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If all you have is a hammer…

2025-06-18T00:00:00Z

This, dear reader, is a hammer. It is almost entirely irrelevant to the article. Enjoy.

I presume everyone is familiar with the idiom “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. If not, well, there it is. It’s generally used pejoratively about being single-minded, but I think it also gives a glimpse into something more interesting: mental and perceptual sets.

Before I explain, let me tell you a story about a person who bought a 3D printer¹. When they were first thinking about getting one, they weren’t sure if it was worth it. They could print a few board game accessories, but then what? After they got it, though, a whole new world opened up: everywhere they looked there were opportunities to improve things by adding 3D printed plastic. Broken appliances were repaired with 3D printed parts, all sorts of shelves, organisers, hooks and other things were made. But when they talked about this to other people, most often the response was “That’s nice, but I don’t think I’d use one”. How could they not see the truth in all its glorious layer lines?!

The answer is in the concept of a ‘set’², and instead of trying to explain it, I’m just going to quote Wikipedia:

In psychology, a set is a group of expectations that shape experience by making people especially sensitive to specific kinds of information. A perceptual set, also called perceptual expectancy, is a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way. […] A mental set is a framework for thinking about a problem. It can be shaped by habit or by desire. Mental sets can make it easy to solve a class of problem, but attachment to the wrong mental set can inhibit problem-solving and creativity.

This perfectly captures what happened. They’d developed a ‘3D printing mental set’: a predisposition to see problems that can be solved with their ~~hammer~~ 3D printer. Once I started noticing this pattern, I started seeing it all over the place.

Sets at work

Aside from the “could this be improved with some 3D printed plastic” perceptual set, I’ve noticed a couple of other sets: DIY, and writing puzzles.

DIY is probably the most obvious one. Once you become a little familiar with the basics of what you can fix and how, it seems like you start noticing the opportunities more. Before, you might have ignored that loose door handle, but now you notice it and realise with a screwdriver and a sex bolt³ you can fix it and stop it coming loose again anytime soon.

As you do more things, you build up your set of mental sets as well. You learn how to attach things to different types of walls, how to safely work with electricity, and so on, and suddenly installing a new outside light goes from a seemingly complex job to just exercising some of those concepts you’re already familiar with.

This works across ‘disciplines’ as well: I wanted to automatically cool a room down, using a fan in the window to blow in cool air. The 3D printing mental set gave me a way to make it physically go where I wanted it to, the home automation set gave me a plan for how to automate it, and the electricity set helped me figure out how to wire in the relay. It sounds a bit stilted when I spell it out like that, but the catch is I didn’t have to sit down and work any of this out. I was already primed to think in a certain way. I had a whole selection of hammers, and could pick the right combination of them to beat this particular nail⁴.

Puzzles are a bit different. I enjoy taking part in puzzle hunts⁵, and at first I was bewildered at how the authors came up with all the puzzles. After I started thinking about writing some myself, though, I began to notice all kinds of things that could maybe be turned into a puzzle: a specialised database, or a song with repetitive lyrics, or set of things with unique ID numbers. Writing the actual puzzles is still tricky, but once you’ve equipped the “look out for puzzle material” perceptual set it’s much easier to gather a range of ideas.

For example, one puzzle I wrote came about because I stumbled upon Sir Patrick Stewart’s Cowboy Classic Sampler⁶. I think everyone will agree that it’s a fairly unique collection. I tied some samples of the songs together with some screen captures of Sir Patrick as Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and puzzlers had to find the season and episode numbers of the pictures, then use those numbers to select a track and a word from that track in the audio mix. Those words spell out a question, and the answer to that question is the answer to the puzzle.

There were other hints mixed in to point you in the right direction, it wasn’t quite as opaque as it might sound! But the point is without being in that “puzzle finding” mindset when I came across the album, there’s no way I could have come up with that puzzle. Like with the fan, I was primed to think a certain way, and managed to create something I otherwise would have struggled with.

