MarkMaunder dot com

The Qantas A380 Engine Failure: The story of an ops team pulling through a crisis

[Thanks to ‘evanm’ on Hacker News, here’s a link to the full documentary if you don’t want the abbreviated versions below.] As a low hours pilot I spend a lot of time reading NTSB reports and postmortems on flight incidents to try and avoid repeating the mistakes others have made or learn about how they […]

December 27, 2013 | Startups | 2 comments

Why you should fly United Airlines

We just flew United from Portland, Maine to Colorado and will be flying back in the next few days. We brought 3 pets with us, 2 cats and our Australian Cattle Dog, Joey. Their pet handling was awesome in the midst of a serious winter storm blowing through Maine with very cold icy conditions. My […]

December 26, 2013 | Startups | 2 comments

Linksys N600 Wifi Router doesn't do Gigabit with Apple Thunderbolt to Ethernet Adapter

I’m filing this under the “Things that suck” category. My two mac’s when connected directly to each other using a Cat 5e ethernet cable connect at 1 gigabit/second. Take the same cable and plug it directly into a Linksys N600 which is supposed to support Gigabit ethernet, and it’s stuck at 100 megabits per second. […]

December 14, 2013 | Rants | No comments

Financial Journalists are not Revolutionaries.

Another financial journalist has republished first year econ theory to add their 2c to the Bitcoinosphere and make their press deadline. To summarize: Mr Coy wants you to understand what deflation is, that it’s a nightmare in an economy where debt exists, and that it slows economic growth to a crawl because everyone holds currency […]

December 12, 2013 | Startups | 3 comments

SSH config for OS X users to keep connections from dropping on MiFi and other mobile hotspots

If you use SSH and are often using your cellphone as a mobile hotspot, or use a MiFi as a hotspot, you probably noticed that if you don’t do anything in your SSH window for a while, the connection drops, usually with a ‘Broken Pipe’ message. Suffer no more… Create an ‘.ssh’ directory off your […]

December 12, 2013 | Startups | 1 comment

Remembering Madiba

I’m at a loss of what to write about Madiba’s passing. I’m deeply saddened. If you’re expecting an email from me today, forget it. I’m at home, drinking strong beer and remembering the guy who saved South Africa’s ass from the fire of a racist government and post apartheid anger. I was in The Parade […]

December 5, 2013 | Startups | No comments

Why Banks are Declaring War on Bitcoin

What if we lived in a world where all transactions were person to person and cost almost nothing. What if we lived in a world where the money you save gradually becomes worth more, not through interest, but simply because as time passes you can buy more stuff with the same amount of money. What […]

December 5, 2013 | Bitcoin | 5 comments

Bitcoin transaction reversal and arbitration is built in. How it works.

Eli Dourado has a well written and easy to understand article about how Bitcoin transaction reversal and arbitration works. The feature built into Bitcoin is known as m-of-n or “multisignature” transactions. Here’s a brief extract: The simplest variant is a 2-of-3 transaction. Let’s say that I want to buy goods online from an anonymous counterparty. […]

December 4, 2013 | Bitcoin, Economics, Finance | No comments

Instrument failure after takeoff and becoming an outside-in pilot.

This is my first post as a relatively newly minted private pilot (about 4 months ago). The learning curve has been steep and it’s the kind of thing that humbles one, so I haven’t felt the sense of entitlement that one needs to write. But I am beginning to spot a few things that may […]

December 2, 2013 | Flying | 1 comment

And so the next Bitcoin Crash Begins…

UPDATE on Dec 7th, 2013: Looks like the crash started Dec 5th, so I was off by a few days. The lowest I’ve seen has been $666, so it’s still a little off my prediction of $600. There’s still some major selling activity out there and we may still see $600. Bitcoin crashes historically have […]

December 1, 2013 | Bitcoin | 11 comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.