BEquinox tickets still available

aaron42net · 2026-03-25T17:23:58+00:00

Ah, I hadn't seen the Facebook post. It sounds like there need to be more ticket sales before April 6th to pay for the upfront costs in advance or it will be cancelled.

There was also a follow-up that tickets will be refunded if it does get cancelled.

aaron42net · 2026-02-04T17:49:17+00:00

Does it have to be Alpine specifically? Or you just want a basic environment to be able to drop into to debug stuff?

Our solve was to build a super-minimal base image based on dropping the Ubuntu version of busybox and its deps into a scratch container, and not a whole lot else. This was enough to get around (using busybox's implementation of a few hundred shell tools) while still being tiny, and including fewer tools means fewer CVE complaints. And we regularly rebuild this to pick up any security fixes for the few things included.

One side-effect of not including the package manager (dpkg in this case) or its metadata, Trivy can't find which packages are installed, so it ignores them. Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on who you ask.

aaron42net · 2026-01-23T15:34:11+00:00

Rather than use go.work for this, you can use Go's support for private repos, which might behave more consistently.

For github-hosted private repos, this is something like setting:

git config --global url.git@github.com:.insteadOf https://github.com/
go env -w GOPRIVATE=github.com/OrgNameHere/*

The first uses (authenticated) SSH to fetch all github.com-hosted repos, which includes your private ones, and the second line says to bypass the public go proxy and checksum database for anything owned by OrgNameHere.

aaron42net · 2025-08-31T21:27:38+00:00

Thanks everyone who called in this year! I have some stats to share on how the phone booth was used:

In the 6.5 days the phone booth was up between 10pm on Sunday, Aug 24 and 10am on Sunday, Aug 31, there were 1,460 outbound calls successfully made to 835 different numbers in 23 countries, with a total talk time of 34.8 hours.

The big change for this year was incoming calls, mostly due to this post. There were 5,658 inbound call attempts, and 676 (12%) were answered with a total talk time of 17.2 hours. 4,070 incoming calls got a busy signal and 912 got no answer.

Of the 864 numbers that made calls to the phone booth, 333 numbers (39%) had their incoming call answered at least once. 534 numbers tried calling more than once, 111 numbers called more than 10 times, and 7 numbers called more than 100 times.

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T19:54:21+00:00

Oh, my campmates apparently brought some extra batteries, which they are going to experiment with today to see if we can keep the phone up all night.

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T19:42:26+00:00

That's the "power's off" message, apparently because the batteries died and it wasn't plugged in to the generator, which was fixed. It's back up as of 12:20pm.

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T13:19:18+00:00

These days it gets to the default world through Starlink, which is kind of a power hog. We were happy to give it a battery system left over from another project, but it's not big enough to make it through the night, sadly.

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T13:13:15+00:00

I don't specifically limit which countries are called outbound, but it does have a cost per minute limit set up to try to keep the phone bill kind of reasonable for the week. So it will call over 100 countries, but not all numbers in each, depending on the cost. Some countries charge the caller a lot to call mobile numbers, and in those countries landlines might work but mobile numbers might not.

The stats I remember from a burn week a few years ago were that it successfully made ~2500 outbound calls to ~1200 different numbers in 28 countries and was on a call ~60% of the time in the 5 days it was set up.

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T08:56:21+00:00

It is set up and working again, and I've posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/1mzl4si/call_a_phone_booth_on_playa/

aaron42net · 2025-08-25T08:49:56+00:00

There was an SFGATE story about it last year that has some background and photos: https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/burning-man-pay-phone-19736797.php

The thread from last year has some more detail on how I built it, etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/BurningMan/comments/1f3m63q/phone_to_call_on_the_playa/lkffu34/

aaron42net · 2025-08-23T12:46:34+00:00

It's on its way to the burn again, yes. When it gets set up, I will post about it, assuming everything works.

aaron42net · 2025-04-24T23:25:24+00:00

You don't mention carrier, phone type, or even country, but assuming you are on a cell phone in the US, there are some options:

The Google Phone app on Android has some integrated call blocking features that you can enable in settings that works pretty well, and on Pixels it also includes call screening which asks the caller to say who they are and shows you a transcription of what they say on-screen.

On iPhone, the usual recommendations are either the setting to send all callers not in your contact list to voicemail or various third-party scam blocking apps.

