Stuff I feel like blogging about.
I worked some retail job when the iPhone 3g came out. Along with it came a bunch of novelty apps. Funny stuff like drinking a beer by tilting the phone. My manager purchased the phone and showed it off to me. He installed an app that showed the weather and also displayed the "feels like" temperature. I don't know how to describe the way he showed it off through text, but he had this distinct pride…
This week I had the pleasure of attending Software Should Work (2026), henceforth SSW. This was my first time attending a conference and it was really fun so I thought I would write about it. Firstly, a huge thank you to the organizer, Isaac Van Doren , for making it happen. I'll be going through the days and their talks and anything interesting that happened outside of talks. I won't be trying to…
Slop has infested every corner of my job. Slop code. Slop reviews on pull requests. Slop engineering documents. Slop "summaries". Slop meeting notes. Slop "analysis" of issues/incidents. Slop messages posted to slack. Everywhere slop. The volume so high. The substance so low. Facts and truth optional. My eyes refuse to see. My brain refuses to process. For whom or what did we generate so much…
During my weekend grocery run, someone asked me to help them. When this happens, its usually a certain demographic that mistakes me for the "help". It always invokes a shitty feeling because they feel just because I am brown I must be a store employee since someone of my skin colour is not capable of being anything than part time help. This weekend this did not happen. It was an older lady with…
The recent places I have lived have all had these kinda cool kitchen faucets, where the tap part extends with a cord/pipe. You can then pull this to while doing dishes and then when you let go, it magically pulls back into the holder. A picture: I never thought or cared about how it worked, up until I had to replace one and the way it works is just freaking awesome. It's just a weight around the…
There's a lot I don't like about LLMs: The ethics of how they are trained, and how the training material is sourced. The resource wastage from running them. A 2nd order effect of the above is the short supply of ram/gpus/hdds/ssds. The terrible low quality slop output. Complete antithesis of open source (no source and a make + configure to create from scratch). Rots your own brain the more you use…
I bought a new laptop, the GPD Pocket 4. It came with windows installed by default, and I wanted to install nix on it. I grabbed a usb, dd 'd the nixos iso image on it and tried to boot. The laptop did not recognize the drive. Turns out, the drive crapped out, no computer would boot off it. The normal thing to do would've been to just go get a new usb and install off of and go about setting the…
New episode of South park aired this week called "Twisted Christian". The entire episode was spent making some joke where the kids say "6 7" and then laugh while moving their hands up and down. Turns out this is a real thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6-7_(meme) I found about it by actually searching it up and finding the wikipedia page. I am officially old.
I made a thing . I don't know if I would say the thing's good. I also wouldn't say that I have pride in it. Nor does it have great efficiency. The source code won't win any awards. But it does the thing I want it to. It solves a problem I had. Now I longer have it. Nor will I have to ever have that problem again. And it does it well enough that I don't see the need to keep hacking on it. I've used…
I use neomutt (with mbsync) to access my email accounts. This involves setting up an app password which retrieves messages via IMAP. I have accounts across gmail, fastmail and microsoft email. All was well until June 19th. Microsoft sent an email with the title "Action Needed – You may lose access to some of your third-party mail and calendar apps". The TL;DR of this email is that MS will remove…
There's this annoying default behaviour in KDE where if you have a multi-monitor setup, your notifications will show up on the "wrong" monitor. I know I am not alone in trying to get my notifications to show up on my main screen. Today I figured it out. On your non main monitors: Open your system tray settings Disable the notification entry On your main monitor, enable the notification entry…
I decided to rework my dad's site again. But first some history: # Site version 1 Dad uploads documents via ftp to hosting company. Files are now public and viewable. This was his workflow for years. The problems started when he relocated to our home country and had to pay for renewal of service. The hosting company does not accept payment from our home country, and the conversion makes the cost…
This is a rant. My previous AP was the Unifi AP AC-lite. I bought it close to 10 years ago now. I set it up once and never touched it again, until I had to change my SSID . I decided to buy the UC6+ as the price is right, I already have POE available, it should just be a straight upgrade. The setup went smoother than last time. I now have 2 access points so using the mobile app was actually…
I thought I should do a recap for this year. Though also for some typing practice. I started this year unemployed, and still burned out from the last job. I do not remember the states of my finances, but I do get a new job later on In no particular order: # Momo I got my cat Momo. She is on the opposite end of the personality spectrum compared to Yar. She is confident and unfazed by new people.…
These past weeks I have been learning to touch type Dvorak. I have been using the lovely tool gtypist . I wrote this entire post using the layout. My typing speed took a considerable hit. I average about 80 words per minute with QWERTY, but now I am down to 15. Here's to hoping that it gets better with practice. Also this is messing with my vim muscle memory. This took a considerable time to type…
Did this earlier this week and thought I would share. My server stores video files for TV shows and movies I have watched. Other types of files exist but it's almost entirely video files. These take up quite a bit of space. The server consists of a single zpool, aptly named "mediafiles". ZFS supports compression, but the default is to have it off. Enabling compression is a single command away (…
Today had nice weather. Instead of doing anything I spent the day sunbathing with my cats. Lazy days are the best.
