BlogDB

Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives

I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.Off the top of my h...

I asked ChatGPT to psychoanalyse me

Update (July 2025): Important Context on AI, Mental Health, and Accessibility This post describes a personal experiment from 2024. I’ve noticed this post has been getting more traffic recently, and...

What Does Product Market Fit Sound Like? This.

I got a call from an ex-student asking me “how do you know when you found product market fit?” There’s been lots of words written about it, but no actual recordings of the moment. I remembered I ha...

👻 Sandboxels v1.10.1 - Creepy Crawlies - OUT NOW 🕸️

The scariest Sandboxels update of all time is here, including Spiders, Webs, Souls, Candy Corn, and more! This is just one of the many Halloween events happening around R74n this month.

Block abusive IPs based on 404 error rate using HAProxy

I’ve been using HAProxy for a very long time. In most cases, I work on stuff where HAProxy configuration fits into the fire-and-forget category, with occasional tweaks to ACLs, redirections, and th...

On surrendering and the fallacy of control

Yesterday, around 1:30 AM, I woke up with a feeling that I needed to vomit. I tried getting up, but I immediately felt faint and did indeed faint. I was a bit sick all over the place. Thankfully, i...

Watching colonialism in real-time

Prevent data loss on page refresh

A technique to retain form data on page reload or navigation.

Terminal colours are tricky

Yesterday I was thinking about how long it took me to get a colorscheme in my terminal that I was mostly happy with (SO MANY YEARS), and it made me wonder what about terminal colours made it so har...

The Deal With WordPress

The boat has been rocked. By someone firing a cannon. At its own fleet.

On being the cheapest cloud

Recently, I heard a pitch from a public cloud company. Among other characteristics, a key aspect they stressed is that they are the cheapest cloud. This aspect struck me. Not because I believe it i...

How Rage Against the Machine changed my life

In a previous post, I infodumped about my special interest in Rage Against the Machine. Since then, I’ve been reflecting a lot on my teen years, as I first got into RATM when I was 13. It all start...

Meta Ends Direct Peering with Deutsche Telekom

On Wednesday, Meta announced1 it was ending its direct peering relationship with Deutsche Telekom (DT) due to the fee being charged for the connections. DT also had some strong words on their persp...

When Xbox Was Alive (Xbox 360 Memories)

It was just a games console but it defined our lives from 2007 to 2012. Featuring dashboarding, GameBattles, scratchcards and slagging matches.

Some Go web dev notes

I spent a lot of time in the past couple of weeks working on a website in Go that may or may not ever see the light of day, but I learned a couple of things along the way I wanted to write down. He...

FreeBSD "kiosk" for home automation dashboard

My current, FreeBSD based server for self-hosting and home automation - now with a touchscreen!

PostScript® 1.0 - A Code Study

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishi...

Hawkpost enters “maintenance only” mode

In practice this already happened a couple of years ago, now we are just making it official. For those who don’t know, Hawkpost is a side project that I started while at Whitesmith back in 2016 (8+...

Post-OCSP certificate revocation in the Web PKI

OCSP, including OCSP Stapling, is leaving the Web PKI. Here's a complete look at revocation beyond OCSP: its past, present, and possible futures.

DIY NAS: 2024 Edition and the 2024 EconoNAS!

A two-for-one DIY NAS build blog! I detail the components that I would pick for 2024's DIY NAS and EconoNAS builds. Which one will be your favorite?