TL;DR: I built a self-hosted open-source email server known as AIMX. It's how I imagine Postfix would look like if it is built for AI agents. Learn more at aimx.email , or view the quick 40sec-demo . Running AI agents on their own dedicated servers has been picking up this year. A few months ago I wrote about OpenClaw , and since then Hermes Agent from Nous Research and NanoClaw have shown up. The…
Just took part in TISC @ DEF CON Singapore finals today. Super fun. The online qualifier ran a month ago over the weekend of 27 to 29 March. I was lucky enough to place in the top 50 and qualify for the on-site finals at the inaugural DEF CON Singapore. As a bonus, I also got a free DEF CON SG ticket out of it. Thanks CSIT . :)
Just discovered ntfy.sh , a very handy push notification service that does not require any signups. Very useful for: Setting up push notifications from a server to your phone to notify on any events. Long running LLM tasks such as Claude Code or OpenClaw . Grateful that it's not only free, it does not require any accounts . Just install the app on your phone, subscribe to a topic, and start…
🦞 OpenClaw is all over my feeds. Viral testimonials, threads about productivity gains, people swearing it changed their workflow. I installed it, ran it for a bit, and came away underwhelmed. Not because the tech is bad, but because I cannot figure out who it is actually for. What is OpenClaw actually Strip away the demo videos and you get a fairly straightforward architecture. OpenClaw runs a…
Raspberry Pi prices have been rising aggressively, driven by surging memory chip demand . What makes it worse is how quickly the hikes have come — two rounds within just two months. The most recent price increase pushed some models to more than double their original MSRP.
An unfortunate reality of the modern web is that many websites check your User-Agent string and serve different content (or no content at all) based on what browser they think you are. With our previous UA string, we were getting degraded UIs, "your browser is not supported" pages, network throttling, and outright HTTP 403 errors from many prominent websites. From: Ladybird Browser Newsletter:…
3D printing is fun. One common situation for anyone who owns a 3D printer is that you eventually end up with a growing stack of filaments at home. These spools come in many combinations of colors and materials, and sooner or later you'll need to top up a spool that's running low. The problem is that Bambu filament labels only show the material and variant—such as PLA Basic, PLA Wood, PLA Matte, or…
Back in June 2025, I submitted a security Capture-The-Flag (CTF) challenge for the annual The InfoSecurity Challenge (TISC) 2025 , organized by Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) , an agency in the Ministry of Defense of Singapore, and it revolves around Passkey. I was lucky to have my challenge selected for TISC. TISC 2025 consists of 12 CTF challenges. My Passkey CTF challenge is…
Remember back in the pre-GUI OS days when everything was done with commands typed on keyboard? Remember how fast and efficient one can get with just keyboard commands and shortcuts? Remember your Lotus-123 or WordPerfect days? That's efficiency. Before world wide web (WWW) took over everything, many systems were designed with purely keyboard-operatable shortcuts or commands.
It has been a dream of mine for 20 years to one day attend DEF CON, and it has finally happened. It was an amazing experience — way larger than I had imagined. What I love most is seeing passionate, like-minded people gather in one spot and show off beautiful things and projects they care about. The scale is massive: it occupied all three levels of the West Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center,…
TL;DR : Passkey has a clever design that allows users to know if your keys are silently stolen and cloned, but the feature is currently not very useful today because its major providers such as Apple, Google and Microsoft do not play ball.
Released Passcay over the weekend. Passcay is an open source Zig library for Passkey relying party, i.e. websites that want to support secure Passkey authentications. Passcay is pronounced exactly the same as "passkey". In hindsight, I probably should have named it Passquay, still pronounced the exact same way, to add a touch of Singaporean flair to it. I've been using Zig as my primary language…
Another day, another AI coding agent. OpenAI just announced Codex , modeled after Anthropic's Claude Code . I have just found my happy place only a few days ago with Claude Code and Visual Studio Code Agent Mode + GitHub Copilot . Nonetheless, happy to be evaluating Codex. OpenAI's UX are usually polished and what I like about it already is that it's open source. This means it will get better so…
Fun project. 16 years ago today, in 2009, I built this dashboard for IMDA (then Media Development Authority of Singapore [MDA]) to showcase the traffic to MDA-funded startups. It was a "simulated" live data of all visitors to all the tracked sites, with the data source being Google Analytics. At least one of the startups then is now a unicorn. You can probably guess which one - Sea, then Garena.
