A place to ramble about my electrical engineering classes, personal hardware projects and research notes.
Over an afternoon, I created futa, or the Functionally Useless Terminal Assistant. Written in 2 hours, backed by Ollama and written with Python, it’s runs in any UNIX environment as an AI assistant, taking control of your terminal when running futa "prompt" on the terminal. It’s the perfect HR pitch; something to back your vibe coders who don’t know what to do in the terminal, it’s also…
It’s almost been 24 years since the shift of exFAT to NTFS on Windows XP, the last bastion of native FAT-family support on any Windows systems. While exFAT still persists in USB flash drives, boot partitions and some legacy partitions, FAT is mostly gone in the Windows space, being surpassed by NTFS and reFS yet it survives in many parts of computing systems to this day.
I believe that Signal is one of the better options for private communications in this day in age. Forget all the supposed offerings of end-to-end encryption by SMS/RCS, anything by Meta and the more privacy focused offerings on display like Matrix and Signal. It simply just is better.
This is the second (and last) paper I’ll be posting here from my IB research. My opinions on the IB curriculum were well-laid out in the previous post and I’d sure be damned if anyone manages to find a valid praise for IB as a whole. Either way, some great research came out of it. I’ll be posting the entire paper here so that at least some good can come out of the hours I’ve worked on this paper.
I’m officially an IB survivor: I’ve graduated IB with a 39 and an A on my Computer Science Extended Essay: a feat I thought was impossible. I’ve spent a total of 48 hours on my Extended Essay (yes, I counted) and now I hope I can put this Extended Essay out as a whole to the world for free. IB in itself isn’t a deplorably bad program - its fruits just reward some of the laborers who put their…
My high school recently installed a new RFID security system for all the doors of classrooms and the auxiliary doors of the school buildings and the cafeteria. While not only being extremely inconvenient as we have to wait until 7:45 in the morning for security to disable the auxiliary doors magentic locks so we can freely leave the school, leaving the building is a hassle because the doors are…
A high-school project never really warrants any extra brainpower required, especially if it’s ungraded and for competition but the time constraints and team pressure makes an absolutely great learning experience. Last month, my IB school decided to run a Group 4 project day(s) and well, other than the redundancy of an optional, 6-hour project stretched out to two days, the Arduino project went…
Pi has always been 3.14159 to me and to everyone else really, it’s only nerds who’d want to know pi up to its 100th or 1000th digit while its your supernerds who’d be searching for pi up to the millionth digit and well, I’m a supernerd (when I want to).
High School competitions are way more competitive than they should be, yet there still is a spirit that can’t be explained when you’re in one. Shaun Gallevo (Heriott-Watt ‘28), Harshit Singhal (Georgia Tech ‘28), Faisal Al-Ruwaili (Warwick ‘27), Sina Ibrahimi and I (Elian Rieza, Purdue ‘28) competed in MIT Battlecode 2023 as cattleboys (previously Ram Ranch Cowboys). Overall, we finished #101 in…
Hello. I’m Elian, or Eli, and this is my blog.