Technology, marketing, networking and the odd gadget review.
Plus all the other random stuff that crosses my mind: Hypervisors, VLANs, storage and backups, GPUs, Monitors, Keyboards. Twenty years of digital marketing leaks in from time to time, and so does football (LFC related). Read on at your own peril.
New here? Start with the about page, or work backwards through the tags.
Latest Posts
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Three Tunnels, One Ceiling
Having just found that my router’s VPN was carrying only half my traffic, the obvious next question was how fast the half it did carry actually went. What I expected was a straightforward protocol comparison. What I got was four wrong conclusions in a row, each one caused by a measurement that looked reasonable and wasn’t.
The numbers are below, and so is the method — including the parts of the method that failed, because those turned out to be the useful bit.
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Half a VPN
This started as a small question. I was reading about WebRTC leaks — the trick where a browser, asked politely by a webpage, will happily enumerate every IP address on every interface it can see and hand them over, VPN or no VPN. I was scoffing at the idea that I had any exposure, but just to answer my curiosity, I ran hide.me‘s own leak test to see what my browser was giving away.
The browser was a solvable problem. Three Firefox prefs and it stops volunteering host candidates. But while I had the test page open, I noticed something in the results that had nothing to do with WebRTC, and I spent the next two days on it instead. It took a few reboots and reconfiguration in 3 different places. Thankfully, there was no downtime during peak K-drama timings!
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Nine Nights in a South Island Winter
We spent nine nights driving a loop around the South Island of New Zealand in the middle of winter. Christchurch to Lake Tekapo, up to Mt Cook, over to Wanaka, through Arrowtown into Queenstown, down to Te Anau for Milford Sound, then back up through Tekapo to fly home.
As a LOTR nerd, it had always been on my bucket list to visit “Middle-earth”, and the best way to truly see it was a road trip through some of the most amazing scenery in the world.
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The ¥45,800 Offsite Backup
I did not go to Japan to buy a laptop. I wasn’t even intending to buy the parts for a desktop that was supposed to be a server, which is its own story. But a second-hand ThinkPad X13 sitting on a shelf at ¥45,800 is the kind of thing that follows you home, and at 125.3 yen to the Singapore dollar that worked out to S$366.
For S$366 I got six cores, 32GB of RAM and a machine that now holds the only copy of my homelab that does not live in my house. That last part is what this post is actually about. The laptop is the cheap bit. The job it does is an interesting outcome of my homelab journey.
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My Perspective on Digital Marketing and AI
Your stack isn’t short of AI. It’s short of tools that talk to each other.
Count the tools your Digital Marketing team opened this week. An SEO tool. A social listening platform. Two analytics platforms, because someone (me) standardised twice. A CMS. A design tool. A DAM. A translation service. A social publishing tool. A survey platform nobody’s looked at since the last wave closed.