I spent this week watching an older Cisco ASA slowly lose its ability to see parts of the Internet. How did I fix it? pfSense.
- Unix: How passwords can improve your life.
- Curated list of curated lists of awesome lists. I suppose this was inevitable. (via)
- Hooray for USB. Really, it’s so successful we don’t even think about it any more.
- A Game as Literary Tutorial. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons on writing. I’d describe it as a common nerd experience for people above 35 or so, similar to “your first computer”. (via)
- Computer virus catalog. Surprisingly pretty. (via)
- Why Outlook gets CTRL+F wrong.
- Open (source) for business. Why aren’t open source software interfaces more polished? (via)
- Cosmic rays: more likely a problem than you think. (via)
- Inside bit.ly’s Distributed Systems. (via)
- Huh, bzr appears to be dead, or as dead as any open source project can ever be. (via)
- Making sure software stays insecure. I had to remove a preinstalled antivirus program from a Windows laptop yesterday… It did nothing, but you’d think I was lighting the motherboard on fire from the warnings it put on screen. (via)
- The SIGCIS 2014 Workshop (on historical computing), happening in November in Michigan, has a call for papers out.
- Time Management with Tom Limoncelli. He wrote the definitive book on the subject. (via) There’s plenty more videos at his site; I suggest setting aside some time to watch it. (ha!)
Your unrelated link of the week: Avery Monsen’s Vines. Vines are an excellent way to make a very short comedy sketch. Infinite Waffles and Break the Silence are my favorites so far. (via)
We had pfsense boxes with openvpn, it worked great. Then we bought palo altos and moved to global protect, then nothing was reliable, or worked right, everything cost far far more, and security issues were more difficult to patch, not to mention we were frequently locked out of our own systems by the different structure.