The curse of noticing things

Figuring out how to make stuff isn’t the only place sets appear, though. Perceptual sets are about how we perceive things. When you read something with lots of bullet points, em-dashes, and the word “delve” do you automatically think it’s LLM generated?⁷ Then you have an LLM text perceptual set! It’s kind of annoying, as it’s difficult to “turn off” and stop noticing these things once you’ve seen them. Similarly, I think I have a “bad grammar” set. I know it doesn’t bother a lot of people, but if I’m reading a book and there’s a rogue apostrophe it will throw me right out of the moment. It’s like tripping up when walking and being torn out of a daydream. There’s some use to these — being able to notice grammar errors easily helps with my writing — but for the most part they’re a negative input: they point out things are broken or bad.

The “edge case set” takes this to another level. After about 20 years of writing software⁸ I have a finely honed ability to spot problems. Give me something to implement and my brain will immediately rattle off all the different edge cases and under-specified parts. Then some other bit of my brain gets the job of deciding which we actually care about, which are worth raising, and so on. It’s definitely useful to spot them up-front, rather than when you’re deep in the weeds implementing something, and tends to make everything go a lot smoother if you can hammer the major ones out when planning work. It doesn’t turn off after work though; it comes up when reading board game rule books, or descriptions of the magic system in fantasy novels, or news reports, and so on. It’s a lot less useful then.

Speaking of news reports, here’s a fun one: Gell-Mann amnesia is a cognitive bias where even when you critically assess media reports about something you’re knowledgeable about (say, technology), you continue to trust similar reporting in other areas (say, medicine). But once you know about Gell-Mann amnesia, you might start to actively notice when it happens. You scoff at the article about how the Internet is a “series of tubes” and then start reading the next one about a cancer treatment, but — wait a minute — your Gell-Mann amnesia set kicks in. I’m not sure what you then do with this information. Dismiss basically all the media and news as useless? It’s honestly pretty annoying.

The meta set

I’ve had this blog post on my ideas list since I first noticed the “3D printing mindset”. I didn’t know sets were an actual thing, and I didn’t have most of the examples I do now. As time went on with this idea rattling around in the back of my head, I started noticing the patterns come up more and more. There’s lots of more examples I didn’t include because I didn’t want to just write a listicle of mental patterns. But the fact that I noticed them all seems to mean that I’ve developed a set set, or a meta-set, if you will. It’s fascinating to think about how all this happens inside our mushy bag of neurons, but also a bit terrifying. If thought processes are that malleable, what stops you accidentally breaking them? Actually, thinking about things like Q-Anon, flat earthers, and a lot of contemporary “politics”, maybe that’s quite easy to do?

Image credits

Photo	Creator	Licence	Source
Hammer	Ian Talmacs	Unsplash License	Unsplash

Surprise! I am that person. Bet you didn’t see that coming! ↩︎
I feel like they should have consulted the mathematicians and/or computer scientists before they picked a name. ↩︎
Yes, that’s a real thing. No, I won’t ever use any of the alternative names for it. ↩︎
OK, I’ve strained the metaphor enough. I’m sorry. I’ll stop. ↩︎
If you’re not familiar, a puzzle hunt is a competition where you try to solve puzzles faster than other teams. The sort of puzzles involved are perfectly described by this quote from Mike Develin: “Imagine a word search. Now imagine you aren’t told what words to look for. Now imagine you aren’t told it’s a word search. Now imagine it isn’t a word search.” ↩︎
Go and give it a listen. I’ll wait. ↩︎
I hereby certify all my em-dashes are hand-crafted. Relatedly, Claude Code keeps writing comments that use hyphens when they should actually be em-dashes. Maybe they’ve trained it to avoid them? ↩︎
I just made myself sad by working this out. I still feel young at heart! … Or maybe that’s cholesterol? ↩︎

The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging

2025-05-16T00:00:00Z

Finding a picture to go with a blog post about blog post ideas is hard, OK?

The single worst part about blogging for me is trying to come up with ideas for what to write about. Not because they’re hard to come up with, but because every idea seems too basic or not worth talking about. Seems.

It’s not just me, either. My friends will occasionally describe some interesting problem they’ve dealt with, and I’ll chime in with “you should blog about that”. Almost invariably the response is something like “it’s not that interesting”.

