frost on red acer leaves with the sun shining behind them

Just what i find

  • Apple has revealed a new robot specifically to take apart and reuse iPhones

    Apple’s new robot, Daisy (an upgraded version of a robot announced in 2016), can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour, sorting the parts for reuse and recycling, extracting parts which traditional recyclers are unable to safely or cost effectively remove. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/apple-earth-day-daisy-iphone-recycling-a8312951.html Apple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones Continue reading →

  • Blockchain Is About to Revolutionize the Shipping Industry

    The move to paperless movement of goods in these extraordinarily complex logistics chains has the potential to unlock massive benefits, reducing the cost of movements, by shortening the time it takes for goods to cross checkpoints and borders – an example 32 day journey of perishable goods could be completed in 20. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/drowning-in-a-sea-of-paper-world-s-biggest-ships-seek-a-way-out Globalization has Continue reading →

  • A Taxonomy of Tech Debt

    I have no idea about the game that the author is engineering manager for, but this is a good write up of a framework for assessing technical debt, including the value of resolving it now vs later (never) https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt Bill Clark discusses classifying and managing tech debt at Riot. Continue reading →

  • Musk Says Excessive Automation Was ‘My Mistake’

    While I’m sure that eventually, the process could have been automated, anyone who’s tried this even at a trivial scale would tell you to get the process working first, then to automate. So I don’t get how Tesla ended up in this position. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-13/musk-tips-his-tesla-cap-to-humans-after-robots-undercut-model-3 Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who’s built up an aura around how Continue reading →

  • Your Next T-Shirt Will Be Made by a Robot

    The clothing industry has long relied on low cost labour in developing countries, but advances in industrial robotics and machine learning and vision, at reducing cost, mean even those jobs are now at risk. https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/industrial-robots/your-next-tshirt-will-be-made-by-a-robot Georgia Tech spin-off SoftWear Automation is developing ultrafast sewing robots that could upend the clothing industry Continue reading →

  • China’s Uber says it’s time to go global

    "For the past two decades, it was China who learned more from the US," he says. "But in the next 10 years, we'll ride on each other's successes. There's no point thinking who will surpass who." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43735023 The head of China’s ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing says his team is young, idealistic and full of surprises. Continue reading →

  • The NVIDIA GPU Accelerated Cloud (NGC) for Deep Learning and HPC

    An interesting move from hardware vendor to PaaS provider: The NVIDIA GPU Accelerated Cloud (NGC) for Deep Learning and HPC https://www.nvidia.co.uk/gpu-cloud/ A GPU-accelerated cloud platform with access to catalog of fully integrated and optimized containers for deep learning and HPC frameworks. Learn more. Continue reading →

  • LetsEncrypt with DNS-01 validation for Unifi

    Update 2021-01-08: this is now out of date. See my updated post with a much easier method. I have a number of Ubiquiti UAPs, and I manage them with the UniFi app, installed on a linode server. Like any publicly hosted server, i want to use a trusted SSL certificate, and for that, I chose Continue reading →

  • How to upgrade VMWare ESXi on HP Gen8 Microserver

    go to VMware ESXi Patch Tracker and check for the latest ImageProfile e.g. ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard Shut down all VMs and turn on maintenance mode allow outbound firewall requests esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient execute the update: esxcli software profile update -p ESXi-6.5.0-20170404001-standard -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml Disable firewall ports esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e false -r Continue reading →

  • Fix: /var/lib/docker/aufs/diff is consuming entire drive

    Some of my docker containers were complaining that they didn’t have enough drive space. This looked odd – so i logged in to the host and checked around: All space used up. Huh. Wonder why? I did a quick check to see what’s using most space: clearly /var/lib/docker/aufs/diff is what’s causing it. Let’s clean that up: Continue reading →

About me

I’m rob. I spend my time exploring the world, playing board games with my family, solving complex technical problems, and learning new things. Sometimes i write about them here, or code them on GitHub. I believe a few things that guide what I do and how I do it:

  • Hard things are hard. It takes time, effort and practice to be good at them.
  • Everybody can learn something new every day. When we’re born we know how to eat and cry and that’s about it. Everything else we’ve learnt, and we can keep doing that all our lives.
  • Great teams are fun to work in, and great teams achieve great outcomes. The wider the range of people and perspectives in the room, the better the work.

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