Recent content on Jack's Brain
MeshCore is a peer-to-peer encrypted mesh radio communications system. It runs on inexpensive hardware and operates in license-free sub-GHz bands worldwide. MeshCore radios (called “companions”) require an interface to send and receive messages. Most commonly, people use one of the available mobile apps, but this requires physical proximity to the radio for Bluetooth or Serial…
I’ve been playing around a lot with MeshCore , a peer-to-peer, encrypted, routed radio network run by average citizens using LoRa modulation in unlicensed sub-gig bands (902-927MHz ISM band in the US). It’s very similar to Meshtastic, but a lot less chatty (pull-not-push messaging, with conservative advertisement intervals), and thus a lot more reliable at passing messages (although…
An Uncomfortable Scenario You’re in a foreign country, and you’ve been mugged 1 , completely — you’ve got the clothes on your back, and nothing more. Maybe you beg a phone call from someone to get in touch with a loved one to wire you some money. You’ve now got enough to buy a basic phone and use wifi to access Dropbox or Google to get at important papers, password manager…
I love me a typewriter. They’re gorgeous, mechanical works of art. Sadly, they’re loud, and I’m just not as fast on them as a keyboard. So, I made a “Writer Deck,” a subspecies of cyberdeck , the science-fiction-spawned concept of a small, self contained compute device that’s hyper-portable and often kept on one’s person. Writer decks deemphasize general…
ohai. Been a minute. The brain hasn’t been braining very well lately from a health perspective but we ball. I’ll do a more full post on it sometime soon, but I’ve been having fun with a Docker-contained VNC honeypot . @Xtrato did something similar but I wanted something that I could blow away easily and that was slightly (as barely as Docker is) more isolated. It’s been a…
And boy that came out well 😍😍😍 Conway’s Game of Life LED matrix with frame
TL;DR No. I swore Narrator on Windows XP was saying “pothole,” as in “pothole start” and “pothole menu end” – maybe even something closer to “pothole-p” with a plosive at the end. I finally got fedup and cracked open an XP VM and ResHacker, and sure enough, it’s saying “popup” with the world’s worst diction. What I…
Always wanted to build one of these and now I have! This is a more frenetic color-demo mode, but my goodness I love it so much. The video doesn’t do the colors justice; they’re so vibrant. Sadly my phone struggles with the refresh rate of the board, but there’s no tearing in person.
This weekend I set out to build a 64x64 LED matrix version of Conway’s Game of Life . For compute’s sake, the board would be wrap-around i.e. on a torus. I wanted each set of generations to run for as long as possible until stagnancy and reset, so I wrote an analysis script to determine what alive-percentage for a random fill would be optimal to keep the game going as long as possible.
I scoured the web for an easy-run RFC865 Cookie/QotD server that I could throw into my Docker host and serve a proper DHCP Option 8 on my home network, but none existed so I vibe coded one. Now, my home network can vibe out like it’s 1983. Open source as always , I wrote a version that spits out a generic 8-ball fortune ( Outlook good , My sources say no , etc.) as well as one that does a…
Well, turns out this design (an ouroboros twisted to form a Möbius loop , interlocked with two others into Borromean Rings ) doesn’t really exist on the internet as far as I can tell. I can find ouroboros as Möbius loop, and I can find ouroboros arranged as Borromean rings, but not all three. For a project I’m doing, I commissioned some! I didn’t end up using them for what I was…
Help I’ve fallen down a well [and it’s filled with regular solids]. Couldn’t shake it out of my mind so I made another spinner, this time with an icosahedron. Haven’t printed it yet but my shipment of 100 bearings just got in so it’s time to warm the printer up. Check it out again on Thingiverse .
I was shocked to not find any fidget regular solids floating around the 3D printing/maker spaces, so I made one, open source and parametric using OpenSCAD. Check it out on Thingiverse .
Happy New Year!! Today I ran the longest distance I ever have in my life (10km). Lately, I’ve been super frustrated by the lack of good pace/mile time/min-per-km charts and calculators floating around, so I made my own. Check out https://miletime.me to see the new app I made to make this fast and easy for me.
Welp, with the faster site came an unexpected change in how my RSS feed renders, resulting in subscribers getting a LOT of emails. My apologies! All should be resolved now.
