January 2024 archive

TDYR 415 – Why ULA’s Vulcan Centaur Launch Was So Important

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 company consistently launching rockets. You can read more at: - https://www.danyork.com/2024/01/ulas-successful-vulcan-centaur-rocket-launch-is-good-news.html -https://crowsnest.danyork.com/2023/11/03/avftcn-022-the-global-chokepoint-where-spacex-is-the-only-consistent-launch-provider/ Comments are welcome - do you want more episodes like this?

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 think about what we would do in an extended power or Internet outage. Specifically, I think about:

  • How can we access Internet content offline? (Without a connection)
  • How can we communicate without Internet or telecom connectivity?

In this newsletter, I’ve got a couple of thoughts….

Accessing Internet content… offline.

Given that we store so much of our information online – what do you do without a connection? Do you have local repositories / copies of all your critical files?

But also – what if you want to look up information? Say… from Wikipedia? How do you do that?

Readers who have been around for a while may be already saying “That’s simple, Dan, I just use curl, wget, or something similar to pull down a copy of a website!”

And yes, you can do that. It works.

But there’s a far more elegant solution – Kiwix!

Kiwix is software that lets you download Internet content so that you can read it offline. It started out focused on Wikipedia, but has expanded since then to cover other sites. The cool thing is that you can use Kiwix in several ways:

  • On a desktop computer (Mac, Windows, Linux)
  • On a mobile phone (IOS, Android)
  • On a Raspberry Pi (which you could then use with WiFi to serve as a local hotspot)

(There are also browser extensions for popular browsers, which could work with a server product they offer, or simply with the “zim” files stored in a folder on a drive..)

You then download the appropriate packages of content (“zim” files) and… ta da… you are using the site offline!

If you have a free 109 GB, you can download the entire 6.3 million articles from English Wikipedia and have your own offline copy. They also have packages of all sorts of subsets of Wikipedia – the top 100 pages, various sections, with-and-without images, and more.

The Kiwix library currently has hundreds of “books” that you can download for offline access. (At this moment, it says “1010”, but that includes multiple different download options for many of the sites.) There is also content from TED Talks and more.

The nice part is you can just have Kiwix on your mobile phone with some site content – and then as along as you can keep your phone charged, you can have access to all the Internet content.

Kiwix is a nonprofit organization primarily supported by users and foundations (including the WikiMedia Foundation) and they are doing good work. I do encourage you to check them out!

There are of course other solutions out there for offline access of Internet content. Do you have one you like? If so, please drop me a note – I’m always curious about solutions people find.

Messaging without Internet connectivity

I often wonder – what would we do if we had an extended power outage for multiple days? It’s been a while, but we have had ice storms that knocked out power and Internet for several days … or even longer. We saw some of the extreme storms last year that knocked out connectivity for days or weeks in other parts of the world.

Like all good Vermonters, we have a portable generator that we could use to provide some electricity. We live in an area with many homes that would probably get attention from the utility companies and so might not be out for too long.

But what if we were? How could we communicate with other people in our area if we didn’t have Internet or telecommunications?

One option of course would be to get a Starlink antenna. They can work with minimal power and so we could use it to get Internet access and be able to communicate with others. If other people in the area also had Starlink dishes we could be able to connect.

I do think there is tremendous power in the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems to add another layer of resilience.

BUT… that requires people to have the Starlink equipment, pay for subscriptions, etc.

What other ways are possible?

I don’t have a specific answer yet myself that I have worked with.

But I’m intrigued by what the folks involved with Meshtastic are doing. As they say, it is “an open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices.”

It’s pretty cool! It’s based off of using “LoRa” hardware and unlicensed spectrum. The Meshtastic documentation does a decent job of explaining what it is all about and how it works.

WARNING! This all gets über-geeky and dives down into building your own hardware, installing your own software, etc. If you like that kind of thing, it’s awesome. If not… you may just want to skip ahead. 😀

I was going to write more details… but I found that someone else already did! By way of a Mastodon post, I found that a person going by the name of “Hydroponic Trash” has written “a guide on building autonomous, off-grid, encrypted, and solar-powered communications infrastructure that lets you send text messages without any cellular or power infrastructure.”

You can view it at:

(Yes, it’s on Substack… but you can still read it, and the person is working on make a PDF available on his website.)

Fair warning that as he gets toward the end, he gets into use cases and you may not agree with his politics. But if you focus on the first 3/4 of the article, it’s fascinating to see all the parts and pieces that can create this kind of low-power, off-grid communications network.

I’m personally hoping we don’t get to the point where we need systems like this… but given the increasingly extreme weather we’re seeing, who knows! I’m glad there are people out there working on solutions like these.

What other communication ways have you seen to add resiliency to our communications?


Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

Please drop me a note in email – if you are a subscriber, you should just be able to reply back. And if you aren’t a subscriber, just hit this button 👇 and you’ll get future messages.

This IS also a WordPress hosted blog, so you can visit the main site and add a comment to this post, like we used to do back in glory days of blogging.

