Will's Blog

  This turned out to be a cautionary tale. At the beginning I was hoping to find an AI success story that demonstrated the power of how it lets you wade into the deep end of a domain and find success. It turned into a grueling week of troubleshooting rabbit holes that the AI insisted I get to the bottom of. It's a powerful thing, but it takes a mindset that I'm still trying to figure out. I have what you might call a home lab and was thinking about adding some smart home devices. After a bit of yak shaving it became clear that I needed to setup a VLAN in order to partition the traffic. While I was at it I'd setup networks for IP cameras and my work computer. Last year I switched over to a proper firewall running OPNsense, so I figured all this would be a nice exercise to get practical experience with things I was generally already familiar with. Shortly after firing up ChatGPT I had a high level plan and a better understanding of how to design a network. With a couple manag...

Cloud technology has slowly crept its way into nearly every aspect of our digital lives. And why not? It's convenient and easy to use, nothing to install or configure, and it's often free. Email clients are a great example of this. People used to live out of Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes , today all you need is a web browser. This starts becoming a problem when you consider your privacy. By using these services, especially the ones that don't cost money, the price is your private information. Consider your family photos and facial recognition, are you comfortable with Google knowing exactly who you associate with? What about your private documents? Even passwords are moving to the cloud with services like LastPass and 1Password ! Another consideration is whether the service will exist in the future. If you keep notes on the cloud, how upset would you be if that service was shutdown? If you don't run it yourself you're beholden to the company providing the servi...