I love the eBay “submit an offer” option. I usually offer 20% under the current listed price and it almost always gets accepted. What is powerful is that you pre-auth your credit card so if they accept the offer they get paid immediately.

Hover started offering an “Account Balance” option as a backup for credit cards that expire: https://help.hover.com/hc/en-us/articles/217282297-Managing-payments#h_01c96997-dbe5-4b41-9ce3-ba8f8e65eeed

This is a step in the right direction for making domains a little less fragile. Related.

Oof. I just learned that the admin of BreachForums arrested last year was a kid who lived less than a mile from me. Kid was clearly talented and it is a shame that he went towards crime.

I thank my lucky stars every day that a teacher in my high school took me under his wing and helped me channel my curiosity and rebellion into productive, lawful activities (maintaining a website and mail server for the local school district, breaking into linksys routers in order to fix them and save the school district money rather than nefarious reasons, etc). Others in my high school friend group were not so lucky.

I’m not sure a person’s moral compass really starts to get solidified until their early 20s and what keeps younger folks from veering off is their community. It has to be more than just their parents, who teens have a natural tendency to rebel against. Teachers, librarians, neighbors, coaches, etc, are so important. I’m sorry all of those people failed this kid.

Heck, I wish I would have met him. Maybe I could have helped prevent this? Pretty sure he got started before I moved here, but who knows.

I guess the question is: What do I do now? How can I help prevent other bright kids like him interested in tech from going this direction? Do I reach out to the local high school and run a web development course (that is what helped me back then)?

There is so much knowledge stored in forums, but forum search is so bad that they are borderline unusable unless you want to sink a significant amount of time into reading threads. Each forum needs an LLM trained on it to unlock that knowledge.

I don’t have a bench grinder because I don’t have enough room on the workbench for it to live. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to see if there is one that can mount on the Shopsmith. I just found one on eBay!

I noticed that Shopsmith’s store uses WooCommerce now. Different parts of my life colliding.

Some neighborhood kids set up a hot chocolate stand, so of course we stopped by. I’m sitting here sipping one with marshmallows, whipped cream, and sprinkles.

A bug of some sort caused my Connections emoji blocks to be misaligned, and I kind of like it. NYT should add a 1-2px random rotation or scaling factor to 3 random blocks in the grid.

Working on a blog redesign.

I tried to sketch today, but I was too on edge from a sick child who had tons of tantrums today, and I utterly failed. Chicken scratch. So no drawing to post today, but I learned that I need to do them earlier in the day if I can. Time to go to bed.

One of the cool things about working with a bunch of nerds is that when there is a new piece of software out, someone spins up a Slack channel for it and 30 people work together to become power users over the next couple months.

This afternoon’s House Blend is the remainders of the last four bags of coffee that don’t make a full pot on their own.

Definitely not doing Dry January. Quiet, cold January is a great time to savor good drinks while reading.

I want fewer things to be computerized and more things to be improved by computational analysis. Example: Gas pump touch screens suck. The buttons last much longer. Double down and make these flawless and durable with models instead of replacing them with touch screens.

Snowstorm prep Charlie and I did this afternoon: Got out the snow shovels, made sure the generator is accessible, got out the sled, and filled the bird feeders.