They’re back! After a three year hiatus (they last flew here in 2010), the tradition of the Blue Angels doing a show for Commissioning Week has been revived. Today (Tuesday) is practice day and tomorrow is the actual show. I’ll be posting pictures and videos here of the Blue Angels over the next couple of days. Stay tuned! Updates May 21, 2014 5:19pm Highlights from the show. May 20, 2014 12:29pm Video of the Blue Angels practicing.

FCC Chairman and former cable industry lobbyist Tom Wheeler has proposed new regulations for the Internet that would allow Internet Service Providers to charge more to site operators and content providers in order to get faster throughput to end users, and slow traffic to any sites and services that don’t pay up. If these rules go through, it will break the current model of the Internet as an open, unfiltered platform for communication.

I’m not going to use an email signature anymore. It’s an arcane practice that provides no real value to anyone. Let’s examine what a signature actually is. The signature is a form of identity verification, whereby the signatory validates that they are, in fact, the person they claim to be by putting pen to paper and swirling their hand around to form squiggles that they alone are the best at creating.

I love WordPress. I use it for nearly all the sites I build, I write plugins for it, I run this site on it. It’s an awesome content management system and blogging platform. I love that I can modify and extend it with plugins and themes however I want, without restriction. I love that it’s open source, so I can contribute to it being a better product and use it pretty much however I want without fees and license restrictions.

A while back I moved my site to full-time TLS. This is great for users since it provides both security through an encrypted connection, and authentication to verify that what they’re getting is actually coming from me, without alteration or interception. However, I needed to make sure any requests to non-TLS locations were redirected to their new TLS-protected URL. Luckily Nginx makes this really simple. Here’s the code you need to add to your server configuration:

I am amazed by the frequency with which I see the announcement of a technological innovation followed immediately by a barrage of naysayers proclaiming all manner of ways this new technology is bad for humanity, society, their national population, or what have you. Let’s take a recent example. A friend of mine posted this video on Facebook about a robot at the National Institute of Health: In case you didn’t bother to watch the video, here’s the major takeaway: the robot can do in one week what would take a scientist working 8 hours a day, 7 days a week for 12 years.

I read a lot. Not many books (though more than I used to), but a ton of articles and blog posts. Actually, let me rephrase that: I have a lot of articles in my reading queue. I do, in fact, read plenty of things on a daily basis, but the majority of interesting posts I come across get sent to Pocket, so I can read them later that day when I have some down time.

Keith Ledgerwood published a post earlier today outlining a theory he’s developed about Malaysian Airlines flight 370. I won’t go into great detail about his theory because you can read it yourself, and you should if you want to understand the rest of this post. The tl;dr is that he used available data about air traffic about the time and area MH370 was known, and later suspected, to be in the air, and has proposed that the plane’s alleged hijackers managed to disable the transponder and fly in the “radar shadow” of Singapore Airlines flight 68.

Last summer I canceled my cable TV subscription, and went 100% Internet. In fact, I’d been using Internet services nearly exclusively for my content consumption for many months up to that point, but other circumstances required keeping my cable TV. Despite pretty much entirely ignoring cable programming I still had the mentality that, if something came along on TV that I really wanted to watch, I still could. Once I dropped cable that option went away.

This post originally appeared on USNI Blog. I’m posting it here for my archives. The Defense Entrepreneurs Forum held their first locally organized event this past Saturday, called DEF[x] Annapolis (think TEDx vs TED). Organized by midshipmen at the Naval Academy, the goal was to bring together a group of people from around the region interested in furthering the discussion of innovation and disruption within the military. This was the second DEF event, the inaugural conference having been held this past October in Chicago.