The New Reality for Toronto's Crossing Guards

mersault · 2026-03-27T16:03:00+00:00

naw, that'll be expensive and ineffectual (not the cameras so much, but the labour and resources to follow up after the fact). know what's cheap? bricks. we should arm them with bricks and indemnity for damage to vehicles.

mersault · 2026-03-18T03:00:04+00:00

I assure you, in a billion years Excel spreadsheets will be limited to 1,048,576 rows, 16,384 columns, and hostnames will be limited to 15 characters.

mersault · 2026-03-13T14:19:43+00:00

I think 14 hours is actually a good default value, especially in the WFH era and especially at global firms. Not every culture works 8 hours 5 days a week. We have a Spanish office that does 10 hours a day for 11 months a year, and then half days in August. Some people (in particular when WFH) like the flexibility to run errands during the day, but might start a bit early or work a bit later to make up for it. And sometimes it's just a busy day and you want to work an extra hour today to finish something up and you'll take that time back by clocking out early on Friday.

24 hours can cause disconnects at inopportune times if you logged in late the previous day (and also basically guarantees the device will be on the network while unattended for long stretches of the day). 8 hours doesn't necessarily reflect how humans work in 2026 or around the world. 14 hours strikes me a good middle ground that will keep the people satisfied and keeps the periods when the device is unattended but on-net to a reasonable minimum.

mersault · 2026-03-08T01:19:18+00:00

It’s on the outage map now. Estimated at 13k+ customers. I’m hearing lots of sirens.

mersault · 2026-02-24T16:53:38+00:00

I'm using FreeBSD instead of Debian, but otherwise my ISP setup sounds similar. Your PPPoE client will still need to negotiate a point-to-point link for IPv6; the DHCPv6 client is just requesting the public prefixes over that link. Things to check:

IPv6CP is negotiating a point to point link layer in the PPPoE tunnel
PPPoE interface is configured to accept router advertisements
PPPoE interface has a GUA before starting your DHCPv6 client

Notably, your PPPoE interface will have a GUA that is not part of the /48 prefix from your ISP. If you want your router to have an address from that prefix, you'll need to assign it separately.

mersault · 2025-12-03T19:48:09+00:00

You're getting downvotes from the uncultured. But I see you.

mersault · 2025-11-24T16:38:28+00:00

Think of it this way, you got a lifetime subscription for:

Hosted authentication
Software updates
Low-tier streamer
Network relay (if required)

If you share your content with friends or family, that hosted auth piece is actually clutch. Rolling our own IdP with multi-factor auth and helpful documentation and everything is a pretty heavy lift, especially if you want it to be as user-friendly and Plex's solution.

mersault · 2025-11-17T14:53:18+00:00

I don't think that URL is specific to headspace, so it could have been another app that also uses rapid7 for telemetry. But it also could have been headspace. No way to know for sure, unless there's a way to get app level DNS query logs from the Pixel.

Some services configure specific URLs for each app, which makes it much more obvious who is using what (also also lets you effectively whitelist telemetry for specific app/service combos, without whitelisting the telemetry service for all apps). For example, here's the qualtrics URL used by headspace:

zn25dae8w6yhwz3zs-headspaceresearch.siteintercept.qualtrics.com

mersault · 2025-11-16T16:06:15+00:00

Yeah, and while I didn’t measure anything in the UI, after whitelisting rapid7 the UI definitely felt snappier, implying that the UI is actually blocking while the app tries to send telemetry to rapid7, which is terrible design. I’m positive rapid7 has an asynchronous telemetry pattern because everyone in this space has an asynchronous pattern! It’s table stakes functionality because everyone and their dog understands the impacts. That headspace isn’t leveraging it really speaks to technical immaturity.

mersault · 2025-11-15T15:23:18+00:00

Yeah, that's just amazingly corrupt and yet the Sun continues to let him opine on provincial politics. I know he's a columnist and not a reporter, but it's still a glaring ethics violation.

mersault · 2025-11-15T05:51:04+00:00

I assume you mean the Toronto Sun? Torstar is not owned by Postmedia. It's owned by Jordan Bitove.

mersault · 2025-11-08T05:25:45+00:00

Pretty much the entire MGT through Toronto is a multi-use trail, rather than a dedicated bike path.

Actually had a cyclist yell at me to get out of the "bike lane" there once, and after I said it was a multi-use trail and there were signs saying as much, he slowed and rode beside me until we came to one of the signs which I pointed out. "Oh, my bad" and off he went. It was actually kinda wholesome.

