Blog
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Locked in Plain Sight
The last time you bought something online, your computer agreed on a secret with a total stranger while the whole world watched, and the math behind that moment has never been broken. This post is about why. RSA, ECC, and the one lever the industry has always pulled when it gets nervous: bigger keys. Classically,…
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The Day 4,500 Megawatts Disappeared
On July 15, MISO declared the first summer EEA2 in its modern record. The headlines said record heat. The data I archived while it happened says 4,475 megawatts of generation vanished from the books between breakfast and mid-afternoon. This is the anatomy of an emergency that worked.
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The Same Trick, Different Physics
Quantum computers do not try every possibility at once. A qubit is not a coin that is both heads and tails. Most explanations of quantum computing are wrong in specific ways that matter. This post is the working model that the popular explanations refuse to give you.
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The Machine That Proved You Can Break the Unbreakable
The Germans built a cipher with 159 quintillion possible settings and concluded it could never be broken. Alan Turing’s team at Bletchley Park broke it within the hour, day after day, not by counting through the possibilities but by exploiting a single tiny structural flaw in the math. This is the first post in a…
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Why Every Power Supply in Your House Says “100–240V” (A Story About Japan)
I was getting ready for an upcoming trip to Europe and picked up my laptop’s power brick to check the voltage. The label said 100 to 240V, which was fine. But then I noticed something odd: who runs on 100 volts? The answer turned out to be one of the best pieces of accidental history…
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The Curious Case of aa.ns.charter.com
I run Pi-hole on my home network. Most days I don’t think about it. But one stray entry in the query log caught my eye, and what I thought would be a five-minute mystery turned into a seven-year-old bug in Charter’s authoritative DNS infrastructure that nobody at Charter is going to find from the inside.
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Deploying DNS over HTTPS on Windows Server 2025, and the Three Things the Docs Skip
A real-world walkthrough of enabling DNS over HTTPS on the Windows Server 2025 DNS role, with verification evidence and the three gotchas the official guide leaves out.
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Why Your Electric Bill Is About to Get Weirder
The conclusion of a four-part series. What the coming grid changes mean for your electric bill, why capacity prices are about to flow into residential rates, and what ordinary ratepayers can actually do about any of it.
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Why AI Might Not Get the Power It Needs
The AI buildout is unlike anything the grid has absorbed before, and the companies building it are not waiting for permission. What happens when private timelines, regulatory gaps, and gigawatt-scale demand all collide. Part 3 of a series.
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The Grid Behind the Grid
How the North American power grid actually works, why it almost broke catastrophically in 2003, and why a brand new kind of customer is recreating the conditions for cascade failures on purpose. Part 2 of a series.
Mike Howells's Blog 