I'm a member of the local search and rescue patrol, and as such I use portable radios when out on missions. I wanted to get an earpiece so I could listen to radio traffic. Of course, I could have bought one but they're like $40 each and why buy when you can make a reasonable replica for a fraction of the price?

IPv6 has a neat feature called Duplicate Address Detection (DAD). When you add an IPv6 address to an interface, it checks to be sure that nobody else is already using that address. That's a Good Thing®. But if you're using IPv6 addresses for anycast and two (or more) devices are on the same subnet it can cause problems. The solution is to not put your anycasted addresses on the shared interface (e.g. eth0); rather, put them on the loopback interface.

Last week I dove in and wrote my first Android app. I've been waiting for a good reason to give it a try and one finally fell into my lap. I'm a volunteer member of a search and rescue team. We use management software from Radishworks.com named Mission Manager. They released an API the other day so I took up the challenge.

Today is the great SOPA/PIPA blackout. These are two proposed bills in Congress which would create a censorship regime for the Internet, much like China, Iran, and Syria have. And we know how great those governments are, so why wouldn't we follow in their footsteps? Wikipedia and Google are the most notable, but thousands of other sites went offline in protest. We at zmonkey.org fully support these actions.

South Korea is reportedly preparing to block TCP port 25 and force all mail traffic through "official mail servers", whatever that means. The BBC article isn't much on technical details. I'm still on the fence about blocking port 25. Fundamentally, I'm opposed to blocking ports outright. If somebody is shown to abuse a service, I'm fine with restrictions. I'm not excited about the prospect of requiring all mail to go through a central server, whether it's mine or someone else's.