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Three months after I built my new computer, it started annoying me.
There would occasionally be a noise that sounded like a fan was catching on a cable, but there weren’t any
loose cables to be a problem. Over the course of a few weeks, the sound got progressively worse to the extent
that I didn’t want to use the computer without headphones on. I measured the sound at 63 dB, which is about
the sound of someone talking. That may not sound terrible, but it’s a constant, nasty noise coming from
something that sits about 40cm from my head.
After some investigating, I identified the PSU fan as the culprit. I have a Cooler Master V750 SFX, which is
not super high-end, but wasn’t cheap, either. It shouldn’t be developing issues after three months.
Thankfully, it comes with a ten-year warranty, so it should be easy to get sorted, right?
Warranty woes
I looked at Cooler Master’s warranty, and for issues within the first two years you have to deal with the
retailer. That would be Amazon in my case. So I looked at Amazon’s information on warranty issues. Their
policy is that if it’s more than 30 days since purchase, you have to send it off to a third-party repair
center and wait for them to diagnose and try to repair it. Here’s the kicker:
Usually repairs take up to 20 business days (including delivery time), but could take slightly longer
I use the computer for work, have upcoming LAN parties to go to, and generally can’t do without it for an
entire month. That’s assuming they reproduce the issue: the PSU fan only turns on when it reaches a certain
temperature, so if you just plug it in briefly it won’t exhibit any symptoms.
I realised my media consumption was too close to this for comfort.
For the longest time I used Spotify for all my music needs. And I listen to a lot of music: sometimes
actively, but mostly passively as background noise. I cancelled my premium subscription last December, and
stopped using the service entirely. Why? There’s a bunch of reasons.
Let’s talk about the money first. Spotify launched at £9.99/month, and stayed that way for over a decade. Then
in 2023 it went up to £10.99/month. That’s probably fair: the economy was in the toilet, and they haven’t
changed their price in so long. Then in 2024 they upped it again to £11.99/month. Hmm. The service they were
providing me didn’t improve in that time. I didn’t want audiobooks in my music player, I didn’t want an AI DJ
that spouted inane comments at me. Paying them more money to do things I didn’t want seemed silly, and the
money that actually goes to the artists is both so small and gets split in such a convoluted way that it’s not
worth even thinking about.
My bigger concern was how uninvolved I became in choosing what to listen to. I leaned hard on their
algorithmic playlists like “Discover Weekly” instead of manually curating playlists. But they ended up
developing this weird feedback loop where it kept playing a country band that I didn’t particularly like, but
also didn’t dislike enough to skip. That acted as positive reinforcement, and they kept coming up everywhere.
There were definitely ways to solve that by changing how I used Spotify, but the realisation that I was
basically just consuming whatever was fed to me made me want to try something completely different. So I
decided to go back to buying music instead. Which is where things got… complicated.
In most Star Trek series, the ship or station computer is ever-present in the background, waiting to be called
on by the main characters. It nearly always does exactly the right thing, and there’s little limit to the
functions it can perform. Take this mundane example from DS9:
KIRA: Computer, establish link with the Bajoran Medical Index for the Northwestern District.
COMPUTER: Link established.
KIRA: Access all information on Doctor Surmak Ren.
COMPUTER: There are no records matching that name.
KIRA: Try the Northeastern District, same search.
COMPUTER: Doctor Surmak Ren, currently serving as Chief Administrator of the Ilvian Medical Complex.
KIRA: Computer, open a channel to the Ilvian Medical Complex. Administrator’s office.
The computer is doing some kind of networking to a database only identified by name. It does a search and
summarises the lack of results. It then repeats the process with another database, and succinctly announces
the results. Finally, it opens a communication channel to a specific room in a facility, based only on its
name.
This whole interaction is remarkably boring. Kira doesn’t have to know any URLs or API endpoints, or what
protocol she wants to use. She doesn’t have to open a specific app and then login and then try the query
again. She just says what she wants and the computer does it.
It seems like this should be one of the most easily obtainable bits of sci-fi wizardry with our current
technology. We have multiple massive companies throwing lots of money at digital assistants, LLMs that are
improving at an insane rate, but we’re somehow not even close to the usability or usefulness of the Trek
computers. What gives?
Boring is, well, boring.
Larry Page once said something that might help explain it:
The Star Trek computer doesn’t seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I
think we can do better than that.
This is the same Larry Page that founded Google, whose mission statement is “to organize the world’s
information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Of all people, surely he should find an
omnipresent computer that can answer ‘random questions’ interesting?! It seems like it should be the epitome
of Google’s mission!
I recently encountered a bug in one of my projects that I couldn’t immediately figure out. It was an issue in
Centauri, my reverse proxy. After its config was updated, I
noticed it stopped serving responses. Looking at the logs, I could see it was obtaining new certificates from
Let’s Encrypt for a couple of domains, but I’d designed it so that wouldn’t block requests (or so I thought).
After a few minutes of confusion, everything went back to working.
It felt like an issue with locking, but a quick glance didn’t show me anything obvious. I decided to throw the
problem at Claude Code and see how it did. With some guidance it managed to identify the cause, but it was a
bit of a journey to get there. I’m going to share the prompts and responses, as it was an interesting process.
The initial prompt
I thought the issue might be quite obvious, and I’d just overlooked it. Centauri isn’t that complex a project,
after all. So I gave Claude a fairly minimal prompt to set it off:
> Hello! Please examine this codebase. I have noticed an issue that when a
certificate is being renewed, the application seems to not serve any other
requests. I suspect there is a misplaced lock somewhere.
Can you see what's happening? Think very hard.
Claude Code has
special hardcoded triggers to
engage “thinking” mode, which makes it take more time to think about alternatives. The keywords are: “think”,
“think hard”, “think harder”, and “ultrathink”. I managed to not quite get the right incantation here, and
only enabled the lowest level.
I’ve been using Tailscale for around four years to connect my disparate
devices, servers and apps together. I wanted to talk a bit about how I use it, some cool features you might
not know about, and some stumbling blocks I encountered.
I’m not sure Tailscale needs an introduction for the likely audience of this blog, but I’ll give one anyway.
Tailscale is basically a WireGuard orchestration service, with lots of nice features sprinkled on top. It’s a
subscription product, but it has an insanely generous free tier that covers basically anything you’d ever want
to do as an individual. They also open source all their client software, and there’s a third party control
server implementation called Headscale if you want to
avoid the hosted system entirely.
Basic connectivity
At its core, Tailscale lets you easily connect from one device to another, even if they’re not directly
exposed to the Internet. You install the Tailscale client wherever you like (on your phone, computer, servers,
Raspberry Pi, etc), authenticate the machine with the control server, and it can then talk to all the other
machines on the tailnet using their private Tailscale IP addresses.
That isn’t anything revolutionary: it’s the basic premise behind VPNs. But Tailscale makes it so easy. You
don’t have to bother with any networking configuration. You don’t have to distribute keys. You just install
the client, and login.