There’s a cognitive bias called the curse of knowledge¹. Basically, once you know something you can’t accurately reconstruct your previous state of mind from when you didn’t know it. You can struggle to do something for hours, piecing together scraps of information, using all kinds of specialist knowledge, and as soon as you’re finished it all seems so basic why would anyone want to read about that?

Other mental obstacles

Of course, nothing involving people is as simple as having one cause and an obvious solution. Even when I get over the “it’s too basic” road bump, there are other issues. Looking back over some of my posts, I get a horrible cringe-y feeling and the question of “why would anyone be interested in reading that?!” arrives unbidden. Even though I know that I’m interested in reading similar posts written by other people. I’m hesitant to attach labels to everything, but imposter syndrome says hi.

I think there’s also a cultural issue at play. British people tend to be somewhat reserved and downplay their accomplishments, especially when compared to people from the US². When I worked for a certain multinational ~~ad conglomerate~~ search engine company we actually had training on how to do performance reviews and speak about ourselves more like our US counterparts.

Put all these things into a cauldron, add a lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, mix it all up, and you get a brain that despises the idea of blogging about anything. Great.

Dealing

So, now the problem is well-defined, what do we do about it? Clearly I am the best person to be offering this advice, given it’s been four months since my last blog post.

The best counter to the Curse of Knowledge that I’ve found is keeping notes, like a lab notebook. If you finish something and have dozens of links to different resources that you had to piece together, it’s probably something interesting and worth talking about even if it doesn’t seem like it any more. Or maybe you didn’t need a lot of references, but you had to write a lot down to make sense of something, or needed to draw diagrams to solve a problem. Again, probably interesting.

The other issues I’ve mentioned are not so easy to overcome. I’m also not going to try and perform therapy in the form of a blog post! What I personally do is keep a list of topics to write about (that have already passed the “probably interesting even if my brain doesn’t agree” check), and occasionally when the stars align I’ll feel like plucking one off the list and turning thoughts into words.

A call to action

If you’ve got a blog and haven’t written anything recently because you “don’t do anything interesting”, go write something! I promise that someone will be interested. Hell, feel free to send me a link and I’ll be interested for you.

If you don’t have a blog then why not start one? There are lots of great articles out there about why-you-should and how-you-can. And as a bonus, blog posts about how you set up your blog are super interesting. That’s one post sorted already!

As the open internet is slowly subsumed by massive corporate interests, and gummed up with spam and AI slop, the voice of real humans is becoming more and more important. Maybe we can — one blog at a time — get back to the ’90s internet that was full of individuality instead of today’s which is full of ads and spam?

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

There’s also something called “Familiarity Blindness” that people like to talk about. It’s a much better name. The only problem is that I can’t find any actual published works that talk about it. No-one authoritative defines or mentions it. It just popped into existence a few years ago. Maybe it’s an LLM hallucination? ↩︎
My favourite commentary on this is Stephen Fry talking about American vs British comedy. ↩︎

A year of boardgames

2024-07-26T00:00:00Z

I realised the other day that it’s a little over a year since I started building out a collection of board games¹, and thought it’d be fun to go through the collection and what I think about the games in hindsight.

The beginning

Ticket to Ride: Europe

I don’t remember how I discovered the concept of “modern” boardgames, but just over a year ago I purchased Ticket to Ride: Europe as my first. Prior to that I thought board games were like Scrabble, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, etc: they might provide a distraction occasionally, but didn’t amount to actual fun in the same way a video game might. I’d characterise those “classic” games as generally being extremely dependent on luck, not presenting many interesting choices, and generally being punishing if you’re behind.²

Ticket to Ride came as a breath of fresh air. You get to decide where to route your lines, whether you want to take on more cards, how aggressive to be in blocking the other players, and more. There’s still some luck involved, but it’s managed by being able to draw from a pool of visible cards, or being able to select which route cards you keep.

