Nanette spent the entire night before she left for Nairobi on February 7, preparing a surprise for me. I was working in Stockholm at the time and wouldn’t come back to my apartment to see it until February 25.

“I can’t wait for you to see my surprise for you,” she said.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“Nope. You just have to wait.”

Nanette is good at keeping surprises and secrets. I had to wait until I got back. I kept thinking about what she could’ve prepared. A photo album? It had to be non-perishable to last almost a month.

No matter how many times I asked her, she wouldn’t budge. A playful and endearing smile was all I got. I arrived at my apartment around midnight weary from traveling. Nanette’s suprise had slipped from my mind at that moment. I turned on the lights and saw various photos of us she had printed and carefully placed throughout my room. I picked up one on my nightstand. We are standing in front of the Boston Science Museum. I’m wearing a chambray shirt with jeans. She’s wearing a black tube top, a light blue dress, and black wedges. A disc-shaped multi-colored pendant hangs around her neck, and she holds onto her purple purse and one of her favorite wool jackets.

I saw she had written a note on the back of the photograph.

27) I love you because I know I can explore the world with you as my companion. ♥ Nette

I read this web page many years ago that described how someone used their unencrypted WiFi network to prank neighbors by turning all images upside down or making them blurry or simply redirecting them to cats. I always wanted to do it myself, but I didn’t have the required knowledge or hardware until now.

In my previous post, I wrote about how I installed DD-WRT onto my Asus RT-N16 wireless router. You might be able to do this prank with the factory default firmware for your router. Your firmware needs to let you do the steps in this awesome tutorial to create a separate guest WiFi network and add custom iptables rules. If it doesn’t, get a better router or flash better firmware.

I’ve known about DD-WRT for a while and always wanted to play with it (partly because I thought it was needed to do this prank of turning the Internet upside down). My router is leased from Time Warner and probably not supported by DD-WRT. So I bought an Asus RT-N16 router and learned how to flash DD-WRT firmware onto it. The process was easier than I expected but required me to read a lot and be careful. I sifted through mazes of documentation, blog posts, and forum threads to find the most recent and correct ones. I was afraid of bricking my brand new $100 Asus, but I succeeded. Here’s how you can too.

What is DD-WRT and why would you install it?

DD-WRT is open-source Linux-based firmware that can replace and enhance the factory default firmware on many wireless routers. Once you install it, you can SSH, overclock the CPU, setup advanced access restrictions, change the firewall, etc.

This is the first part of a series in which I write about how Nanette worked for and finally got accepted into Kiva, a well-respected microfinance organization. She’s now having a great time in Nairobi helping borrowers and improving the operations of Kiva Zip. This series of posts is a gift for her and a tribute to her hardwork.

The sun was setting over Manhattan, and Nanette was staring at Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides on her clunky work laptop. Throngs of tourists seethed through Times Square 20 floors below her at Ernst and Young’s Times Square office.

It was January 2014, and Nanette felt lost and unsure of herself. She had been working for Ernst and Young—EY according to their recent rebranding campaign—for two and a half years. She knew that something was missing, but figuring out what that something was and how to get it, would take her more than a year.

I work at Spotify on backend infrastructure. In this context, infrastructure is the shared plumbing and platform on which various Spotify systems run. In particular, I work on an open source tool called Helios. This project and, more importantly, my team are pretty awesome.

What is Helios?

Helios is a Docker orchestration framework. This means it’s a tool used to manage your Docker containers across a fleet of hosts.

Why did Spotify create Helios?

Let’s say you have 20 hosts, and you want to run a Docker container named “hello-world” on each of them. You’ve installed the Docker daemon on each. Now you SSH into each of them and run docker run hello-world. Doing this 20 times is tedious.

So you use cluster SSH or fabric and run it once. That works.

Your application grows and you need environmental variables, exposed ports, and mounted volumes. You Docker command becomes longer:

1

docker run --env="FOO=BAR" --publish=80:8080 --volume="/etc/default/config:/etc/default/config"

You need to remember this long command so you save it to a file in your code repository. This works OK.

You notice your Docker containers sometimes crash when you start them. You run watch 'docker ps' to see which containers have crashed on which hosts. You have to tail the logs on those hosts to figure out what went wrong. Hm, this is becoming hard to manage.