It's no secret that I despise ads . I go out of my way to block them where and when I can. I run a Pi-hole on my network, run uBlock Origin (and some other) extensions in my browser. I avoid any product mentioned in a YouTube sponsored segment (y'all already know which ones I'm talking about). One ad (that I've noticed so far) has managed to affect me and caused me to buy it's product. I was in…
I use a thinkpad flex 14 AMD laptop hooked up to my TV so that I can work in my living room. This is to keep my cat happy, who for whatever reason, hates my office room. This thing has about six gigabytes of ram in it and I am constantly running into linux's oom (out of memory) killer. I am not doing anything crazy either, in fact at the time of writing this blog post this is the output of free -h…
Incredibly simple trick to figure out how lazy the programmers behind a company are, just view the transactional emails sent by said company as text instead of html. I made the switch over to plaintext email a little over a year ago and it's just sad seeing how programmers at billion dollar companies drop the ball on this. There will be stray html tags like <ul> or <li> inside the email, the…
I am on a transatlantic flight from Europe to Canada. Internet is not available. Well, technically it's available, but it it's rated at 120mb for 60 Swiss Francs which is outside of my price range. Before the flight I downloaded the first day's first part problem from Advent of Code (AoC). I wanted to practice both go and rust (and ideally zig as well). I am not well versed in any of these…
I have always wanted to go to Italy, namely for the food and the coffee . Imagine my surprise when I went to Italy (Rome + Naples) and found the coffee to not live up to its hype. # Why does it suck? Saying it sucks is a bit harsh but here are the main reasons why I did not enjoy it: They use robusta beans Italians like their dark roast (even at specialty shops) # What's wrong with robusta?…
Damn it has been a long time since I have posted anything on my blog. The biggest difference between then and now is that I have quit my job. # Why? I was not happy. For those who know me, it's no secret that I don't enjoy web development. Doubly so, if its with rails. I feel like I have not learnt anything new despite being at the job for two years. Web development isn't a technically deep field,…
Well it's been a sold three months since my last blog entry. Not a lot has happened, but at the same time some stuff has. Most importantly, I, at long last, have gotten my Canadian citizenship. This has been 14 years in the making. I am now awaiting for the processing of my passport application so that I can have that sweet Canadian traveling privilege. With relation to my blog, there is nothing…
Not too long ago, I had written about how I exposed my ssh port onto the internet (for use by my dad). I had also written about how I started experiencing attacks on said port and what I did to harden against it . This is the next (fingers crossed, last) step in my hardening of my server from the outside world. What had happened was a determined script kiddie wanted in to my server. This person…
As the title suggests, I have a Unifi AP AC-lite that I use to serve wireless in my home, paired with an EdgeRouter PoE. This is my story of trying to change my wireless SSID. # Step 1. The mobile app Unifi provides a mobile app that should, supposedly, make managing your ubiquiti network easier. I installed it with hopes of this being a quick and simple process (spoiler alert: it wasn't). The…
I use neovim as my main driver for all my coding and text editing needs. They released version 0.5 (up to 0.6 now) which supports having your vim configuration in lua (5.1 via LuaJIT) instead of in vimscript . I've never used lua before but it's a nice small language. LuaJIT is also crazy fast. You can find most of what you need to know with either :h lua and some syntax reference . One of the…
My previous post was about how I setup a SFTP server for my dad. This post is going to be about all the things I learned about exposing your server to the internet. # Unable to login About a week after I exposed my server via SFTP to the world, I wanted to log in to my server to do some maintenance. Much to my shock, my server was unresponsive to my regular ssh commands. This is when the panic…
My dad has a site that he has been working on since the windows 3.1 days. It's static site and up until now he had been paying a little over a hundred dollars a year to have it hosted. This came up during the winter of last year, where he had to pay for a renewal for his domain as well as his hosting. The hosting company did not accept payment from where he's located, so he asked me to handle the…
The province that I am in lifted covid restrictions for the gym. I used to work out a lot before covid, during the pandemic I have co-opted more of a sedentary lifestyle. I signed up for a new membership as soon as possible to the closest gym. The first workout (per body part) always sucks. The weights that I am able to lift is far below what I used to be able to do I am going to be sore for days…
For the first time in my life I have gotten vertigo. It's not clear from where I got it, or how. All I know is that it sucks quite a bit. Here's to hoping it passes soon and my body adjusts to my new sense of balance.
