Mark McBride

I lead teams of really smart people in personalized life sciences. Educated in computer science and forever curious about teaching dirt to do math. Perpetually hacking on all sorts of #homelab projects. #Seattle and #London

:machappy1: #MacOS
:freebsd: #FreeBSD
🏔️ #AlpineLinux

Website: https://markmcb.com 

Last Notes

2026-05-30 18:07:27 UTC

The newly purchased #ODROID H5 is online. I can't recommend this series enough. Perfect balance of low electrical power and high home use capability. For my fellow #FreeBSD fans, everything just works. You do have to use the rge driver in the ports tree for the 10G ethernet port, but I've had zero issues. https://markmcb.com/hardware/

2026-01-23 02:52:11 UTC

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Good point. I updated the article to include an approach that in exclusive instead of inclusive for cases like this where you want to assume agents are ok by default, which would be more feed-reader friendly.

2026-01-22 17:25:34 UTC

Two days ago I mentioned I was selectively disabling HTTP/1.X on my personal site. Now that I’ve got two days of data, I’m increasingly convinced this is a good setup. The nginx-reported error rate has dropped to near zero. It seems bad actors strongly prefer the older protocols. I wrote up my approach and results for anyone interested.
https://markmcb.com/web/selectively_disabling_http_1/

2026-01-20 19:13:38 UTC

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Did a quick write up for you. I’ll probably add a bit more detail later but this has the important bits:
https://markmcb.com/web/selectively_disabling_http_1/

2026-01-20 18:14:12 UTC

While enabling http/3 on nginx for my personal site, I noticed in the logs most traffic was http/1.x, and of that almost all was garbage.
So I’ve disabled http/1.x and made exceptions for bots I want and text-based browsers. As expected, my logs are noise free. Now I’m curious to see if there are unintended side effects.

2025-05-24 16:14:58 UTC

I’m collaborating with the #FreeBSD docs team on a potential refresh of the web site. Aside from a style refresh, also looking to make the content a bit more attractive to a newcomer. If you have ideas or feedback, please let me know here or on the FreeBSD discord documentation channel.
Mock-up:
https://freebsd.markmcb.com/
Especially could use input on the features page to call out things a new user may be unaware of.
https://freebsd.markmcb.com/features/

2024-05-30 23:21:16 UTC

It's been a little over a year since my switch to #FreeBSD for my servers. It’s been such a good experience. Stable, documented, and packed with feature that set it apart from alternatives. If you like #linux but find yourself occasionally fighting your favorite distro, I can’t recommend enough that you give it a try. And if there's that one thing that absolutely must run on Linux, then give #bhyve and the vm-bhyve tool a shot. I find it far more intuitive than using virt-manager/kvm/qemu.