Or if you don’t want to do email, send me a message on one of the various social media services where I’ve posted this. (My preference continues to be Mastodon, but I do go on others from time to time.)

Until the next time,
Dan


Connect

The best place to connect with me these days is:

You can also find all the content I’m creating at:

If you use Mastodon or another Fediverse system, you should be able to follow this newsletter by searching for “@crowsnest.danyork.com@crowsnest.danyork.com“

You can also connect with me at these services, although I do not interact there quite as much (listed in decreasing order of usage):


Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.

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. 🤷‍♂️

Screenshot of W3C RSS Validator showing that the feed is invalid

After some trial and error, I discovered that… I need to drop the “www” on the feed! 🤦‍♂️ If I instead use this:

https://danyork.com/rss.xml

Then… everything works!

Screenshot of the W3C Feed validator with the feed successfully validating

I made the update to the FeedWordPress settings, forced an “Update Now” and … 🎉 …. the posts started appearing again at danyork.me!

So it’s somewhere between a DNS issue (cue “it’s always DNS!”) and a web hosting issue. My DanYork.com site is one of the ones that I still have running on the old TypePad platform…. and THAT  is where I suspect the issue lies.

www.danyork.com is just a CNAME pointing over to lodestar.typepad.com, where TypePad is then redirecting it to my specific blog. However, if I do a ‘curl’ for the www URL, I can see I get a plain HTML page that looks like it may be trying to do a meta refresh. If I do a ‘curl’ on the non-www URL, I get the correct RSS feed.

However, in an amusing bit of 🤦‍♂️, the RSS feed says that it should be at “www.danyork.com”:

<atom10:link xmlns:atom10="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" rel="self" href="https://www.danyork.com/rss.xml" type="application/rss+xml" />

But of course that won’t work.

So… something for me to dive into at some point and figure out.

Maybe I should call my IT team!  Oh, wait… that’s … me! 🤦‍♂️

 

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 is an interactive piece that explains in both text and animations why it is that search engine optimization (SEO) has driven every website to look the same… why even short articles are being broken up by headings… why author bylines are suddenly expanding into bios…  … and why the #Web is increasingly bland, useless, and untrustworthy

It also explains why increasingly people are using other search experiences (ex TikTok) - or moving content into other systems - purely because the Web is no longer working in the way it used to. It’s now gamed by so many… and filled with generative-AI spawned content farms….

Certainly some of us keep posting to our good old websites or blogs… largely because they were and are labors of love, not profit.

But those seeking profit or fame are all playing the SEO game… and we with our regular old websites will lose out on the discovery.

I thought one of the final paragraphs was on point about the paywalling of content (my emphasis added):

But no matter what happens with Search, there’s already a splintering: a web full of cheap, low-effort content and a whole world of human-first art, entertainment, and information that lives behind paywalls, in private chat rooms, and on websites that are working toward a more sustainable model. As with young people using TikTok for search, or the practice of adding “reddit” to search queries, users are signaling they want a different way to find things and feel no particular loyalty to Google.

People are looking for alternatives, and increasingly they are moving to private communities / walled gardens in large part to avoid the spam... and to avoid the blandness and overall "enshittification" of the Web.

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/2024/01/a-new-plan-for-getting-in-the-habit-of-consistently-publishing-podcasts-and-newsletters.html

ULA’s Successful Vulcan Centaur Rocket Launch Is Good News

Vulcan centaur launch 776

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 of my “A View From the Crow’s Nest” newsletter, we are currently in this strange spot where there has been only ONE launch provider - globally - that has been consistently launching rockets… SpaceX.

And SpaceX has done AMAZING work! In 2023 they launched an incredible 98 rockets (96 Falcon 9s, 2 Starships) from four different launch locations. That’s a launch cadence that is truly amazing.

But as amazing as the SpaceX team is, it’s a bit scary from a resilience point-of-view to have only one company consistently launching systems into space. It would be good for all of us to have more competition.

And meanwhile, ULA in 2023 launched a grand total of… *3* rockets.

Yes, 3!

Largely because ULA is running out of its Atlas and Delta rockets and has been betting everything on this new Vulcan Centaur. However, as the Wikipedia page notes, the Vulcan Centaur has been in the works since 2014. It was supposed to first launch 5 years ago in 2019… and then it was delayed… and delayed… and delayed… and delayed… until today!

So it is great to see this successful launch. Hopefully this will lead to many more.

But we’ll have to see.

Right now ULA has only booked six launches over the rest of 2024 … while SpaceX is reportedly shooting for 144 launches! ULA could of course book more, particularly now that they’ve had a successful launch. But they are still far away from the volume and cadence that SpaceX is achieving.

And, as Eric Berger wrote in an excellent piece over at ArsTechnica, it’s not clear where ULA is heading as a company. There seems to be a good bit of tension between the company and its Boeing and Lockheed owners. And the owners are also putting the company up for sale. (The Wikipedia article about ULA is a good read.)

