Kyle Kingsbury

  1. Geoblocking Multiple Localities With Nginx

    A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom, that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act. I wrote a short tutorial on geoblocking a single country using Nginx on Debian. Now Mississippi’s 2024 HB 1126 has made it illegal for essentially any…

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  2. Astound Supports IPv6 Only in Washington

    In the hopes that it saves someone else two hours later: the ISP Astound only supports IPv6 in Washington State. You might find this page which says “Astound supports IPv6 in most locations”. Their tech support agents might tell you that they support v6 on your connection, even if you are not in Washington…

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  3. The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

    In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection…

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  4. The Future of Comments is Lies, I Guess

    I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years…

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  5. The Future of Customer Support is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole…

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  6. The Future of Newspapers is Lies, I Guess

    Update, 2023-05-23: Added a paragraph about Dr. Howard Whiteman’s non-existent quote. I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter…

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  7. When Flat Rate Movers Won't Answer Your Calls

    Back in 2023 I went through an inter-state move with Flat Rate Movers, LTD., a.k.a. Flat Rate Moving, US DOT 488466, MC 254356. They bungled the job, damaged my stuff and my house, and then refused to talk to me or their own insurance company. I placed dozens of calls, wrote letters, emails, nothing…

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  8. Comments on Executive Order 14168

    Submitted to the Department of State, which is requesting comments on a proposed change which would align US passport gender markers with executive order 14168. Executive order 14168 is biologically incoherent and socially cruel. All passport applicants should be allowed to select whatever gender markers…

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  9. Geoblocking the UK with Debian & Nginx

    A few quick notes for other folks who are geoblocking the UK. I just set up a basic geoblock with Nginx on Debian. This is all stuff you can piece together, but the Maxmind and Nginx docs are a little vague about the details, so I figure it’s worth an actual writeup. My Nginx expertise is ~15 years out…

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  10. Seconds Since the Epoch

    This is not at all news, but it comes up often enough that I think there should be a concise explanation of the problem. People, myself included, like to say that POSIX time, also known as Unix time, is the number of seconds since the Unix epoch, which was 1970-01-01 at 00:00:00. This is not true. Or…

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  11. Threads Won't Take You South of Market

    In June 2023, when Threads announced their plans to federate with other Fediverse instances, there was a good deal of debate around whether smaller instances should allow federation or block it pre-emptively. As one of the admins of woof.group, I wrote about some of the potential risks and rewards of…

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  12. Ecobee Settings for Heat Pumps with Resistive Aux Heat

    I’m in the process of replacing a old radiator system with a centrally-ducted, air-source heat pump system with electric resistive backup heat. I’ve found that the default ecobee algorithm seems to behave surprisingly poorly for this system, and wanted to write up some of the settings that I’ve found…

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