Shortly after I also picked up Carcassonne, and was similarly enamoured. I’ve not played either of them recently, though: they both fall into a weird little gap for me. While I enjoy the games, I don’t like playing them with certain groups³, but I don’t love them enough to prioritise them over other games when playing with other groups.

Pandemic

The next “gateway” game I picked up was Pandemic, which was my first co-operative game. I loved everything about it, and still do. The feeling when you managed to claw back a victory after setback after setback is great, but so is the shock when everything goes even worse than you thought possible!

Pandemic was also the first game where one of the mechanics caught my attention. The way epidemics work is that you take the bottom card from the infection deck, which becomes the center of the new outbreak, then shuffle that and all the discards back onto the top of the deck. It sounds simple, but it has big implications: everywhere that was previously infected can now be re-infected, and you’re guaranteed some tense rounds while you work back through those cards. It still blows my mind a little how shuffling and re-adding some card can mix up the game so much.

I still play Pandemic when I can, and it generally has a spot in my board game bag when I’m going away. I’ve since picked up the On the Brink expansion which adds some fun new twists⁴ to the base game, and Pandemic: Hotzone – Europe which plays similarly but is a bit quicker and smaller. I’ve also recently ordered Iberia, but it hasn’t materialised yet.

More gateway games

The Quacks of Quedlinburg

Over the next few months I picked up The Quacks of Quedlinburg, Azul (the mini variant), and Splendor. Quacks is probably my least favourite out of all the games so far: it’s not terrible, but it straddles deck-building and push-your-luck in a way that I don’t find particularly satisfying. It’s fun to play the combos you’ve invested in, and it’s fun to try and push your luck, but it’s not really fun when failing at the luck element means you don’t get to use the stuff you were building.

Quacks does bear the distinction of being the first game I customised, though: it got a little plastic organiser to hold all the ingredients instead of having to sort through a massive plastic bag with them all mixed in. My appreciation for game boxes with good built-in storage has gradually increased over the year, as have the tools I have for fixing those that don’t. But we’ll get back to that…

Azul is fun when you’re in the right mood; I’m not terribly into abstract strategy games, but Azul is light enough that it’s enjoyable. Splendor, on the other hand, I really like. So much so that I wrote a digital re-implementation of it. Both Azul and Splendor allow you to mess with your opponent a little, but not too much, which keeps it interesting but also means it still plays well in groups that don’t like too much head-on confrontation.⁵

I think the thing that really caught my attention in Splendor, though, is the quasi-engine building you do. It’s not actually classed as an engine builder on BoardGameGeek, but as you collect cards you get discounts on other cards, which lets you get better cards and further discounts, and so on. I love that kind of positive feedback loop in video games, and I apparently love it in board games as well.

Terraforming Mars

A recent game of Terraforming Mars

I’d heard lots of good things about Terraforming Mars, but I was worried it sounded a bit too complicated so put off buying it for a while. I mean, its weight on BoardGameGeek is orange. That’s scary, right?! Well… no. Terraforming Mars is easily my favourite board game, and I’ve played it pretty consistently since buying it. It has such a huge stock of cards that no two games feel the same: one game you might have an arsenal of cards that generate and use microbes; another you might have a plethora of science tags that let you play some of the most powerful project cards; next you might be spamming forests on Mars, or drowning in credits because you have too much income. It has the engine building element that I love, but I also really enjoy that it’s not always obvious who’s doing well and who’s not until the final score is tallied; that keeps everyone engaged and working on things for the entire game.

I’ve added in the Prelude expansion, which I wouldn’t play the game without now, and the Venus Next expansion, which adds some interesting bits but is nowhere close to being a hard requirement. I’ll probably pick up Colonies next. Prelude adds a new type of card that you take at the start of the game, which gives you a fairly hefty boost; these help you get off to a faster start, and may also affect what strategies you try to run with for the rest of the game. Venus Next adds another resource track, but you don’t have to complete it to end the game; it also adds a bunch of project cards that have “floater” resources, but they don’t feel that much different to the base game microbes⁶. One interesting thing that Venus Next adds, though, is a “solar phase” where one of the global parameters is increased at the end of each generation. The active player decides which parameter, but gets none of the benefits for it, so you get to decide entirely tactically.

