A series of tutorials, visualizations and thoughts created by Henry Schmale.
I have been continuing my experiments with ZeroClaw and its browser integration. Most of my goals with AI are explainable AI. I want to be able to see the tool calls that it makes to answer my questions. I want to know if the query was properly grounded. To answer some of these questions I enabled otel so I can see the tool calls in grafana, I also encourage the agent to use tools in the prompts.…
After evaluating numerous claws in an attempt to build some kind of assistant and wanting to see what all the hype was about, I have settled on ZeroClaw . It’s neat because it’s written in rust, and is relatively new and seems to have learned from several previous attempts. Although it seems like there are several potentially malicious forks floating around. This is my experience with it, and my…
I was given the opportunity to attend BSides Philadelphia and was able to compete in a CTF. I took home 3rd place playing by myself. I meant to form a group but I didn’t get around to it. The below is my write up for a couple of the problems I solved. I forgot to do the write up while I was there, so I apologize for not sharing the exact names of the challenges. I was also able to attend a couple…
My mom and I listened to The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton. We really enjoyed listening to it and it was quite the page turner. It has an exploration of a lot of interesting scientific topics including what exactly is life, drugs and investigation techniques. Along with quite a few political topics on how experts are treated by the government and the communication methods. It’s told…
SMRender is a great open source (GPL v3) tool to render Open Street Maps data to an image file. It was originally meant for rendering high quality sea maps. I have a new project where I want to take a look at some map data where I live and show it off in an interesting and digestible way. I live in Philadelphia now so let’s use that as our example here.
This week “Magic the Gathering Arena” had momir as it’s midweek magic challenge. In this format you are given a deck of 60 snow lands, 12 of each color. You have an emblem that lets you pay X mana and discard a card to get a random creature token with mana value X at sorcery speed once per turn. I find it terribly unsatisfying due to the amount of random luck involved in this format. I would find…
I needed an endpoint to convert markdown to a standard PDF for reasons. This is how I made a simple low traffic markdown to pdf converter using AWS Lambda and pandoc . When evaluating solutions I discovered that everything either required webkit or a native LaTeX installation. All options that are painful to maintain from a user perspective for a script I was building. This solution ensures that…
Lets continue on with my batman dialer project. The entire goal here is to hide a secret control panel in some kind of statue. What that control panel does is completely up in the air. So here’s my current progress. I have gotten the analog rotary dialer working. I have also gotten sound working using the MAX98357A breakout board.
I want to build a security combination lock out device hidden inside of a statue bust of a later to be determined character 1 . I want to extend this project to do many different features and be a sort of entertaining puzzle for people to play with. To do that I’ve decided to start a series of blog posts describing my thought process through this, the inspiration, and how I built it. Hopefully you…
I’ve been building a site in Golang using Gorm as my object relational mapper because it’s a pain to map things into a struct and use the scan interface. Not really using it as a query builder, but it’s still handy. I recently wanted to use some extensions in my queries to do things like unicode normalization and similar functions. I was also sick of waiting for Cgo compilation times so I switched…
I’ve been using the SQLite shell a lot lately to slice and dice data is slightly too large for excel. It’s a very powerful tool to get SQL on the command line without spinning up a large Postres server, and supports most of the SQL standard with syntax similar to Postgres. It’s super fast and supports loading CSV. I want to talk about some quality of life features in it that you probably don’t…
One of my colleagues is from Karlovy Vary and told me that it’s a great place to visit. It’s an old school spa town known for its geothermal springs. The water from the springs is fully potable and loaded with minerals. It comes out very warm. I spent the weekend exploring this small town and here’s what I did. I treated this as a normal tourist place to visit. I visited alone, but I think it…
The other day my colleague invited me to go to Kuttna Hora. It’s a small town about an hour away from Prague. He described it as a town straight up out of fantasy. He was NOT wrong. It’s such a cool town. We visited 3 separate churches and walked around the town. I had a crisis of my own mortality from one of the churches which I will describe later. The wine was very good too. The weather wasn’t…
I used to think that “Ender’s Game” was one of the deepest novels and series I’ve ever read. I’ve since reconsidered my opinion on this significantly. I’ve since decided its quite dumb and overplayed. The characterization of the children is too much. There’s an obsession with hyper intelligent children that isn’t realistic or believable in this day and age. I’ve revised this opinion because I’ve…
Let’s talk about sts:GetFederationToken and why we should disable it within our AWS Accounts. This call allows the creation of temporary access credentials that can be associated to any user identity. These credentials are difficult to revoke from the console, and cannot be revoked using the standard deny all credentials created before X time policy. It is much better to use standard built in…