I’m no Steve Wozniak but I carry a healthy distrust of computers. After hearing of the Equifax data breach affecting the privacy of more than 145 million Americans, learning Uber paid and tried to cover up the loss of 57 million driver and passenger records and seeing the lasting impact of the Meltdown attack I’m starting to understand the gravity this quote from Woz:

After giving a talk once in Bali – where I showed how to use a $5 Vultr box and Redis with Load Impact to support up to 7000 concurrent WordPress users – I was asked to help turn some of the performance optimization work demoed into a WordPress plug-in.

It’s the first of it’s kind — and like no other performance plugin to precede it. Based on initial tests it speeds up the stock Twenty Seventeen theme about 300% and I suspect time will show even greater gains for other themes. It builds on top of a performance optimization technique called Fetch Injection, enabling external scripts to download asynchronously in parallel while preserving execution order.

Rio is a MicroPaaS for Kubernetes designed to run using minimal resources. Rio provides automatic DNS and HTTPS, load balancing, routing, metrics and more. Use it to remove the chore of creating and managing a secure IT infrastructure.

k3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution capable of running on constrained hardware and therefore ideal for local, edge and IoT substrates. K3s was originally developed for Rio but useful enough to stand on its own.

Today I’m going to show you how to easily set-up k3s and Rio on Manjaro Linux MacBook and use them to create a self-hosted, git-based continuous delivery pipeline to serve your own website.

If you’re not yet familiar with Kubernetes, no problem. Please let this gentle introduction serve as your practical guide. When you’re finished you’ll have a better understanding of the concepts and tools used in container orchestration and a shiny new website you can use to demonstrate your skills.

I read an article on Medium titled How to encrypt your entire life in less than an hour. The article provided a number of tips for staying secure digitally. One of the tips was to use the Tor browser because popular browsers such as Safari and Chrome were not private enough – even in private mode.

What the author didn’t tell you was that it’s possible to increase your privacy without switching browsers using Dan Pollock's hosts file. A quick look at the file describes exactly what it does…

Last week Firefox suffered multiple zero-day vulnerabilities, prompting renewed interest in a browser discussion thread on the Manjaro Forums.

Ironically the reason I’m using Manjaro in the first place is because macOS itself had several zero-day vulnerabilities recently, prompting me to perform a serious back-up of macOS and all my files on iCloud.

Thankfully switching browsers is trivial compared to switching operating systems on macOS. So herein I’ll show you how to easily install a few different browsers so you can try them out and decide for yourself which you prefer.

Trust is like the stock market. Escalator up, elevator down. When an individual places trust in something they typically do so because that trust has been won through unwavering commitment over time. When we speak of brand trust – or trust with a company – committed relationships work much the same. Especially as that trust applies to technology in an era of cloud.

But here’s the thing about trust. If it’s not built with transparency, it is created under false pretenses – smoke and mirrors – and, in the long-term, will never stand. This is the unfortunate case with Apple. And here I will explain exactly when I stopped trusting them and why, and what I’m doing about it.

I’ve long been inspired by the work of Steve Souders. Back in 2009 Steve published an article titled Loading Scripts Without Blocking, which I first became aware of and studied during my time at Orbitz – where every millisecond a user waited for the page to load had a measurable impact to the business.

Steve’s work was instrumental for performance-critical websites and apps, and even inspired Nicholas C. Zakas to write Loading JavaScript without Blocking the same month Steve’s book Even Faster Web Sites was published.

After a four year hiatus, I recently rejoined Facebook to give it another shot. Here’re some insights I gained since I left.

Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency. It is open-source and accessible to all. With Monero, you are your own bank. Only you control and are responsible for your funds. Your accounts and transactions are kept private from prying eyes. Learn how to install the Monero CLI wallet. There’s only one way…

Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

Timothy C. May, The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

Imagine your sitting at a cafe on some exotic island after your last visa run to Sim Lim Square in Singapore where you picked up a CCTV Wi-Fi camera to protect your valuables and nerd out on gadgets.

You unbox your new toy only to realize you can’t connect it because the cafe you’re sitting at is using a captive portal.

Gah! What to do… Shell into the device and use wget or curl? Fuggetaboutit.

You reach into your Tortuga carry-on bag, pull out your laptop and do the only sensible thing you can think of—spoof the device’s MAC address.

Here’s how to spoof the MAC address of an IoT device using macOS.

An open source ebook from Addy Osmani on modern image optimization techniques. Formats, decoders, techniques for efficient compression and more are covered.