There are two drawbacks to Terraforming Mars: it’s a little lengthy, and some of the components are a bit rubbish. Timing-wise, I find it takes a good hour and a half for a two player game, while adding a third player can almost double that. Obviously it depends who you’re playing with and what’s happening in the game, but that’s enough of a commitment that you more-or-less have to plan when to play instead of just spontaneously bringing it to the table. Component-wise, the game comes with basically no storage for anything other than little plastic bags that slosh around in the box; horrible plastic cubes for resource tracking that somehow jump out of your hand constantly, and flimsy printed sheets for putting those cubes on.

My custom player boards

The reason I got a 3D printer was in part so that I could make my own upgraded player boards that actually held the pieces in place instead of letting them fly everywhere if the table was slightly knocked. You can buy third party ones but I figured it was a teach-a-man-to-fish kind of situation, and dropping £200 on a 3D printer would save me money in the long run vs buying £50 of player boards someone else had made.⁷ About seven versions later, I have some boards which I think look and feel great. It’s 3D printed in two halves, then has a laminated 2D print sandwiched in the middle for all the markings and artwork.

As well as the player mats, I 3D printed some boxes, card holders, and so on, but have since replaced them with an insert from Folded Space. These are made of foam, and are perfectly sized to the game box and all the components in it. I could have eventually got to that point with 3D prints, but it would have taken a lot of time to design and print everything. Terraforming Mars was also the game that I first sleeved, as trying to shuffle the huge decks was an exercise in frustration. With all of the cards sleeved, not only are they more protected against wear and tear, you can now shuffle the deck just by gently mashing stacks of cards together. It makes shuffling so easy I now sleeve basically all my games as I hate having to riffle shuffle unsleeved cards.

Marrakech and HeroQuest

Later in the year I bought Marrakech after playing a giant version of it at a games expo. It sits somewhere between Azul and Splendor for me: it’s fun, and good when you want a short game, but it’s not high enough on my list to want to take it away with me. Playing with felt rugs does make a nice change from flipping cards or dealing with plastic components, though.

I also picked up HeroQuest at one point when it was on offer. It’s a good concept, and I felt like I would like it, but it was a bit of a let-down. The biggest problem for me is that you either need one player to basically be the DM, and manage the board, or you use an app to do that and have to deal with a bunch of admin and duplicating things because you’re half playing on the board and half in the app. I also don’t like relying on an app because I’ve been around long enough to know how easily computer software can become defunct, get removed from stores, get “updated” to remove features you need, and so on. I feel like the game would work well with five people: one to DM, and four to control the four heroes. But if you’ve got five people who want to play a dungeon crawler why aren’t you just playing D&D or a similar TTRPG? I’ll probably sell this at some point.

Party games

Codenames

These are all smaller games, and with most of them I’d played them before and decided I wanted my own copy. Codenames is my favourite party game, and I also picked up Codenames: Duet and they now live in the same box with a nice 3D printed insert. Codenames seems to just naturally produce fun moments: when an obscure clue is understood completely it feels amazing, but when it’s totally misunderstood it’s also generally hilarious. There’s also a great tension as the spymaster when you give a clue, then immediately realise it can be misinterpreted in a way that points straight at the assassin.

Poetry for Neanderthals is fun in the same party-word-game sort of way, but basically has no replayability. There are few enough cards that if you play a few times you can remember the “harder” word and just immediately guess it once you get the “easier” one being hinted (you can also sometimes just do this outright, which feels great but it kind of sucks from a gameplay point of view). The best bits are the inflatable “no stick” you get to bop people with, and how everyone speaks like a neanderthal for a little bit out of habit even after the game has ended. I seem to be weirdly good at this game, and I’m not sure what that says about me.

Love Letter has to take the spot of best game per cubic centimeter. It’s basically just a small set of cards, but it enables some really fun emergent gameplay. I really love how small the game is, and how easy it is to set up and play. It’s the perfect time filler. I’ve also played Lovecraft Letter, which adds a lot more complexity and was great fun, but is sadly out of print and I haven’t been able to find a copy at a sensible price.

