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.
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Latest Posts
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The Pi That Can’t Run a Browser
A 2012 Raspberry Pi, a 320×240 touchscreen, and four things that failed silently while reporting success.
I have a dashboard. It runs in a container, it pulls from five services, and it lives at a URL. Which means I see it when I go and look at it, which is less often than I intended when I built the thing.
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Eight Months on CachyOS
It has broken my audio, refused to speak to my Bluetooth chip, and eaten thirteen seconds of my life every time I opened a settings window. It’s still my favourite operating system.
I run CachyOS on two machines, and they could hardly be less alike. gilgalad is a current all-AMD desktop that does photo work, gaming, and local AI. feanor is a second-hand ThinkPad X13 I found on a shelf in Japan for ¥45,800, whose CPU shipped in 2020. It’s my travel machine, and it’s also the one that carries my backups out of the house.
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Three Tunnels, One Ceiling: Part 2
Part 1 ended with four wrong answers and a set of conclusions I was reasonably confident about. I have another Windows workstation, so I ran the same test from it the following day, and then moved it through every router path in turn. Three of those conclusions didn’t survive the afternoon.
The method is unchanged:
curl -4, 1 GB per stream, single then four in parallel, CPU sampled across every transfer, and a control taken with the tunnel switched off. One addition. On the client-side tunnel I read the tunnel adapter’s byte counter before and after each run, which is a harder path proof than asking an external service what address it sees. Every client run showed 106% of payload crossing the interface, the extra 6% being WireGuard encapsulation. You can’t fake that by accident. -
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!