And in keeping with new things for the upcoming new year, a site redesign! Long overdue to get off wordpress and onto something static and quick that doesn’t take eight to ten business days to load. All the same posts, 1% of the upkeep, and 500% speed! :D
Hiking the Accursed Mountains in Valbonë, Albania Howdy! I’m Jack Kingsman, an SRE, developer, and serial hobbyist. I live in Seattle with my partner and work at Atlassian as a Senior SRE on the Atlassian Analytics platform. I really, really love computers. Bringing joy to others using technology is my highest passion, whether with fun side projects like Nobody.live , or with my day job,…
Three of my four current implants. What? Extending the body’s senses and communication into the electromagnetic spectrum is awesome. I’ve had implanted in my body: a subdermal magnet, providing tactile perception of magnetic fields (implanted 2014; removed due to bioisolating coating failure in 2019). Read about and watch my self-implantation here . an NFC NTAG216 RFID chip, currently…
My PGP identity is verifiable at Keybase , where my GitHub profile is verified, and my SSH key can be further confirmed. SSH ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAILDDULC1LD04Hss//MwUXumtJE0YiH1IrioRDly/jack Jack Kingsman <jack@jackkingsman.me> PGP curl -sSL https://jacksbrain.com/jackkingsman.asc | gpg --import - -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----…
I’m updating my public SSH key; it’s long overdue to step out of the dark ages and move to ED25519. My new key: ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAILDDULC1LD04Hss//MwUXumtJE0YiH1IrioRDly/jack And yes, I worked very hard for those last five letters. Below is a PGP signed message attesting to this change, including an identifying comment. Keys for validation can be found on…
I had too much time on my hands after work today and yesterday, so I made this silly site to celebrate my new shromps. https://skrimp.lol There’s nothing more to it, except that the shrimp dances faster each time you tap/click it. skrimp. lol.
And the tetrapods and gabions look great , even if the round jar makes the cube looks like it’s melting haha. Yay shrimp!
I’m starting a new shrimp tank soon and I want to fill it with hollow tetrapods, commonly used for reenforcing shorelines. Their stable, interlocking shape combined with oblique surfaces for dispersing wave energy is idea. I just think they look cool, and think a carpet of them in a shrimp tank is both very aquatic (I see these all over shorelines I love). Tetrapods in Latvia. by [Andrzej…
I was pleased with my last post on getting TinyLibrary up and running on an ESP32 (and WOOOO got a PR accepted to the ESP-IDF codebase for the standard ESP32 firmware for DHCP option 114 ), but really wanted something with some more RF and speed oomph. I worked on an off for a while to get a captive portal + DNS + DHCP working on Ubuntu 24 on a RasPi Zero 2W but kept getting blocked by random…
I’ve been on a big ebook kick lately (currently rereading the first scifi I ever consumed as a little kid, Contact by Carl Sagan). The concept of written words that have been a major part of my development (or recreation) being subject to the same resilience, shareability, and indexing as other digital goods delights me, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort to get every book I’ve ever read…
Last week, I implanted a SmartMX3 P71D321 secure element chip in an ultra-thin, biosafe-polymer-enclosed form factor as provided by the Dangerous Things flexSecure implant in my left arm. This microprocessor + radio provides onboard compute and a 13.56Mhz NFC radio, with the chip accepting 200kB worth of Java Card applets (extremely feature-restrictive/resource-minimal Java). While this technology…
This weekend I implanted an xSIID , an implant that is essentially a copy of my first xNT implanted chip, except that this one lights up when you scan it. I am now not just a cyborg, but a disco cyborg 😎 Implant was very smooth; you can see in the mid-implant photo all the topography I charted to keep track of vasculature and tendon boundaries. The sweet spot was VERY tight; I had about +/2mm…
What an awesome review of a side project I’ve been really passionate about. And he couldn’t have described the site better. Super, super proud of seeing this in print.
For years, I’ve had an abiding love of machine code, the fundamental binary instructions that the CPU of a computer understands, ever since I took my first embedded systems course at Santa Clara University. Below all the user interfaces and flashiness of modern computers, there is a hunk of silicon which is reading ones and zeroes from memory and performing the fundamentals of computer operation —…
At any given time on https://twitch.tv , the livestreaming capital of the internet, there are thousands and thousands of streamers playing games, making music, or just hanging out with an audience, talking and relaxing with friends. However, there are also thousands of streamers with nobody watching them – they are, in effect, screaming into the digital void; some are hoping for viewers to watch…
My pet hisser Julian on the prowl, with some dubbed Jurassic Park for atmosphere.