In one of my previous roles I had to use Django Rest Framework (drf) to make APIs and I enjoyed it. It fit my mental model for building robust APIs. My mental model is as follows: A user sends a request Check auth Check request body (do we have the right fields/structure) Perform basic validation (types) Perform business logic validation Persist to data store drf makes this super easy with its…
It has been an interesting year (or two). Covid has caused a lot of people to adopt new pets, myself included. Why not? We're all home all the time anyway right? The issue with this is that I live in a condo (I'll get around to writing about all the joys of owning a condo). This means if you, or your new dog, ends up making a lot noise (read: barking) all your neighbours suffer. You can complain…
Like most nerds I have a home server that I use to serve media (via Plex) and maybe host some personal projects. # History I built the first version of my server (I think) about 8ish years ago. It's a simple and cheap setup. The OS ended up being ubuntu server since it had been quite a while since I dabbled in setting up a distro from scratch. This was the fastest way to have something up and…
This is going to be my first time shucking hard drives. I managed to get a couple 14tb WD easystores for about 20$/TB. According to /r/datahoarders it's always a good idea to run badblocks on the hard drives to make sure there are no faults. Since this is my first time it's better to err on the side of caution Well here is how long the command has been running for so far: EDIT The full time was…
Last week James Hoffman came out with a video about how to make a tasty donut flavoured espresso drink. The full recipe is here . I wanted to try it but I had hard time getting donuts. I ended up getting some generic donuts from my local grocery store (I forget to take a picture before making the recipe). {"height": 800, "orig_height": 4032, "orig_width": 3024, "static_path":…
The title of this post should be "Shut up about python and multi-line lambdas". I browse HackerNews a bit more than I should, if I'm being honest. Every now and again there will be a post involving python on the front page. Predictably there will always be (at least) one person in the comments moaning about the lack of multi-line lambdas and how it's holding python back from being a "real"…
I used to hate coffee. I never understood why people enjoyed drinking coffee so much and so often. Among my coworkers and friends it wasn't unheard of someone drinking 8 cups of coffee a day. Though, to be fair, programmers generally seem to consume an unholy amount of coffee. To me coffee always tasted bad. Everyone told me it's an acquired taste and that I would come around, but it just tasted…
A while ago I wrote about ads showing up on my TV player, which annoyed me. To solve this annoyance I repurposed a raspberry pi I had lying around into TV player over the winter holidays. All I needed to do was be able to access my Plex server and twitch. One option was to install android on the pi and just use the official apps. It looks like not even android TV is free from ads anymore ( source…
I upgraded to linux 5.10 and noticed that LightDM would fail to start consistently. I was still able to switch to a different tty and startx manually, after which everything would work fine. Looking at my journalctl -b was interesting Jan 05 21:20:04 linux-desktop kernel: amdgpu 0000:28:00.0: [drm] fb0: amdgpudrmfb frame buffer device Jan 05 21:20:04 linux-desktop systemd[1]: lightdm.service:…
I saw Dhall mentioned on a job posting for NoRedInk. I had never heard of it before but NoRedInk did create Elm and are fond of functional tooling so it piqued my interest. For reference, Dhall is a simple language. It's not Turing complete, but it's strongly typed. It's primarily used for managing configuration files. It has some helpers to output JSON/YML/bash, but you can also output to plain…
I am a huge fan of dumb TV's made smart via a TV player, something along the likes of an apple TV or a Roku. The first device that I owned was the first generation of a google chromecast. It worked decently enough, but it would struggle when trying to play back some of the more higher definition media that I had. I upgraded from the chromecast to a Roku 3. It worked splendidly for a while, up…
This weekend I spent some time migrating my music off Google Play Music to Spotify. I am going to miss its auto generated radio stations which helped introduce me to a lot of new music. The last Google product that I actually enjoyed was Google Inbox, which was subsequently also killed. With this I am probably not going to be buying into any new Google products. The lesson learnt is that do not…
I decided to move my blog to Zola instead of Docusaurus. They are both static site generators, but Zola is much faster. Heres a Docusaurus build: And heres a Zola build:
Replacing one of my shell scripts with a compiled binary using rust.
How I improved my work from home setup using a proxy auto-config (PAC) file.
I wanted to use Docusaurus to setup my blog because I might be using it for work and wanted to test it out. I am also a fan of the fact that it's a static site builder, which means I can use it with a free static site hosting solution. I decided to go with GitLab Pages because I am already using GitLab and it lets me use a custom domain. # Setting up the GitLab project This was pretty straight…