We need to talk more about how just anyone can walk into an electronics section, pick up a router and become the administrator of a class C network without any kind of training or background check.
I Must Attempt to Explain the LEGO Scandal Rocking YouTube, Entire State of Utah
The Bricks & Minifigs / Reckless Ben beef is breaking containment and can no longer be ignored.
Hey I thought we'd killed off the UI pattern of having a new clickable thing appear in a prominent spot on a web page soon after the page has loaded, pushing existing interface elements (that you may be about to click on!) down/out of the way. I guess it came back during the pandemic? It's so very annoying/disruptive.
I hate how so many people are struggling right now, while a handful of people have more money than it's possible to spend in a hundred lifetimes
Related, this week was the first time a service I wanted to use acknowledged that they have an MCP endpoint but no REST API to offer human developers. Le sigh.
Can’t help but wonder, if more people and orgs provided structured/RSS feeds of the things they put out into the world, would we have fewer LLMs wandering around just to extract useful things from arbitrary blobs of text?
I am fatigued by the number of daily prompts I get to sync things, add AI features, upgrade, invite contacts, share my data. As someone intent on data ownership and self-hosting where possible, I am especially on the lookout for saying no to these, so it’s terrifying to think what typical users are opting in to (or failing to opt out of) all day long.
I blogged about using the open source Nagios tool for monitoring small business infrastructure, services and SaaS dependencies.
https://tech.chrishardie.com/2026/nagios-small-business-infrastructure-monitoring/
Using Nagios for small business infrastructure monitoring - Chris Hardie's Tech and Software Blog
There are a million tools out there for monitoring services and measuring application performance, and I’m sure many of them are awesome. When I went looking for a good service and infrastructure monitoring solution for our community newspaper’s one-person IT department (me), I came back to an open source tool that I’d probably first started … Continue reading Using Nagios for small business infrastructure monitoring
Bot war escalations are getting ridiculous. Our web host introduced a Cloudflare anti-bot layer that we can't manage/audit. Suddenly we can't post, authenticated, to our own site's REST API endpoints without getting a JS challenge. Support rep didn't have any knowledge of the Cloudflare layer, told us to deactivate all our plugins. Now it's with a senior engineer. 😭
I blogged about the ways that Apple's iCloud private relay service has made home network and parental controls management harder.
https://tech.chrishardie.com/2026/apple-private-relay-network-parental-control/
Apple Private Relay and network parental control - Chris Hardie's Tech and Software Blog
I’m jotting down a few things I’ve learned about Apple’s iCloud Private Relay network service and the implications of using it for having parental controls or other network allow/block settings in place. What is iCloud Private Relay? Apple describes iCloud Private Relay as a privacy-protecting service that hides the IP address and network activity (DNS … Continue reading Apple Private Relay and network parental control
Mallory's Musings & Mischief