One of the topics of discussion in my circle of friends we keep circling back to is security of personal, work, corporate, and production systems. Its no surprise since many of my circle have backgrounds in highly academic fields and have between us bordering on a century of experience in operating systems at all points on the scale spectrum. From active red-team work to defense of mission critical systems, our discussions tend to span it all, and usually with a fairly blunt and honest look at reality, something I don’t often see in the industry.

My home network is complicated. A good friend recently described the network as having the complexity of a small to medium enterprise. I’m inclined to agree, since my network participates in multiple internal and external Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) arrangements, has close to a dozen internal security zones each with unique set of firewall rules and access control rules. The network includes split horizon DNS, both dynamic and static DHCP configurations, and a number of servers and distributed switches.

TL;DR - If you’re using USB-C displays with Intel 12th or 13th gen hardeware, its probably a DRI firmware issue in the i915 kernel module. Roll back your DMC blob to adlp_dmc_ver2_16.bin. I’ve recently been building a machine for doing video production work at the robotics competitions I support as well as other small events where a video mux is required. In my pursuit of ever smaller footprints to load in and load out, I switched late this year to using a pair of portable USB-C monitors that accept displayport over USB-C.

I was recently asked at my day-job to think about what the global fleet would look like if I had the powers of Star Trek’s Q and could snap my fingers with a flourish and re-form prod into what I think would be better. Without the restrictions of design documents, dozens of project management strategies and more meetings than I can shake a stick at, I’ve put a lot of idle time into thinking about this.

Recent changes in high profile open source projects has got people talking about sustainability in companies that build open source again. Usually I don’t really care about this as it comes across as just poor business management, but Hashicorp taking the entire core portfolio out of the Open Source ecosystem has lensed this through a new perspective for me. That perspective is when business people try to solve for market conditions, and seem to forget about established solutions.