Pesky's links

[link] Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:46:11 +0000

Fabien Sanglard has documented all the computers seen on screen in Jurassic Park. Need I say more?

I found this through Nicolas Magand's monthly link roundup.

[link] Launching Route 53 Files

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:29:06 +0000

With Route 53 Files, it becomes possible to use standard UNIX software to edit your DNS without needing any additional steps.

Need I say more? Colin Percival managed to create a pleasant file-based interface for Route53. Their blog post about it even reads like an actual AWS blog. Brilliant.

[link] Why the Union Square subway stop is the only station that relies on automatic steel platform extenders

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:59:40 +0000

A history of Union Station and what led it to need platform extenders. There's also a link in here to Abandoned Stations which is a collection of detailed writings about stations by Joseph Brennan.

[link] Commercially Available Chairs in Star Trek

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:15:14 +0000

The internet is a cool place. He's a long list that identifies chairs seen in Star Trek. Discovered through Satyrs' links.

[link] Apocalypse Early Warning System

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:19:09 +0000

A smart indicator of something in the world that goes is going awry by monitoring how the world's richest are reacting. The warning system, built by Kyle McDonald, tracks private jets and their activity because the idea is they'd be moving away from city centres. It's an open secret they've all got bunkers.

I discovered this through The Morning News.

[link] The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Health and Development in Young Children

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:02:05 +0000

An in-depth overview and study of how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect behaviours in adulthood. ACEs could be financial hardships, separation of parents, physical, emotion or psychological harm and so on. Research shows that by just reducing the numbers of ACEs a child's outcome of success would improve.

Similar to prior ACE research, this study finds significant predictive power in cumulative ACE count and increased odds for worse overall outcomes with high ACE scores [...] Conversely, children with no or low ACEs were less likely to experience health and developmental difficulties, and are therefore, likely to continue experiencing success on age salient tasks [...]

Now I've grossly simplified and the full article is worth the read. HackerNews user, mrguyorama, had this great point:

This is also one reason why something like "Free food at school for anyone who wants it" is so damn effective, because it eliminates an entire class of ACEs from all those kids[...]

[link] I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:00:22 +0000

Lina writes about about how E.164 international phone numbers can be mapped to a domain number under e164.arpa. They were able to find a disused nameserver used for the country codes and the challenge to report this issue ensues.

I discovered this through HackerNews.

[link] Configuration is a liability, just like code

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:24:12 +0000

Having predominantly worked with cloud services for a large part of my career one thing I've taken for granted is how ingrained infrastructure as code (IaC) is in most of my actions. Whether it's application that's deployed on a container or a configuration change it's stored in a repository and ideally reviewed. Reading Chris Siebenmann's post made me think about this some more.

The git log and pull request/code review act as the reasoning or documentation of the change. The repository itself reflects the current and past states of the infrastructure. Lastly, the IaC tooling is able to diff and hopefully manifest that change into reality. Rolling back to a past state should also hopefully be possible and usually is.

[link] AWS internet gateway NAT

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:52:31 +0000

I recently learned that AWS internet gateway does a one-to-one destination NAT for public IPs inside a VPC, this includes public load balancers and elastic IPs (EIPs) on EC2 instances. So for any inbound IP filtering rules I need get the private IP addresses of the resources (if filtering by destination IP).

The closest documentation I could find of this behaviour talks about this in regards to EIPs:

traffic that's destined for the public IPv4 address or Elastic IP address of your instance has its destination address translated into the instance's private IPv4 address before the traffic is delivered to the VPC.

Seems logical in hindsight but led to some fun troubleshooting.

[link] Building without predicting

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:53:52 +0000

Derek Sivers talks about living off the grid in a plot of land and building his house as he goes. Inspired by the book How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand things only get built or added when they're needed.

It's an interesting approach and I can quite say I'd enjoy it but is a good thought experiment for me.