I share my technical projects and personal experiences in tech. Covering my work in systems programming, networking, and deploying hidden services.
I write anywhere. Like right now, sitting outside at night with a campfire going. I wish I could share a picture of it… but my whole thing about not posting anything that could expose my identity won’t allow it. Not that my opsec is running at some super high threat level or anything. Just because I hang around darkweb forums doesn’t make me a criminal. I just want to keep my pseudonymous identity…
I just finished migrating from Nextcloud to OpenCloud. And after a few weeks of using OpenCloud, I just kept thinking… why didn’t I do this sooner? Nextcloud is great and has an absolutely insane app ecosystem. With 10 years of development behind it, the app store is stacked. Calendar, contacts, email client, notes, Kanban board, RSS reader, password manager, everything is there. Nextcloud isn’t…
I have an old Android that barely gets any use. I charge it, it drains on its own, dies, then I charge it again, repeat. So since I had already rooted it before, I figured I’d turn it into a mini homelab. This old phone is from way back, with only 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage ( lol ), but interestingly it has an 8-core CPU. So roughly speaking, the software I needed had to meet these criteria:…
This week, I finally pulled the plug on my internet life on Twitter and Reddit. Deleted both accounts and I’m moving over to Mastodon and Lemmy full time. And of course, self hosting again (if you can have full control and ownership over your data, why wouldn’t you?) . I started with GoToSocial because it ticked all my boxes: Probably single user, unless someone asks to sign up Lightweight since…
A screenshot of Eta Carinae from Space EngineThis is my favorite star system, and honestly the one that got me into astrophysics. It also happens to be the one that makes me feel like the universe (es... This post contains complex math rendering. Read the full post here.
This is a follow-up to my previous post where I walked through deriving the speed of light using Maxwell’s third and fourth equations. Honestly, once I got to this point things started getting harder... This post contains complex math rendering. Read the full post here.
So I just got through a pretty hectic week haha. Had to migrate the server for my blog and Forgejo, and also move away from Minio since it went publicly archived. Kinda frustrating but honestly saw it coming, they were already cutting features in the community edition and it just ended with them killing the open source version entirely. So yeah, had to find another option and landed on SeaweedFS.…
Well, I want to write about objects in outer space. But since most of them are estimates or theories that keep getting updated every year, I’m just going to enjoy the theories. While taking notes on what I find, so my brain doesn’t explode from processing millions of different pieces of information every second (well, a little dramatic is fine. The point is I want to write because my head feels…
I honestly don’t know where to start writing this, but from now on I’m going to write down everything I’ve learned so I don’t forget it. Writing helps strengthen memory and moves information from shor... This post contains complex math rendering. Read the full post here.
If you enjoy exploring the universe on your PC, Gaia Sky is worth a try. It’s open source and developed by the Gaia group at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Jupiter Planet The data accuracy is really solid because it pulls from real data collected by ESA’s Gaia satellite . The satellite itself was launched in 2013 and operated until March…
This started with the most innocent question in the world. I was supposed to be writing C code for my ESP32, a simple IoT project that should have taken maybe an hour to finish. But I stared at an if-else statement I had written thousands of times before, and suddenly asked myself: how does this actually work at the lowest level? Not how it works inside a programming language. But literally,…
So earlier I was reading about Laplace and my brain literally froze for a second. Imagine this: there is a person in 1814, sitting in Paris, and calmly writing that if there was an intellect vast enough to know the position and momentum of all particles in the universe, that intellect could calculate everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen. Completely. Without remainder.…
During the alpha release of my custom WAF, I realized a few things about handling malicious traffic. When I first built it, I was too confident and directly killed Tor circuits. But if you kill a circuit, Tor can automatically rotate and switch to a new one. Back then I only relied on circuit IDs or I2P destinations. I started with manual parsing, which was quite dangerous, and eventually moved to…
I finally finished the stateless CAPTCHA I’ve been obsessing over for the last few weeks. The idea had been rotting in the back of my head while I worked on other things, but the absolute state of anti-bot protections on Tor finally pushed me to write the code. JS is out of the question. I don’t use it here, and I certainly won’t force Tor users to enable it just to prove they exist. The whole…
I spend time exploring darknet sites, only to find many that are vibe-coded or have weak security. These developers probably don’t realize how brutal the darknet is. Their sites get scanned every damn day. People will attack your site whenever the fuck they want. If you want to build a secure system, you have to think like an attacker . I mean it. I can’t guarantee this is 100% safe, but at least…
I thought Tor would be full of dark magic bullshit, turns out it was mostly careful people. I first touched Tor around early 2015. Not because I was brave or ideological or some freedom fighter type. I was just curious and bored and internet kept whispering about “hidden stuff” . You know the narrative. Dark web. Secrets. Crimes. Things you are not supposed to see. That kind of marketing works…