Like anybody, I’ve made a fair share of spelling mistakes in my life. I was never particularly talented, having never gotten a spelling bee medal myself. Red underlines are simply a fact of life, with no real emotional reaction. But fortunately, I’ve never made a spelling mistake so consequential that it’s been broadcast at least 200 billion times every day! This is the story of the referer header, a part of every single web request, and why it’s spelled incorrectly.

In an absolutely perfect world, we’d never have to restart our server software ever, because it would be flawless. There would be no bugs, memory leaks, state locks, and we’d all get along with each other! Unfortunately, we live in a much crappier world where our software is imperfect, and we don’t have enough time or resources to fix it properly. In the olden days, we’d just put a one-liner in root’s crontab, and be done with it:

You’ve got a new idea for a product, or a store, or maybe just a neat pun. So it’s time to buy a domain, isn’t it? That’s the easy part. Put in your credit card info, add a reminder for next year so you remember to renew it, and you’re set. But that’s far from the end! There’s a lot of work to make sure everything is set up correctly, and the best time to do it is right now, before it becomes “scary” to tweak the DNS config.

It was a cold, rainy November night in 2013, and I was hunched up over my desk trying to get my sound card working. In my teenage years, I had taken on a keen interest in “Hackintoshing”, that is, installing Apple’s Mac OS (then OSX) on regular non-Apple PC hardware. While my box was fairly well behaved, it had two quirks that were eluding me. My sound card didn’t work properly, and the graphics driver for my video card didn’t really work correctly until the system got all the way to the login screen.

I finally caved and bought one of the no-name 8" mini laptops from Aliexpress. I’ve had my eye on these for a long time. Really, since the days of my youth with the Sony Vaio P and other iconic UMPCs of the early 00’s. The game changer was the original GPD Pocket from a few years back. Now, there’s a cambrian explosion of cool tiny computers coming from China. This particular one was sold under the name “Topton”, but also appears under “Crelander”, “Aslay”, and a few other storefront names.