Category Archives: General

Vaccine Scepticism is stupid, but not for the reason you might think

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Recently I was sent a video by a certain Dr John Campbell titled “Immunology of mRNA vaccines”, which I won’t link to here, but it essentially casts doubt about the safety of mRNA vaccines with no evidence or sources whatsoever. In a discussion with a fellow retired crank named Robert Campbell, he leaps to unlikely conclusions from official statistic, misrepresents the effectiveness of the vaccines at preventing disease, invokes broader concern about genetic science, ignores the overwhelming evidence of effectiveness, and fails to see wood for trees.

In this post, I want to talk briefly about the vaccine scepticism industry, of which Dr Campbell is a part, as he is evidently profiting from it.

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Improving your privacy with a custom email domain

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This blog post is a follow-up to It’s Time to Ditch Gmail. It began as a review of Fastmail, and my experience of moving to it from Gmail, but I quickly found myself going on a tangent. Since privacy was the main driver in my decision to move to Fastmail, and using a custom domain is one of the ways that I protect my privacy, I figured it was important enough to warrant its own post.

One of the factors that made it easier to move away from Gmail is my use of a custom domain for most of my mail. Before moving to Fastmail, this domain was tied to a GSuite account which forwarded everything to my standard Gmail account. This made switching in anger much easier, as I had fewer accounts to log in to and update my email address, and those that were still pointing directly at Gmail tended to be older low-value accounts that I no longer use anyway.

In this article though, I want to take a detour to explain why I use a custom domain, and how it can aid your privacy. Continue reading →

It’s Time to Ditch Gmail

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I haven’t written much about privacy on this blog, despite often behaving, by some people’s standards, like a paranoid schizophrenic where my data is concerned. Until fairly recently I used to run a rooted phone with XPrivacy installed, which is about as private as you can get without ditching smartphones altogether. These days I’ve gone back to a stock un-rooted phone, partly because Android permissions have improved (although you do have to be careful with apps targeting older APIs), and partly because rooting is more risk and burden to me as a user. Also, some apps actively attempt to block rooted devices for quite legitimate (if, I would argue, misguided) reasons.

Anyway, I could go on for hours about Android privacy, but the subject of this post is Gmail. We all know that Google mines your personal data for targeted advertising purposes. But when giving data to companies, there’s a balance between functionality that is useful to you, and commercialising your data for purposes that, often, are not in your best interest.

While Gmail was once an innovative service, I’d argue that the scales have long been tipped in favour of commercialisation, and that today the data cost of Gmail outweighs its value as a service. Continue reading →

Kiwis, London, and expectations

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Recently there’s been a conversation in the expat community about Kiwis making the move to London. Alex Hazlehurst’s article, which set out to dispel the myth that finding a job in London is easy for kiwis, attracted a fair bit of commentary (she also has a nicely designed blog here). Some of it was nice, some not so nice, and one reply was well written but somewhat condescending.

This conversation is not about people coming for an extended holiday. It is not about coming to London on the two-year visa, with nothing but travel plans and maybe a bit of bar or temp work here and there. It’s about young Kiwis moving to London to start or continue their careers, as I and many others have done. Continue reading →

Ubuntu Home Server 14.04

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I had grand intentions.

This home server article was to be a detailed masterpiece, a complete documentation of my home server setup.

It hasn’t turned out that way, and many pieces are missing. Turns out, that writing a detailed article on setting up a server is much harder than just doing it! So what you see here is what I finally managed to publish, 5 months after actually building it. I hope you find it useful, and I don’t rule out the possibility that I may update parts of it in future. Continue reading →

Sony’s “cancellation” of The Interview’s cinematic release is a shrewd move

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Yesterday, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) announced that it has cancelled the theatrical release of Seth Rogen’s “The Interview”, in the wake of terrorist threats.

In light of the decision by the majority of our exhibitors not to show the film The Interview, we have decided not to move forward with the planned December 25 theatrical release. We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theater-goers.

Apparently, one of the demands of the GoP hackers that breached SPE, was that Sony should not release this film. I’m not making this shit up.

According to the USA’s own Department of Homeland Security, the threat is, unsurprisingly, not credible. Sony therefore, has no reason to cancel the theatrical release. Other than… publicity.

The trailer looks bloody awful, and if I was North Korea I wouldn’t take offense at all. Really, it should damage Seth Rogen’s reputation more than Kim Jong-un.

Cancelling it then, is exactly the right thing to do. Except that it really hasn’t been “cancelled”, as the release will eventually be “re-evaluated” once there is “no longer any threat to innocent lives”. Of course, no one would ever want to see a “highly controversial” film which “incited terrorist threats” and “offended an entire nation”.

Talk about making Lemonade.

They used to call this /.’d

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Maybe these days it’s “hackernews’d”.

Some kind person posted a link to this article, which resulted in an email alert from Linode about outgoing traffic at midnight this evening.

This blog runs on a single wee Linode instance, but fortunately it’s over-engineered for its usual traffic volume, and served by nginx, php-fpm and the WordPress totalcache plugin.

It seemed to weather the storm really comfortably with load hovering around 0.2.

Network Graph

Wordpress Graph

RMT tube strike – whose side would you take?

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Tube strikes are unfortunately a fairly regular fact of life in London, and so far I’ve been unaware of the reasons the RMT (National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport workers) feels strike action is necessary. So with the recent announcement of more strikes, I decided to educate myself this time around so I could either support the RMT and accept the inconvenience, happier in the knowledge that it’s for a good cause, or support TFL and just be angry.

Unfortunately, I’m just angry.

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Christchurch

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Nostalgia is a wonderful experience. Visiting an old city, seeing old friends, visiting old bars, shops, and reliving the moments is an experience to be treasured. With Christchurch, we have been deprived.

I visited a full 3 years after the most devastating quake (February 22nd, 2011). In that time, much of the rubble has been cleared, and the city is starting to rebuild. But it was shocking just how much of the condemned old city remains, so long after the event.

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