Ben Kettle

Making Semgrep rip: how ripgrep inspired us to shave hours off scans

Photos from Darktable to my blog in one click

I fixed the graphics drivers on my laptop and Darktable—for the unaware, an extremely solid OSS photo editing software—went from essentially unusable to decently fast. After years of anticipation, I finally plugged my big hard drive into my little server and set up a network share (and backups!). I consolidated all my various photo libraries that were previously strewn across four…

Finding Fibonacci in the NYT Pips

When I was home over the holidays, one of my good high school friends got me hooked on the NYT Pips game. If you’re not familiar, it’s a puzzle game where you arrange a provided set of dominoes onto a board so that their values satisfy some constraints like “these 3 spots add to 5” or “these spots are all equal”. 
 
 While we were downhill skiing over…

Autogenerating a Book Series From Three Years of iMessages

I am frequently annoyed at the things that I can’t remember. And when I’m trying to remember the details of something, I often turn to my text messages—thanks to big improvements recently, it is now quite fast to search my whole iMessage history on my phone, provided that I can remember some verbatim part of the message I’m looking for. And often, once I’m in the…

Building a Safer FIDO2 Key with Privilege Separation and WebAssembly

FIDO2 is growing as a solution to the password hell we all know too well by
replacing passwords stored in brains with secret keys stored on dedicated
hardware security keys. This new protocol brings a huge increase in security and
in usability, but the security key poses an attractive new target for attackers.
For my Master’s thesis, I implemented a safer FIDO2 security key…