90s Kid - Channel 3 Was Not a Channel
The sacred television setting that made the VCR, game console, and family peace work.
Posts
I Put One Disposable IP on the Internet. Five Hours Later, Mirai Showed Up.
A fresh, isolated cloud VM attracted 191 sessions, 2,322 attacker commands, two Mirai variants, and an SSH tunnel attempt in about five hours.
90s Kid - The AOL CD That Would Not Stop Arriving
The internet used to arrive in the mailbox, shiny, free, and apparently breeding.
The Phantom Bad Blocks: How a 15-Year-Old Linux Bug Took Down 75 Security Cameras
A field report on diagnosing and repairing a RAID failure that wasn’t a hardware failure at all — and why ‘replace the disk’ would have made it far worse.
The Alert That Went to Nobody
A critical event fired a perfectly good alert into a receiver wired to absolutely no one — and everybody slept fine because of it.
The TLS Cert Only an API Could Renew
A FreePBX user panel served an expired TLS cert, every reload swore it was fixed, and the only thing that actually moved the needle was calling the cert module’s own regeneration API.
When Postgres Won't Start
A database stuck forever on ‘starting up’ wasn’t broken — it was clawing its way through WAL replay on a dying disk.
The Sensor That Cried Wolf
A loud-sound detector paged us all night for slamming doors — because it measured volume, not meaning.
Why Your Fitness Tracker's Correlations Are Lying to You
I built a dashboard that confidently told me walking ruins my sleep — then I learned what a confounder is.
The App That Wouldn't Open After an Update
A desktop app auto-updated, swallowed its own window, and hung forever — and the fix had nothing to do with the install.