Fluxx

Star Trek mega-Fluxx

My arbitrary 12 month period ends not long after I went to a tabletop event and played, amongst other things, Cthulu Fluxx, Doctor Who Fluxx, and Star Trek: The Next Generation Fluxx. Each game has the same core Fluxx elements, but adds slight twists along with the unique themes. I ordered a copy of Star Fluxx, but then found out that you can combine the four Star Trek variants (TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY) together with some expansions to make a mega game so ordered all of those as well. While putting together my mega-Fluxx order I noticed they had a Firefly Fluxx that was out of print so I snapped up one of the last copies of that, too.

I ordered most of the games direct from Looney Labs, as the out of print ones weren’t readily available anywhere else. Unfortunately, UK Border Force managed to misread the import label⁸ and demanded £300 of VAT and import duties on them! They refunded it eventually, but this small set of tiny games were for a little while the most expensive things in my collection.

Fluxx is fun enough, but the mega-deck version is brilliant. It gets much more chaotic, with multiple captains, teleporters, and other doodads in play to steal cards back and forth. I was worried it wouldn’t play well with non-Trekkies, but the cards from each series use a different font and the weird people that can’t identify Star Trek series based on uniform variations seem happy enough relying on that.

Future

A few more months have passed since then, and my collection is still growing. Board game stores have summer sales, it turns out! If my physical wallet was in any way involved in the purchasing flow I’m sure it’d be crying.

I’ve recently started logging my plays with BG Stats (which synchronises the information up to Board Game Geek). I’m interested to see if the hard numbers actually align with my conceptions of how often I play certain games. If I do another roundup in a year’s time, expect it to have a lot more stats in…

Other words that may be appropriate here: “hoarding”; “compulsively obtaining”; “spending all my money on”, etc ↩︎
Think about a game of Monopoly: what do you actually get to decide? It basically comes down to “buy or not” if you land on an available property, then later on “buy more houses or not”. ↩︎
e.g. a family member doesn’t like the farmer mechanic in Carcassonne, and I don’t find the game interesting enough without them. Nothing wrong with the game or the people, we’re just not going to both enjoy it the way we like when playing together. ↩︎
Which is definitely why I bought it. Not because it comes with amazing little petri dishes to keep the disease cubes in. Certainly not. ↩︎
There’s a different edge to taking a card that someone else wanted in Splendor — there’s twelve others they can pick from, or they can take a face down one, etc; it might be an inconvenience but you haven’t totally upended their plans — versus blocking a really long train line they were trying to build in Ticket to Ride. ↩︎
Floaters are meant to be big pieces of infrastructure that float in the atmosphere of Venus. The fact that they feel exactly the same way as tiny little microbes when played seems wrong. ↩︎
Having since bought a more expensive printer, I think I’m past the point of convincing myself it’s “cheaper”. It’s a lot more fun, though, and if you design parts yourself you end up with exactly what you want! ↩︎
Turns out the “weight (lbs)” column is not the “quantity” column. Who knew? ↩︎

Upgrading the RAM in a Dell G15 laptop

2023-07-29T00:00:00Z

The Dell G15

I currently use a Dell G15 laptop for work. It has served me well for a little over a year, but recently it has been struggling a little with my day-to-day workload. It came with 32GB of RAM — the highest possible specification at the time¹ — but that is apparently no longer enough for me.

For a recent project, I was working on a Rust library used in an Android app. That meant running the usual glut of Android tools (Android Studio, an emulator and at least one Gradle daemon) alongside a normal IDE (IntelliJ IDEA). Throw in a web browser and a couple of electron apps, and I often managed to use all 32GB.

When you start swapping memory out to an encrypted disk — even an SSD — it doesn’t make for great performance. At first, I tried to work around this by enabling the Linux out-of-memory (OOM) killer, but it turns out that it’s not too good with Electron apps: it will kill the large browser process, but then the small Electron wrapper will just respawn it.

Can it be upgraded or not?