Thank you Bernard Leong , a friend, fellow entrepreneur & technologist for the kind invitation. It was an honor to return to my alma mater and speak at National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School for the Master of Science in Venture Creation students about a long-time passion of mine: the open web. In my talk, I covered the inception of the web in the 1990s, the destructive influence of…
My journey started casually enough—working on Tixie , I was looking into simpler ways to deploy Rust-based Lambda functions when I came across Cargo Lambda . What got my attention was that it is so easy to cross-compile with it, mainly due to Zig 's powerful build system. Even though it was built for Rust developers, it utilizes Zig for cross-compilation, allowing me to compile ARM binaries that…
The Roadmap Pitfall If you run a company, do not release roadmaps or make future promises. You owe your customers nothing beyond what they're paying for right now. Your customers pay for what you sell today , not what you will be selling tomorrow . I call this the Roadmap Pitfall . It is a common mistake and trap that many companies, especially startups, fall into. The tech landscape is littered…
Spelling, or 听写, is a very familiar process for parents of Singaporeans with primary-school-going children, or in fact, for parents worldwide. Every week, each of our children is to learn two sets of words and phrases, one in English and one in Chinese, to be tested in school. Each set consists of 15-20 phrases and sentences. A usual process for us would be first having each of our children study,…
Digg is coming back ! Digg was one of the very first social news aggregators back in the 2005-ish. It's one of the inspiration that led to me creating and launching Ping.sg in 2006 . Ping.sg was a social blog aggregator for mainly Singpaore blogs. To me, that's a sign of revival of free and open web independent of big techs.
Watch the OpenAI GPT 4.5 announcement video . Messages from the announcement, some obvious, some not so: GPT 4.5 is going to be awesome. We got a glimpse of GPT 1 ( 08:34 ) , circa-2018. Spoiler alert: it sucked. The engineering team that worked at OpenAI is just as awkward in social settings as your company's engineering team.
My workflow with generative AI has been changing quite rapidly over the past two weeks. DeepSeek's release really sped up innovation and release cycle among its competitors. I may draft a longer note covering my workflow next time; I'm writing a quick one to share how impressive Claude Code is. Claude Code hit a homerun
Since the introduction of Perplexity's Deep Research on Feb 14, 2025, now the 3rd major deep research AI offerings after OpenAI ChatGPT's, and Google Gemini's, I have been using it rather extensively. It helps greatly on a research project I am working on. Early findings on Perplexity Deep Research, it often takes 5-20 minutes, not quite 2-4 minutes as advertised. Perhaps it is due to the spike in…
Q: Would you consider releasing some model weights, and publishing some research? Sam Altman: yes, we are discussing. i personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy; not everyone at openai shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority. Source: AMA with OpenAI's team It is interesting that Sam Altman said…
It must have been be a challenging week for the folks at OpenAI and other similar closed-source foundational AI model companies. The release of DeepSeek , which is not only better than OpenAI's o1 model but also free, has sent shockwaves through the industry. The fact that DeepSeek has managed to achieve this feat with only a fraction of the resources that it took for other comparable models to be…
Remember a freer web? Remember when the World Wide Web was once much more open and freer? Individuals used to maintained control over their own websites, curated their own content, and engaged with others without the influence of big tech social media, who have gotten way too big with the network effect. Remember when content creators were publishing either directly at their own websites and not…
A proud moment that started with a simple catch-up with a good friend. I briefly shared that I am working on a project related to self-publishing. My friend, Chandra, shared that he has been considered blogging and asked me to set one up for him on the spot. He also shared that he would prefer self-publishing than contributing content on social media platforms. That was music to my ears! I am on a…
Let’s Build Like It’s 2005 Software engineering has become overwhelmingly complex. Want to build something today? Good luck. First, you’ll need to wade through an ocean of decisions: which tech stack to choose, how to set it up, which JS/CSS/TS/TSX frameworks to use, which build tools, linters, and testing environments to adopt, how to structure your project, organize your repository, and…
Hello again. I started blogging in 2003 on b2, the precursor to WordPress. But over time, the updates slowed down, and the blog eventually faded away.