the internet was before the cloud turned it into a subscription. We built our sites by hand, broke things to learn, and knew every log by name. This is not nostalgia, it is stewardship. Some of us still remember what it means to be root on our own systems.
The Great Cloud Exit: Taking Back the Internet, One Rack at a Time
The cloud was supposed to free us. Instead, it made us dependents. Here’s why developers, sysadmins, and builders are taking back the Internet, one rack at a time.
AWS and the Myth of Regional Independence
AWS has long sold the idea of regional independence, a cloud so resilient that no single outage could take it down. Reality keeps proving otherwise. Every time us-east-1 coughs, half the internet catches it. The truth is simple: AWS’s global control plane still lives in one place, and when it stumbles, everything feels it. This piece looks at why that happens, how “multi-region” isn’t what you think it is, and why real decentralization still isn’t in Amazon’s playbook.
Half the Internet Is Bots (and the Other Half Is Just Trying to Block Them)
Half the Internet isn’t people anymore. It’s bots, scanners, and digital junk chewing through global bandwidth like termites in a datacenter. Most of what your server sees isn’t traffic, it’s noise. This post takes a look at just how much of the web’s capacity is wasted on bad actors and why sysadmins have basically become the Internet’s immune system.
Love in the Time of Root Access
I grew up reading BOFH stories like they were sacred scripture, tales of sysadmin vengeance and terminal justice that shaped my sense of humor, my ethics, and maybe my lack of both. Somewhere between the first sudo and the last rage ticket, I became the thing I once admired: the Bastard Operator From Hell. These days my love language is uptime, my poetry is a clean log, and my mischief lives in cron jobs. It is not cruelty, it is control. And honestly, it is beautiful.
Why Email Feels “Broken” Today (Even When It Works)
Email began as a fully decentralized network where anyone could run a server and communicate freely. Over decades of spam wars and authentication layers, control shifted to a handful of large providers who now decide which messages deserve to be delivered. This post traces how that happened, why it matters, and what it means for the future of self-hosted communication.
When Apple Stopped Building for Builders
There was a time when Apple made real tools for real creators. From the Xserve racks that powered studios and schools to the AirPort Time Capsule that quietly protected entire homes, Apple once believed its users could be trusted with control. macOS Server, the G4 Cube, and the original Time Capsule showed that technology could be powerful, elegant, and personal all at once. Today, that spirit is gone, replaced by cloud subscriptions and closed systems. This post looks back at the era when Apple built for the people who built things.