I recently stumbled upon a site I wanted to save a video from, so I went to open devtools and check the Network tab for the video source when suddenly the page redirected me to an error page! After a couple tries it was clear this was detecting devtools being opened and directing me away from the page — how curious (and annoying). A quick google indicated that there are some hacks to detect sudden…
Zork is one of the very first interactive fiction games and was released in 1977 for the PDP-10. Interactive fiction is a gameplay style now (sadly) mostly lost to the sands of time where on-screen text describes your environment to you and you interact via basic text commands (e.g. go north , take sword , hit troll with sword ). Zork (or Zork I, to differentiate it from the subsequent releases),…
If you’re like me (and, in this regard, if you’re not then you should be), you use Google Authenticator or a similar application to generate Multiple Factor Authentication tokens — six digit codes that add an extra step of identity verification to sites you log into. These codes rotate every thirty seconds and must match the one the server is expecting (kinda like nuclear launch codes, but to log…
Well, after four and a half wonderful years with my magnet, I bid it farewell. After a particularly firm snag and a subsequent major loss of sensitivity, I was concerned the magnet was fractured or the coating had failed so I did an emergency removal which went very smoothly and I’m now all healed up. I’ll miss it dearly; after that long, it became an instinct — just the other day I was doing PC…
I’ve been diving quite a bit (just finished my 26th dive today)! Here are some videos from last weekend, when two buddies and I camped in Monterey and dove (literally) sunup to sundown, and from this weekend when I dove a marine preserve called Point Lobos with another friend of mine.
A couple weekends ago, I install PiHole , a software package that provides DNS blackholing for your local network, and I was shocked. Some background: DNS (domain name server) is essentially the internet’s phone book. When you type google.com , your computer first asks a DNS server (run by your internet service provider, Google, Cloudflare, or any other of hundreds of DNS providers) for the…
…I’m becoming one of those blogs with 6 month intervals between posts. Life’s been great lately! I’m chugging along at work, taking on more responsibility for IT needs. Outside of work, I’ve jumped feet first into scuba diving! I’ve got my certification and am shooting for 20-25 dives under my belt before I hit Hawaii in September. I’m getting plugged in with some local clubs as well as wildlife…
Hai world. It’s been a while since I posted; life is changing — updates lie within. I’m really liking my full-time gig doing software dev in SF. My parents are moving to South Carolina and I’ve just signed the lease on a cute little apartment in Redwood City. I’m currently struggling to sort through (and dispose of most of) my accumulated junk from the last 22 years of life, including much that…
My latest hobby/focus/obsession has been mead, and man, I’ve been having so much fun sinking my teeth into the art and science — already made 3 gallons and just started a 5.5 gallon batch. To track what’s at what step, what my recipes are, and to do some helpful conversions, I made Mead.Kiwi , a site to track all of my work. On each bottle is a QR code that will take you to the recipe page for…
TL;DR : I’ve learned things, built things, got employed at a thing, was sad about and thought about things, and am happy about things. Ohai there. I said I’d post with what I’m up to over my break, so here are things: I got a job with an awesome data viz company which cares about the people they join on data (heh, get it?) as much as cool code I’ve been enjoying my last summer vacation with plenty…
Today marks the end of two summers of interning with Facebook; I’ll be going away for a week and then the job hunt begins with a mess of interviews. I’m so proud of my time at FB — the friends I’ve made, personal challenges faced, and skills developed. To tell the truth, I’m not really sure what I’m feeling right now; it’s part excitement, part sadness, and many parts perspective looking forward…
Hey y’all. This has been a long and tiring (and sleepless) week, so in my restless hours, I built a web app to help you unplug, breathe deep, and recenter. Hope you like it. Head to defuse.xyz –>
[trigger warning: pretentious thinkpiece] Tonight I was speaking with a new friend and the topic of what we do with our free time came up. In the course of describing what I do with my down hours (usually, coding), I realized I had never actually verbalized my reason behind this to anyone but her until then. At first glance, it may seem odd — I code all day; why would I want to do more of it in my…
And no, it’s not my brain. nope forcibly shuts down your computer down like pulling out the plug. No shut down process, no graceful halt, just a crash and burn. Because sometimes you just gotta say, ‘nope.’
Hi all. New implant tonight. I’m zonked so not much fanfare, but it’s an xEM that lets me clone contactless access cards (like cards to get into buildings, gym, etc.). Check out the video here (don’t need a FB account to watch).
…because I make things like this. I have no regrets. https://jkingsman.github.io/TheProclaimers/
Wait! Don’t run away! This is actually super cool. It’s a long post, but you’ll be super smart by the end ;) Yesterday, an extremely exciting academic study from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam described tremendously exciting leaps in anti-aging drugs, often thought to be a holy grail of biological science. These results are so cool I wanted to break them down into layman’s terms for…
Tech debt: a concept in programming that reflects the extra development work that arises when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution. source Research institutions often suffer from the effects of technical debt that slow processing, lead to inflexible procedures and pipelines, and ultimately limit the potential for forward progress in…