Posts and syndications feed
Most people meet Nix as a package manager, get scared by the syntax, and leave. That's a shame, because the whole thing is built on about three ideas. Once they click, the weird /nix/store/ paths, the reproducibility, the rollbacks, all of it stops being magic. No fluff. Let's look at what Nix is actually doing under the hood. 1. The language is just a calculator for attribute sets Before any…
This summer break turned out unreal. I got a scholarship from NYC DevRel , then another one for Black Hat in Las Vegas , and now I’m also going to OpenAI DevDay through a scholarship. A few months ago, these rooms felt very far away. Now I’m packing for places I used to only read about online. Grateful, nervous, excited. Mostly just trying to take it all in. a very weird season of saying yes and…
yerp, turned 22 today. i was asleep at home when my friends showed up with a cake and gifts. i was surprised but also kinda knew something was coming, we always plan surprises for each other in our circle. they watched football while i lay in bed half-dead. the cake was mango flavored and genuinely so smooth. after cake and gifts we went out for dinner, came home, slept. perfect day honestly.…
Made an anonymous confession board that lives inside your terminal. No account, no browser, just ssh and a little chaos. Go ahead and post your confession. $ ssh eipi.boo
I've been working on haylxon for a while now. It takes screenshots of URLs from the terminal using Chrome's headless mode, talking to Chrome over CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol). I even gave a talk about it at PTN 11 . It was already pretty fast. But I kept noticing things that bugged me about how it worked under the hood. what was bothering me Every time you ran hxn , it would spin up an entirely…
I keep my entire Nix config in a public repo. Dotfiles, packages, shell setup, everything. But I also need my SSH and GPG keys on every machine I use. Storing private keys in a public repo is obviously a terrible idea. So how do you manage secrets in Nix without going private? The answer is agenix . How it works agenix uses age encryption. You encrypt secrets with your SSH public key, and only…
I saw Nexus 6P on Facebook Marketplace for $10. Owner forgot the PIN, just wanted it gone. I already know Kali NetHunter support this phone officially. So I bought immediately without a second thought. Literaly drove 25 miles after college to pick it up. First I spent a couple hours researching how to get in without the PIN. Wanted to do it properly and then i found CVE-2016-8467 . Tried it. It…
Hacked for two days straight at MorganHacks and somehow walked away with Best ElevenLabs . Our project was inventoryAi . The demo was stressful, the sleep was fake, and the team still pulled it off. tired, happy, proud.
I finally flipped my config to Neovim 0.12 . This release makes project-local config and package management feel much closer to Neovim itself instead of another layer glued on top. The part that got me interested: the built-in package manager . Leaving lazy.nvim Behind I was using lazy.nvim with a .lazy.lua setup. It worked fine, so this was not some dramatic migration. But with more things moving…
I recently got a ThinkPad and decided to turn it into a small home server. I plan to use it for heavier tasks like running Hack The Box machines, practicing for Red Hat, and other lab work. Since it stays at home, I wanted a simple way to SSH into it from anywhere. The usual way is to port-forward port 22 , but that exposes your server directly to the internet. I didn’t want that. Instead, I used…
A small bug in haylxon caused screenshots to fail with this warning: warning: oneshot canceled But the tool still said: info: Screenshots Taken and saved in directory hxnshots No screenshot was actually saved. What Was Happening haylxon uses chromiumoxide to talk to Chrome. In the background, there’s a handler loop that keeps reading messages from Chrome and sending responses back through oneshot…
Today I switched to Lilex Nerd Font Mono . Feels weird, but refreshing. I didn’t realize how attached I was to a font until changing it made the whole editor feel like a different room. it is just a font no, apparently it is not.
Got my first split keyboard today. I’m still painfully slow on it, but every keypress feels intentional. Weirdly fun.
I spend a lot of time building, breaking, and rebuilding software, so my workspace matters. For the past two years, I’ve been using Nix on my MacBook and NixOS as a daily driver. Everything is declarative, reproducible, and easy to roll back when experiments go wrong. Most of my work happens in the terminal and Neovim — for coding, notes, and writing. The setup is simple, predictable, and quiet.…
Never thought I’d write this, but I got my license today and bought my first car. I used to walk those roads in the rain. Now I drive them. small freedom, big feeling.
For my first two semesters, I used Markdown and Obsidian to take notes, Git to version them, and GitHub to back them up. Exported as PDFs when needed. It worked, but always felt like a patchwork solution. Then I found Typst — a modern typesetting system with proper math support, macros, and beautiful PDF output. The moment I tried it, I switched everything over. The setup A dedicated Git repo for…
Staying silent is powerful. Not every question needs an answer. Not every comment deserves a reply. And not every situation needs your voice in it. I was watching this video by Ron White , where he says, “You have the right to remain silent, and I wish to God you’d use it.” .It’s a joke, but it really stuck with me. Silence is a choice, one that can save you from unnecessary trouble and help you…
Turned 21 today. Grateful for the growth, the lessons, and the people who made the year feel worth it. older, hopefully a little better.
First semester done. Sometimes I miss home, the food, the people, the normal rhythm of everything. But I’m okay. I’m grateful for the professor who helped me connect with people at the university. I also started working in the computer lab, which feels small from the outside but means a lot to me. new place, slowly becoming familiar.
First flight. First long goodbye. Home behind me, Miami ahead. trying to act normal at the airport while my whole life is packed in bags.
Background After high school, I was at home with my parents, doing errands and self-learning while preparing for my USA visa interview. Out of the blue, a well-known company reached out with a job offer. Despite not getting the terms I hoped for, I decided to take the opportunity. The job There wasn't anything specifically like working on just one domain. I used to manage linux server's, providing…
PTN — Pentester Nepal, is a community for security folks in Nepal. They organize events, meetups, and challenges. PTN 11 was their 11th anniversary event, and I got to speak there. My talk was on OS as Code: Using Nix on Apple Silicon . What even is Nix? Nix is three things at once — a purely functional programming language, a package manager, and an entire Linux distro (NixOS) built around it.…
Wrapped up my job and said goodbye to the people I worked with. I feel sad and excited at the same time, which probably means it mattered. Some places teach you more than the job description ever says. Read my full blog post »
My company has recently provided me with a VPS to test things before deploying them to production. This is a great opportunity for me to push the envelope and use Nix extensively. While most VPS providers don't offer Nix as a default OS installation option, there is a workaround using nixos-anywhere . In this post, I'll walk you through how to install NixOS on any VPS. PS: I'm using hetzner vps,…
Got my US student visa approved today. It still feels unreal to type that. I’m flying to Miami for my bachelor’s, and a chapter that used to live in my head is becoming an actual date on the calendar. Miami, FL. soon.
OWASP is a non-profit open-source foundation focused on application security. They have local and global chapters around the world aimed at improving community security. We also have a local chapter called OWASP Kathmandu, which organizes events to spread awareness within Nepal. I had the privilege to speak at OWASP Kathmandu 0x03, where I presented my tool, Halyxon . If you do not know what…
2023 felt slower in the best way. I got to stay home more, help at our shop near the school, talk with people, play cricket with kids, and spend time with my brother. The foggy morning runs were rough, but I miss them now. On the computer side, I wrote haylxon and hysp , both in Rust, and went way deeper into the language than I expected. I also made it back to Threatcon. less rushing, more…
2022 was a strange little unlock. I launched METISLinux , met some really good people at Threatcon , and somehow finished +2 science with grades I was proud of. I also got recognized by the Dutch government and Cambridge for bug reports, earned eJPT , and started learning Rust . The best part was not even the certificates. It was meeting old online friends in real life and realizing the internet…