The obvious solution to not having enough RAM is to add more RAM. A quick look in the manual showed this might not be possible, though. The manual includes the following “Memory specifications” table:

Description	Values
Memory slots	Two SODIMM slots
Memory type	DDR5
Memory speed	4800
Maximum memory configuration	32GB
Minimum memory configuration	8GB
Memory size per slot	8GB or 16GB
Memory configurations supported	8 GB, 1 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 1 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz 16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel 32 GB, 2 x 16 GB, DDR5, 4800 MHz, dual-channel

That unambiguously says that an upgrade from 32GB is not possible. I gave up.

Later though, I was complaining about memory issues to a friend, and he pointed out a Dell forum thread where a couple of people claim to have successfully installed dual-channel 32GB modules. Since the alternative was getting an entire new PC after only a year, I decided to give it a go.

The upgrade attempt

I ordered a pair of Crucial 32GB DDR5-4800 SODIMMs, and after they turned up dismantled the laptop. The G15 comes apart pretty normally: there are uncovered screws on the bottom holding the lower part of the case on. With those removed and some gentle prying, it pops off, and you get access to the battery, GPU and motherboard.

The first thing I saw was this:

The G15 motherboard adamantly proclaiming that it doesn’t want 32GB SODIMMs

Not one but two labels that indicate it will only accept 8GB or 16GB modules. Oh well, what’s the worst that can happen?

Oops?

I dutifully installed the new modules, reconnected the battery and put the case back together. I pressed the power button, and… nothing. None of the usual garish lights that immediately come on, no screen output, just a dead laptop. After reading some more of the user manual, I found that there is a tiny status LED on the side next to the ethernet port. Forcing the laptop to power off and back on again, the status LED blinked a distress code at me: 2 amber blinks, 4 white blinks. The manual says that is — unsurprisingly — a memory fault.

I figured at this point that the manual and labels on the motherboard were probably right. I took the laptop apart again, reinstalled the original 2x16GB modules, reassembled it, and pressed the power button. It didn’t boot. I don’t spend a lot of time fiddling inside computers, but I’ve done it enough that I’m reasonably confident I can’t entirely break a computer while swapping some RAM modules. I took to Googling², and found an interesting article that said Dell laptops don’t like to boot after RAM changes unless you clear the CMOS by popping out the battery for 15 minutes.

I opened the laptop up, and looked around for the CMOS battery. There wasn’t one. Turns out they don’t exist any more. I left the main battery disconnected for a while to see if it would help, and it didn’t.

Unexpected success

I started to get worried: if I couldn’t fix this, I wouldn’t be able to work until I got a new PC, and that wasn’t really in my budget at the minute. I sat reading old forum threads and help guides³, none of which were actually useful. Out of nowhere, though, the laptop booted up.

Naturally, I immediately shut the laptop down again, opened it up, and switched back to the new RAM modules. Then I turned it on again and sat waiting. After about 15 minutes of it looking totally dead, it turned on and showed a BIOS warning about the hardware configuration being changed. It then booted perfectly normally, and all 64GB of RAM was visible and usable.

My theory is that the forum threads were right: Dell laptops are funny about RAM upgrades. But somehow in removing the physical CMOS battery, they’ve kept the same “you have to wait 15 minutes” behaviour just without any indication that’s what’s happening. Regardless, I now have enough RAM even for the greediest of IDEs and Electron apps.

Bizarrely, the maximum spec has decreased to 16GB since then. ↩︎
In the generic sense. I use Kagi these days. ↩︎
On my phone because, y’know, the laptop was busted. ↩︎

Why you should be using HTTPS

2016-06-17T00:00:00Z

The EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere logo

One of my favourite hobbyhorses recently has been the use of HTTPS, or lack thereof. HTTPS is the thing that makes the little padlock appear in your browser, and has existed for over 20 years. In the past, that little padlock was the exclusive preserve of banks and other ‘high security’ establishments; over time its use has gradually expanded to most (but not all) websites that handle user information, and the time is now right for it to become ubiquitous.

Why use HTTPS?