One day, one of your hosts restarts. You don’t notice that the container is no longer running on that host until several days later. Maybe it’s time to think of a better solution.

These and many other reasons are why Spotify created Helios. Helios makes it easy to deploy to multiple hosts, and Helios keeps track of which containers are running where and will restart containers if they crash.

I first heard of Semester at Sea (SAS) from my friend Alyssa who attended the University of Virginia, the official sponsor of the program. SAS is a study abroad program for college students. They live on a ship that circumnavigates the globe while they take courses and visit various regions. It attracts both youth struck by wanderlust and affluent collegiate party-goers alike.

I was envious that I didn’t spend an entire college semester partying aboard a luxurious ship that docked in exotic locations throughout the world. What was I doing drifting around Manhattan’s Morningside Heights when I could’ve explored Mauritius, Malaysia, and Malta? But as I asked Alyssa about her experience, I learned the cruise wasn’t always luxurious and while partying at sea was an allure for many students, it wasn’t the only one.

1. Have a tenant email you asking you to check out a strange chemical smell coming from her oven when she uses it.

   From: Tenant

   Date: January 20, 2015

   Subject: Oven problems

   To: David

   Hi David,

   I’m sorry to keep email [sic] you with problems, but over the past few weeks the oven has increasingly emitted a chemical smell. Any time the oven is turned on there is a strong burning/chemical odor from the back of the unit. The rear is unusually hot and the smell is so strong that it burns our eyes and noses, so we’ve stopped using it entirely.

   Thanks for your attention,

This article will show you how to troll your roommates or family by sending their browsers to this amazing website where He Man sings “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes (flash required) whenever they try to visit facebook.com.

What you’ll need:

• administrative access to a router (I used a Netgear router with firmware WNR1000v3 leased from Time Warner)
• router firmware that lets you configure static routes, port forwarding, etc
• a server connected to the router (I used jarvis which runs Ubuntu 12.04)
• DNS software running on that server (I used bind)

What you won’t need:

• access to your victims’ devices (we will be doing something more sophisticated than simply editing /etc/hosts)

How the prank will work

We will intercept the DNS queries unsuspecting devices make to the router for facebook.com and reply back with the IP address for He Man. The router will send those DNS queries to your server instead of legitimate DNS servers and your server will reply back with the IP for He Man. Your roommates will be confused.

I hate email spam and fanatically guard my inbox from it. I try to not give out my real email address unless it’s for an account I need or a service I find useful. These include bank accounts and billing accounts like credit cards and utility bills.

But I inevitably receive spam. Gmail does a great job of filtering out most of them. But for ones that get through, I appreciate organizations that add an unsubscribe link in their email footers. They are doing themselves a favor because I’m going to click that link instead of marking their email as spam which might hurt their email reputation and actually make it harder for their emails to get into inboxes overall.

Almost all my physical mail is junk, but none of them tell me how to unsubscribe. It’s rather unfair how companies collect and use my email in the first place. They ask me for it when I buy something for the first time without explaining how they’re going to use it, or in the off-chance they do explain, it’s usually about following up on my purchase.

In the months that follow, they send me with sales offers and catalogues. Why would a merchant waste the goodwill I gave them by sending me unsolicited mail? I should be asked to opt-in to promotional and marketing mail. Okay, maybe they’re too lazy or their employee forgot. Then at least give me an option to unsubscribe.

Not only does it crowd my mailbox, I now have to worry that when I move, some sensitive piece of mail might find its way into a strangers hands and be exposed or used maliciously.

Here’s an example of a letter I received from Mount Sinai. I’ve only visited Mount Sinai once to ask a surgeon about what my options were for two herniated disks in my lumbar. I can’t think of any other way Mount Sinai got my mailing address.

The more I think about the letter in the photo above, the more I start to wonder. How and why did my email from a surgical consultation get passed on to Mount Sinai’s fundraising department’s mailing list? Does this violate HIPAA?

They should at least provide me a method to unsubscribe myself. Something like a website, phone number, even a mailing address. Instead they don’t even provide a postage paid envelope for the check they expect me to write.