The good news for now is that the Vulcan Centaur’s first launch was successful. Hopefully their next will be as well, and they can start launching more and more satellites and systems.

Meanwhile, SpaceX will keep launching and launching and launching… 

--

Image credit: Tweet from ULA

A New Plan For Getting in the Habit of Consistently Publishing Podcasts and Newsletters

a screenshot of a black calendar of the month of January with a large green checkmark on every Friday and a large orange checkmark on every MondayIn 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 doing both.  I want to instill in myself the discipline of regular production.

And I also want to be realistic by planning a weekly production. Sometimes in the past I have tried to “get back into producing content” and targeted daily production. But that’s not realistic for me with everything else going on in life. 

We’ll see. Weekly may turn out to be too much. Perhaps I will shoot for every other week.

My logic for the podcast being on Mondays is that it gives me time on the weekend to do the production. My logic for the newsletter on Fridays is that sometimes I write about stuff that people might want to experiment with over a weekend - or I have links to other longer reads or items that may take more time than people have in a typical week day.

There’s also a symbiosis where either the Friday newsletter can feed into the Monday podcast… or vice versa where the Monday podcast becomes the topic for the Friday newsletter.

Another aspect is that by limiting myself to weekly, I’m hoping to plan ahead and produce both newsletters and podcasts in advance! (Wild concept for me!!)

Which isn’t to say that I won’t also put out a podcast or newsletter at another time when something interesting or breaking news makes me want to publish a new edition. But I want to get to a consistent cadence.

Again… we’ll see! It’s all a grand experiment. Stay tuned… if I actually execute on this I’ll drop a podcast episode tomorrow…. 🙂

 

Crossing the 45th Parallel in Northern Vermont

IMG_3995From 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 we lived in Ottawa, Ontario, for five years from 2000-2005, I maintained a blog called “North of 45” about our experience living there. (Sadly now all filled with ads because of the decline of LiveJournal.)

These days, we mostly drive north of the 45th to either: 1) go curling just over the border in Bedford, Quebec; 2) go to the Montreal airport (YUL) to fly somewhere; or 3) go to our closest IKEA in Boucherville, Quebec, just to the east of Montreal. 😀

I just smile whenever I see the sign. We are definitely in the northern part of the northern hemisphere!

 

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 how they work?

If so, someone I know, Russ White, recently completed a 7-part article series about the entire process over on the Packet Pushers Network site. Russ has nicely summarized the series on his site at:

https://rule11.tech/the-rfc-process/

He does a nice job providing an overview of the long process of starting with an idea, creating an “Internet draft”, working it through the IETF process, and then hopefully getting it published.

There are many more details, of course, but Russ lays out the high-level aspects and mentions some of the parts of the process which are harder to understand for someone new to the IETF.

If you are interested in the RFC process, I would encourage you to give Russ’ series of articles a read.

Using Markdown instead of XML

I do have one area of disagreement with Russ. He advocates for using XML for writing Internet drafts, whereas I used to write drafts in XML but have moved over the years to instead using Markdown. If you are writing simple text documents, I believe Markdown is a simpler and easier way to work.

Back in 2019, I gave at tutorial session at the IETF meeting in Prague about “Writing Internet Drafts in Markdown”. The materials are at:

[One important note - this tutorial session was given FIVE YEARS AGO and the state of Markdown tools is always evolving. I would monitor https://authors.ietf.org/drafting-in-markdown to see about new tools and ways to work with Markdown.]

The video of the tutorial session is actually a great comparison of the two ways of creating Internet drafts. In the first half, my friend Matt Miller explains how to create I-Ds using XML tools, and then around the 32-minute mark I explain how to create drafts in Markdown.

Either way - XML or Markdown - hopefully Russ’ series helps explain a bit more about the whole process of writing a RFC.

 

20 Years Ago, LiveJournal Was My Home On The Web

IMG_3981This 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 in April 2009 saying where people could find my writing. I haven’t really written there for most of 16 years… since back in 2008.

In those early days in the mid-2000s, LJ was a vibrant, social place to be. There were no advertisements and it was one of those amazing places of creativity during that time. Strong communities were built and thrived. Many of the ways we started interacting there (ex. “friends”) would carry over into later services.

Wikipedia outlines some of what happened after that… Brad Fitzpatrick sold the site to SixApart and I think they understandably wanted to figure out how to turn it into a business. But then in 2007 it was sold to a Russian media company… and things changed more and more after that.  (Viewing my site today I am amused to see some of the ads displayed to me having Cyrillic text.)

In my own case, I’d started to branch out. Those were the glory days of “blogging” as a thing, and at the end of 2005 I’d launched first Disruptive Telephony and then Disruptive Conversations as places where I very prolifically wrote on different topics. I continued to use LJ as a place for “personal” blogging… up until I decided to start up the site you are reading this article on.

Still, for a few years, it was my home on the Web - and I’m grateful for the time that I was there!