There are numerous advantages to using HTTPS, both for the users of a website and for the operator:

Privacy

The most obvious advantage is that HTTPS gives your users additional privacy. An insecure (HTTP) request can potentially be read by anyone on the same network, or the network operators, or anyone who happens to operate a network along the path between the user and the server.

Users on shared WiFi networks (such as those in coffee shops, hotels, or offices) are particularly vulnerable to passive sniffing by anyone else on that network. If the network is open (as is frequently the case) then anyone in radio range can see exactly what the user is up to.

Integrity

HTTPS also helps to maintain the integrity of your site. With a plain HTTP request, there’s nothing to stop anyone in between the server and the user from modifying the content of the request or the response. This is a frequent tactic used by annoying WiFi gateways (such as the ones you’d find in a hotel), dubious ISPs who want to serve you extra adverts, or just plain old nefarious attackers.

If you’re trying to convey some kind of information to users (and if you aren’t, why exactly are you running a website again?) it seems beneficial to both you and them if the information arrives as you intended, rather than in a modified form due to someone or something tampering with it.

Security

If your website has any kind of authentication, or session identifiers, it becomes extremely vulnerable to an attacker monitoring the traffic and stealing the credentials. This was starkly demonstrated in 2010 when Firesheep was released. This tool allowed anyone to quickly and automatically hijack social media accounts of anyone on the same network who was using HTTP to access them.

Even if your login pages are served over HTTPS, if you send a single session ID cookie over HTTP (such as a page you decided wasn’t particularly ‘important’) then an attacker can probably spoof the user’s session and gain full access to their account. Again, in the case of open WiFi networks that could be anyone in radio range.

Search engine rankings

Some search engines use HTTPS as a signal in their ranking algorithms. Google announced in 2004 that it was using the presence of HTTPS as a small positive signal, but that it may strengthen that signal over time as more and more websites switch to using a secure transport. It’s not unthinkable that at some point in the future there will be HTTPS-only search engines.

But… But… But…

There are lots of excuses for not implementing HTTPS. Most of them are either misguided or outdated.

It’s too expensive and/or complicated

In the past, getting HTTPS certificates was a pain. A number of free suppliers have existed for a while but the process for getting their certificates wasn’t particularly straight forward, and many imposed arbitrary restrictions on the certificate parameters. Even once you had the certificate, you had to fiddle about with your HTTP server configuration to make it work, remember to manually get a new certificate when the old one expired, and lots of other annoying busywork.

With the arrival of Let’s Encrypt, all that changed. You can retrieve and deploy a free HTTPS certificate with two or three commands. Renewal can be handled completely automatically with a single command executed by cron.

There’s no point; nothing on my site is sensitive

You might not think your content warrants privacy, but can you speak for everyone who accesses it? Even content that seems mundane to you — such as travel advice, or technical writing — could be used to build up a profile of a user. If an attacker is monitoring traffic in a coffee shop and sees a user looking at travel advice and weather forecasts for a foreign country, he could use that information to plan a burglary knowing that the user will be away. Similarly, some content which is perfectly mundane to you may actually be very sensitive in other countries with repressive governments. HTTPS makes it much harder for these people to snoop on traffic.

From another angle, if you’re offering any kind of information, instructions, or especially file downloads, there’s a severe risk to users if the content is modified on its way to them. An evil sysadmin could rewrite your travel advice to suggest visiting the local drug dealer’s hangout, or replace your download with a malware-infested version.

HTTPS is slower, uses more resources, etc

Back in 1995 this might have been a valid argument. Enabling HTTPS on a modern server will make an almost negligible difference to performance. If you also enable HTTP/2 (which most implementations only support over HTTPS), it’s likely to actually use fewer resources, and result in a faster, smoother experience for your users. HTTP/2 was designed to work with HTTPS, and designed with modern requirements and networking techniques in mind.

CloudFlare have an excellent demonstration of the benefits of HTTP/2, and it can show speed improvements of 2-3x in a typical environment. On top of being faster, HTTP/2 uses fewer connections which results in less resource overhead on both the server and the client.

So what are you waiting for?

If you run a website and aren’t using HTTPS, give it a try.