Earlier in the year I decided to move back to Australia as the pandemic handling in the USA was rather insane (I wanted to move earlier, family reasons kept me from doing so). So, on the 6th I headed to SFO with my ticket, a PCR/NAA COVID-19 test, my Queensland Health QR code and my 3 pieces of checked luggage: one climbing bag, one dive bag and one bag of sundries (including weight limited overflow from the others).

Earlier in the year I set a goal of either getting a job in the US government working towards fixing some of the mess left over from the previous administration or leaving the country. I recently got the news that I was unsuccessful in my applications and so the hunt for tickets to Australia began. Tales of the difficulty in getting to Australia are rampant right now and I can see where some of them come from.

Two tech issues today, which caused a bit of debugging fun: Firstly, I powered up an old iPhone SE to see if I could replicate a problem that a friend had been seeing. It was having some TLS issues and, as I dug further, it turned out to be all TLS issues rather than some. All connections to Apple services failed (so no updates, no synching, etc) and I couldn’t even unsubscribe it from iCloud in order to do a factory reset.

Introduction I started trying to work with Storm Crawler for a project and found the documentation to be a little spartan. I had figured that I was working with a general purpose crawler, but that’s not the case. Turns out, things were not quite so simple and, while Storm Crawler does work out of the box, it’s really an SDK for developing your own crawling system. The documentation is minimal, with most information being a series of blog posts on the Digital Pebble website labelled tutorial or storm-crawler.