BlogDB

Goodbye Microsoft Hello Facebook

Philip writes about how small cost saving policies at Microsoft irritated him as an employee: We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time. It felt like free food was on offer at least once a we...

Linux UEFI booting simplified

Demystifying the UEFI boot process with a focus on Linux, simplicity, reliability, and security.

I'm Writing Again

I can’t believe it’s been over two years since I last published an article here! Time really flies. The crazy part is that over these last two years, I’ve done more writing than ever; it just hasn’...

🏖️ Sandboxels v1.10 - Return of the Sand 🔥

Just in time.

Space Is Really Big

More than 30 earths could fit between the earth and the moon. Our elementary school models of the solar system really undersell how big space is. The problem is, space is too big and human brains a...

Infineon TPM firmware update on the HP t620 thin client

Updating the Infineon TPM firmware on an HP t620 thin client, which is vulnerable to the ROCA attack (that allows an attacker to recover the RSA private key).

Common Crawl and search engines

Reply to We really fucking need a community owned search engine index that fucks the corporate rules (but still respects personal websites' indexing preferences) by Marta Sokolska Common Crawl is t...

$656,000 of Frugal Things I Still Love Doing

“I used to read Mr. Money Mustache”,  some people say these days,  “Until he got all rich and fancy so that he no longer understands the common person’s plight. Stash probably doesn’t even practice...

Getting Started With a Private LoRaWAN Network Using ChirpStack v4 (Updated)

I have recently started experimenting with LoRa radios, and the LoRaWAN network protocol. Interestingly it seems that the LoRa ecosystem is simultaneously surprisingly open (both in specifications ...

Musing about a secure computer for sensitive data

How about splitting the usage and storage of sensitive documents and data? Plus a few ideas on how to implement a small custom "secure" computer for the storage part.

Metropolis Hastings for a Univariate Posterior

Using Bayesian statistics at work, sometimes there is a bias towards conjugate priors. Conjugate priors are great due to their computational easiness and pedagogical utility. Specifically, you don’...

Speedgoat 50K 2024 Race Report

The energy at the beginning of any race is exhilarating. Tapering for weeks after intense training leaves me with tons of pent up energy. My third time completing the Speedgoat 50K has been the mos...

On a more selective Google

Reply to Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content by Vincent Schmalbach Selectivity is long overdue. Marginalia, Stract, and Teclis feel like a breath of fresh air for broad short-tail quer...

Caveats to Ungoogled Chromium recommendations

In the wake of a certain ad-funded browser company bundling adtech into its browser yet again, some people have been recommending Ungoogled-Chromium (UGC). I think it’s fine to recommend UGC with c...

I turned my 10 year old tablet into a digital photo frame, displaying google photos album. 🌴

Custom PyTorch Collate Function

If your Dataset class looks something like class MyDataset(Dataset): # ... boilerplate ... def __getitem__(self, idx): item = self.data[idx] return item['anchor'], item['positive'], item['negative'...

Robots.txt Won't Save You

The AI vacuum hard at work Is it too late? The ever hungry AI titans demand more and more data that is vacuuming up the entirety of the internet. You just got off a boring Zoom call? Chomp.1 Checke...

“Extracting wisdom” from conference videos

PyCon US happened in May, this month, the 154 videos gradually started being published on YouTube. Between now and then many other interesting conferences took place. That’s a lot of talks, present...

Website Evolution: Q2 2024

There weren’t quite as many changes in Q2 2024 as there were in Q1, but I managed to do lots of cool things nevertheless. Part of the website #evolution series. This post covers versions 3.14 to 3....

Freedom of the Last Minute

Leaving logistical plans until the last minute leaves you with fewer decisions to make, fewer options to compare, and more importantly, more time to enjoy yourself. If you accept that the future is...