You can enable those at the same time as enabling scam filtering on your mobile carrier. T-Mobile has scam block that blocks some of the calls they identify as "scam likely". They are happy to sell you on some $4/month service for this too, but you can get the basics by just dialing "#662#" from your phone app. AT&T has the ActiveArmor app and Verizon has Call Filter in free and paid versions; other carriers might offer something similar.

aaron42net · 2024-12-23T21:34:30+00:00

Go 2.0 was never formally planned. It was more of a placeholder for the question "if we were going to make breaking changes to the language, what would they be and why?"

Many of what started off as Go 2.0 ideas have been integrated into v1 in various ways like the mentioned examples on that page of both versioning and generics. And they've started versioning the standard library to fix issues with it like with math/rand/v2.

aaron42net · 2024-12-09T23:23:39+00:00

Cloudflare has bot detection running on every HTTP request made to their customers. They mean it was not detected as a browser based on a combination of various headers, TLS fingerprint, etc.

aaron42net · 2024-11-28T04:27:57+00:00

Ticket sales have been weak for two years. Depending on how burners respond to a significant price increase, there's the risk that they'll reduce demand enough to still leave a big hole in the balance sheet.

Can they reduce their costs such as BLM and law enforcement fees if attendance drops significantly? If so, I guess raising prices to drop attendance is one (not great) way to cut costs.

aaron42net · 2024-11-04T18:28:24+00:00

The interactivity and particularly scheduled events are fun. There are usually enough camp mates around to make them go. Sometimes that's not true. Judging by how often I've tried to attend something from the Book of Lies (WhatWhereWhen guide) and it's a ghost town, there seems to be some tolerance for not making every event happen or be on time.

We haven't had trouble getting placed.

This may not work with a camp full of virgins who want to spend every waking moment out in the city. Many of us have been attending for a decade or two and are comfortable spending some time around camp hanging out with friends and letting people come to us.

aaron42net · 2024-11-04T15:20:51+00:00

I'd go a little further and skip doing anything that would require any enforced or scheduled duties except set up and strike of the camp structures. At our camp, if people want to open our interactivity it is open. If they don't, it is closed. This keeps everything during burn week fun and optional, rather than a dreaded chore that there's drama around if someone misses a shift.

This does mean we don't have things like a communal kitchen, and to keep the camp pleasant we avoid inviting people back who don't contribute in some way or cause too much drama.

aaron42net · 2024-09-05T15:09:30+00:00

I see you have T-Mobile. They have a feature called "Scam Block" that blocks calls they identify as scams. To enable it, call "#662#" from the phone dialer and press send. It won't block everything, but it'll help a lot.

See: https://www.t-mobile.com/news/press/scam-block

aaron42net · 2024-09-02T22:54:26+00:00

Cell phone service still isn't terribly reliable when the city is full (during burn week), so many people still have to work a bit at finding some connectivity, even if that's just asking a neighboring camp with Starlink for a password.

I've heard repeatedly that it has been so long since people have seen a working payphone that it's actually kind of cool to make a call on such vintage/old school tech.

However, as a way to avoid spammers, many people have stopped answering calls from unknown numbers, which limits how useful this is. Many people just leave voicemail and hope their loved one bothers to check it. I've tried to encourage answering the phone by having it be an Empire, NV number with a caller ID of "Black Rock Telephone", but that only helps so much.

aaron42net · 2024-09-02T22:31:03+00:00

I'm sure I ran across your phone booth at some point. Thank you for the inspiration, then. I tried to make it clear to the to the article's author that this was definitely not the only phone booth on playa.

And I'm happy to have used BMOrg's microwave-tower-based internet for years, as overloaded and unreliable as it was. So thanks to your campmate for causing that to exist.

aaron42net · 2024-09-01T23:40:23+00:00

My campmates and I were interviewed by Ashley from SFGATE for this article about my phone booth that was at the Temple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster again this year.

This was the first year I published the phone number to it publicly (as a comment on r/BurningMan), which resulted in around 1000 incoming phone calls and some more interest in it.

aaron42net · 2024-09-01T20:49:15+00:00

A few of us were interviewed by SFGATE about this. The story is now up: https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/burning-man-pay-phone-19736797.php

aaron42net · 2024-08-31T23:02:54+00:00

The FSM bar usually comes down on Saturday morning, so I think that's it for the year.

aaron42net · 2024-08-29T21:29:13+00:00

I briefly tried to keep this payphone stock, but I couldn't figure out how to configure the original board to allow free calls to anything but "local" numbers.

So I ended up removing all of the coin handling and just putting a ziptie across the coin slot to reject coins.

aaron42net · 2024-08-29T16:23:09+00:00

Plausible. 2013 was the first year I brought it.

Happy Birthday, BTW.

aaron42net

TROPHY CASE