eta's personal website & blog
The UK has used small credit-card sized tickets to pay for train travel for years and years, since long before I was born — originally the APTIS ticket 1 , which later got replaced by a slightly easier to read version printed onto the same stock. Nowadays, the industry would very much like you to ditch your paper ticket in favour of a fancy mobile barcode one (or an ITSO smartcard 2 ); not only do…
My current flatmate has a bunch of these HDMI extender devices (also apparently known as “LKV373” / “Lenkeng extenders” / “LK-3080-ACL”). They’re pretty nifty: HDMI goes in one end, they emit UDP over ethernet, and then HDMI comes out on the receiver end with surprisingly minimal latency (around 100ms). image: the receiver end of a transmitter-receiver pair, taken by said flatmate A couple months…
This is old! When I wrote it, I was a very different person . As it turns out, growing up a bit made me care a lot less about the nuances of Rust programming. In 2017, I said that “asynchronous Rust programming is a disaster and a mess” . In 2021 a lot more of the Rust ecosystem has become asynchronous – such that it might be appropriate to just say that Rust programming is now a disaster and a…
I bought a YubiKey 5C Nano recently. These devices are great – I’ve built a lot of my (metaphorical) empire on top of them, seeing as they’re capable of acting as an SSH agent (store your SSH keys on them, securely!), an OpenPGP smartcard (do encryption and decryption on the key!), FIDO U2F ‘security keys’ (use them as a 2-factor authentication method!), and probably more. Getting the thing to…
Warning! This post is a mental health / feels post from a long time ago (in fact, one gender ago ). It is kept up in case some people find it useful, but I don't necessarily endorse the content in here nowadays. Various people have various different opinions on how they should present themselves. Personally, I’d consider myself quite a sensitive person; I’d like to think I try quite hard to take…
This post is about mostly personal circumstances / issues, as well as current affairs. If that’s not what you want, turn back now. At the start of the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we were told that “flattening the curve” was a good idea – i.e. attempting to limit the spread of the disease by staying at home, wearing face coverings, etc. was a necessary step we should all…
[This is post 5 about designing a new chat system. Have a look at the first post in the series for more context!] This post follows on from the previous one in the series 1 , wherein I had a shot at designing / specifying what state – persistent information, shared amongst all servers in a federated system – in group chats should look like. To summarize, we ended up with the group chat state…
[This is post 4 about designing a new chat system. Have a look at the first post in the series for more context!] This is potentially the point at which the previous few blog posts, which have talked in vague, vacuous terms about the possibility of designing some new utopian chat system, start to gradually become more about actually getting the work done – purely due to the fact that, as…