Author Archives: jik

Can’t log into Costco website, their technical support is useless

I spent nearly four hours of my time proving this isn’t my fault. I’m still doubtful that Costco will do anything to resolve the problem.

Another credit reporting agency breach, another terrible breach notification letter

TransUnion is bad at security and bad at handling security breaches and none of this is going to get better until we have a real federal data privacy law with meaningful penalties for companies which leak people’s data.

Thoughts on the proposed Massachusetts Data Privacy Act, S.2608

The proposed law is a good start but it has problems that should be fixed before it is enacted. Here are some of them.

Using Tasker on Android to toggle Blokada+ / private DNS / WiFi

Creating an Android quick setting tile that performs three different tasks automatically so I don’t have to do them all by hand on a regular basis.

Suspicious email from “pulse <root@overlinux.com>”: malicious or just dumb?

The person who sent this email is either extremely clueless or up to no good. It’s hard to say for certain which.

Some Comics Aggregator internals changed, let me know if you run into issues

I’ve had to rewrite a bit of the Comics Aggregator code to be able to add Alexandra Petri to it. Because this involved switching from one third-party library to another in code that doesn’t just impact Alexandra Petri, I may have broken something. I did some testing and everything seems to be working, but I… Read More »

Alexandra Petri added to comics aggregator

I’ve added the humor columnist Alexandra Petri, who previously wrote for The Washington Post and now writes for The Atlantic, to the comics aggregator. If you don’t feel the need to read her stuff Right Away When It Comes Out, then I would encourage you to use the “1-day delay” variant of her entry in… Read More »

The solution I’ve found for non-rich Americans who want to legally move some money offshore

You can use Wise to convert dollars into foreign currency at a very competitive rate, then transfer the converted currency into an HSBC Expat account, if you have enough liquidity to open one.

How I lost my family’s email, recovered most of it, and made sure it wouldn’t happen again

I made some mistakes, it cost me some time and a bit of lost data, and I’ve taken steps to make sure if it happens again I’ll lose less time and less data.