On January 8, 2024, United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched their Vulcan Centaur rocket – in this episode I talk about WHY this was such an important milestone and about the current state of the launch industry where SpaceX is the only compa…
Jan 12
AVFTCN 033 – Kiwix, Meshtastic and content and connectivity during an outage
Tonight here in northwestern Vermont we’re supposed to get the double trouble of heavy, wet snow and a windstorm with winds up to 49 mph (79 kph). The combination will undoubtedly cause trees to fall, taking down power and Internet cables. Forecasters are expecting power outages all across the state. In these moments, I often […]
Jan 10
The Joys Of Being Your Own IT Department – And Of DNS and RSS
Tonight I was looking at my danyork.me aggregation site and I was confused… why were my posts from my danyork.com site NOT appearing in the master list? I *knew* I had written there. Of course my initial thought was some problem with the RSS feed. Yep! On danyork.me I’m using the older FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress that does RSS syndication. A quick look told me that the feed it was supposed to be pulling in was: https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml Except… that was showing up as invalid XML. 🤷♂️ After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www”…
Jan 09
An Excellent Read: The Verge on how "Google shapes everything on the web"
If you want to understand how we got to the Web that we have today, I would strongly recommend reading this beautiful piece by Mia Sato at The Verge on the theme of “Google shapes everything on the Web” It…
Jan 08
TDYR 414 – A New Plan For A New Year
It’s a new year and this year I’ve got a new plan that I’m aiming at for producing weekly podcast episodes. In this episode I talk about the plan an how it relates to other work I’m doing and content I’m creating. More info at: https://www.danyork.com/…
Jan 08
ULA’s Successful Vulcan Centaur Rocket Launch Is Good News
As I was posting about on Mastodon, early this morning United Launch Alliance (ULA) successfully launched their new Vulcan Centaur rocket into space from their launch site in Florida. The rocket carried the first US moon lander (Peregrine) from a private company (Astrobiotic), as well as a whole range of science experiments, part of the remains of several people, and even a collection of stories from writers. Some great coverage is available from ArsTechnica, SpaceNews, SpaceFlight Now, and Space.com (many photos). The key point is that the rocket launched successfully! As I wrote about back in my November 3rd issue…
Jan 07
A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters
In thinking about my themes for 2024 and specifically about changing my habits, one change that I am going to try is to get consistent with both my “The Dan York Report” podcast and also my “A View From The Crow’s Nest” newsletter. Right now they are both “irregular” or “periodic”… meaning I just do them whenever I think about them or have some reason for doing them. Which means that sometimes I publish 4 of them in a week… and then I don’t publish anything for four weeks or more! 🤦♂️ I want to get in the *habit* of…
Jan 06
Crossing the 45th Parallel in Northern Vermont
From the Burlington, Vermont area, it’s only about a 45 minute drive to the Canadian border. (Yes, we are *that*close!🙂) As you get close to the border on Interstate 89, there is a sign on the right side that says: Latitude 45° North Midpoint Equator to North Pole Yes, indeed, once you drive past that point you are now getting closer to the North Pole than the Equator from a latitude perspective! Wikipedia of course has some interesting info about the 45th parallel, including that it has formed part of the US / Canada border at times. In fact, when…
Jan 04
Russ White On The Process Around Creating RFCs in the IETF
Have you ever been curious about the process of creating a Request For Comments (RFC) document within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)? These are the standards like, oh, “HTTP”, that power the Internet. Have you been interested in understanding…
Jan 03
20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web
This morning brought a reminder that it was twenty years ago that I opened up an account on LiveJournal. For about four years, “LJ” was my home on the web. It was where I wrote MANY articles, connected with people across their journals, and started interacting with a few people with whom I am still in touch today. My journal site is still there today, with a much younger photo of me (I still had brown hair!), but my last entry was 11 years ago in April 2013, and that was just an update to a post four years earlier…