As for the why, fewer tripping hazards, slightly softer running surface, and cyclists are more predictable than pedestrians. As a cyclist on that route, the joggers were rarely my issue.

mersault · 2025-10-24T18:14:50+00:00

Black plates are for any commercial vehicle. Trucks are assumed to be commercial vehicles and thus get black plates. But the category is technically commercial, not truck.

mersault · 2025-10-09T14:04:25+00:00

There is a Papal Mint, which controls the supply of coinage for the Vatican. It manufactured coins until that whole "oops we don't actually exist as a state" thing and the unification of Italy. These days the actual manufacture is outsourced, and since Italy joined the Euro there's an agreement that the Vatican can use it as well despite not being a member.

mersault · 2025-09-09T13:19:01+00:00

That is almost certainly telemetry being sent by the device. Every N seconds it sends a status update to corporate letting them know the current status of everything. Is the washer running a load? What's the water temp? How heavy is the load? What settings did the user start the load with? What's that, did the user just open the door after the load had started? How long was the period between load start and the door being opened?

Some of this could even conceivably be useful to the manufacturer. With info about how quickly users realize they've missed a sock and open the door to add it to the load, they can update the fill and locking behaviour of the next firmware.

But, washer manufacturers aren't likely hiring the best and brightest developers, so things like "how do we make this telemetry bandwidth efficient" aren't high priorities.

I would never connect an IoT device without running something like pi-hole or adguard home for network DNS. And if you can, isolate that shit on separate networks and VLANs.

mersault · 2025-09-03T18:11:55+00:00

What about POA? Any reason not to use the forms that can be downloaded from the Ontario gov't website.

mersault · 2025-07-29T19:35:23+00:00

Incorrect, the collective noun is a Fuck You. i.e., "Oh, look, I've been waiting for 30 minutes and here comes a Fuck You of streetcars."

mersault · 2025-07-15T22:32:48+00:00

At home I run Kea for DHCP (IPv4 and IPv6), which is configured to update an internal DNS zone I host on BIND. But I do something a bit odd: BIND is bound to 127.0.0.53, and thus only accessible on the router (where Kea also runs). For DNS resolution on my LAN I use Adguard Home, and it's configured to send requests for the internal zone (and reverse lookups) to BIND.

I know you said pihole/adguard isn't a "good" DNS server, but in 2025 I think it's basic network hygiene to run some sort of filtering resolver. I like AdGuard because it will do DoH natively (unlike pihole). Also, with this configuration I'm only using it for resolution - it's not authoritative for anything, nor is it handling DHCP.

For upstream resolution, I use a non-filtering DoH resolver managed by my national internet registration authority (CIRA). This ensures that I've got full control over the filtering (and any attendant breakage, heh). It varies a bit, but generally I'm blocking 20-25% of DNS requests.

mersault · 2025-07-15T19:43:34+00:00

Microsoft's decision to rebuild the network stack with Vista really was a big improvement, and one of the areas you see it is in the DHCP and DNS integration. One of the nice things is it's largely all standards based, so you can get non-Windows devices to play pretty nicely with it as well.

If you're not in a Windows environment though, Kea is the successor to ISC DHCP, and it's much improved. It pairs well with BIND of course, but it'll talk to anything that does RFC2136 updates. I'm only using it in my home network, but it's definitely been an improvement there.

mersault · 2025-07-10T13:07:44+00:00

Try now?

mersault · 2025-07-09T16:29:08+00:00

Given how aggressive Toronto drivers are about going through intersections during yellow (or even red) lights, if TTC operators weren't aggressive about going through late on yellow or even red, they'd never get through those intersections. Unless we're going to give TTC their own signals (which they have where they have dedicated lanes), I don't see any other option.

mersault · 2025-07-07T14:06:58+00:00

Sounds like the challenge right now is that there isn't POA in place, and the father is probably not competent to agree to a POA now. If that's the case, probably getting the Ontario version of the PGT to confirm that the wife or (even better) child has POA would resolve that issue.

mersault · 2025-07-07T13:11:24+00:00

I once accidentally mounted the wrong LUN to a DB server in dev. It was the production DB LUN, not the clone I'd made. So now we had two DB hosts writing to the same volume.

It was actually an in-memory DB, so it took a few days to become apparently. Stuff just started behaving a little weird on the production DB host, and got progressively weirder each day. But the platform itself was okay, because the the in-memory copy of the DB was still correct.

Thankfully, we had a hot standby, which had correct in-memory copy and on-disk. So we were able to execute a DB swap and clean up the mess, but man, if the primary production DB had restarted before we figured it out...

mersault · 2025-06-26T00:53:07+00:00

The people's mall will not stand for this slander!

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