BlogDB

ASCII control characters in my terminal

Hello! I’ve been thinking about the terminal a lot and yesterday I got curious about all these “control codes”, like Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W, etc. What’s the deal with all of them? a table of ASCII ...

Nebula VPN split configuration

We have had Nebula VPN within the Fedora repositories for a couple of years. A couple of months ago, I changed the default systemd service unit. More specifically, this is the change: -ExecStart=/u...

Mathematical Analysis of the Royal Game of Ur

From the Board Games Study Journal: Mathematical analysis of the Royal Game of Ur Despite many discoveries and proposals for rules for the ancient board game known as the Royal Game of Ur (RGU), no...

It’s not your fault: a letter to myself

Here’s a letter I wrote to try to show myself some self-compassion. Dear Rachel, It’s not your fault that you whisper instead of speaking at a normal volume. It doesn’t mean that you’re stupid or d...

A New Look

I’ve given this blog a new look by switching the theme from Noteworthy to Long Form, the latter a theme of my own design. Why the change? I adopted the Noteworthy theme at the onset of this blog an...

Using less memory to look up IP addresses in Mess With DNS

I’ve been having problems for the last 3 years or so where Mess With DNS periodically runs out of memory and gets OOM killed. This hasn’t been a big priority for me: usually it just goes down for a...

2024 dbt Labs Coalesce Conference

I traveled for much of the last two months and during that time I went to four conferences. I usually like to write about them when they are happening but I wasn’t able to manage it, so I’m offerin...

Who is a terrorist?

Using Nix to Fuzz Test a PDF Parser (Part Two)

This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow. At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things starte...

Quantum Computing – An Update

In March 2022 I wrote a description of the Quantum Technology Ecosystem. I thought this would be a good time to check in on the progress of building a quantum computer and explain more of the basic...

An experiment in fighting spam on public forms using “proof of work”

Spam is everywhere. If you have an email account, a mailbox, a website with comments, a cellphone, a social media account, a public form, etc. We all know it, it is a plague. Over the years, there ...

Who Is Signal For?

The impossibility of migrating its message history raises one question.

Exposure to Art: a MTA Case Study

Many corporations and agencies allocate a certain amount of their budget towards the creation of public artwork. For instance, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has funded near...

The Worst Travelcard Of All Time

I wanted foreign currency at a reasonable exchange rate. Such a simple request was beyond the abilities of the Post Office.

Six Dumb Misconceptions About The Economy (that the Politicians Want You To Believe)

Well, it looks like we’re here in another US election year already.  As Advanced Mustachians, we already know that the ongoing battle of Harris vs. Trump should not be consuming much of our time.  ...

Gender Journey

In which a time of gender questioning is succinctly summarized.

Bye-Bye WordPress

No more Wordpress on this site!

How Saboteurs Threaten Innovation–and What to Do About It

This article first appeared in First Round Review. “Only the Paranoid Survive” Andy Grove – Intel CEO 1987-1998 I just had an urgent “can we meet today?” coffee with Rohan, an ex-student. His three...

Linkfest #25: The "Third Thumb", Prairie Strips, and Science Proves People Love Spoilers

Hello folks! It’s time for my latest “Linkfest” — i.e. "the opposite of doomscrolling”, in which I ceaselessly roam the Internet’s Plutonian shores to find the subtlest gems of science, culture and...

Some notes on upgrading Hugo

Warning: this is a post about very boring yakshaving, probably only of interest to people who are trying to upgrade Hugo from a very old version to a new version. But what are blogs for if not docu...