Varun Biniwale's blog
My future alma mater is one of the best engineering schools in Canada (and in the world). But, you definitely wouldn’t think that by looking at the course selection webpage, course search page or student information system [1] . A list of every course offered by the school, but not a particularly helpful list if you’re trying to choose an elective as a first year student One of my classes was…
This is the story of our three year long journey to turn a fleet of laptops into what can only be described as the world’s most unhinged video wall. This project was a collaboration with my friend Aksel Salmi . I was responsible for the software, and he designed the incredible hardware, see his blog to learn about the unexpectedly complex hardware needed to mount these dismantled computers [1] .…
Typically, the highest impact of an XSS vulnerability on the web is gaining access to a victim’s account on the vulnerable website (either through a session token or by performing actions on their behalf while your code is running). If you’re particularly unlucky, an admin account could be exploited to perform more dangerous actions (like accessing additional user data) or something along those…
This article is outdated! Firefox now ships a sidebar natively, and honestly, that alone is probably good enough for 99% of use cases. Mozilla says that Firefox will be shipping better profile management and vertical tabs sometime soon. Until then, this blog post serves as a writeup about how I customised my Firefox experience to work the way I want it to. By the end of this article, you will…
I can’t believe this isn’t the default. On MacOS Sonoma onwards, under ‘System Settings’ in ‘Keyboard’, turn on ‘Keyboard navigation’. This grants you the privilege of using Tab and Shift Tab to select options in popup menus. Enjoy the marginal productivity improvement!
zsh was slow. A shell should not take nearly a full second to start. 814 milliseconds may not sound like a lot, but it’s extremely noticeable, especially when creating new terminal tabs or sshing into a server. Time how long it takes for zsh to start: time zsh -i -c echo I was seeing upwards of 0.81 to 0.90 seconds on my MacBook (and worse on my spinning rust servers) for zsh. Blanking out my…
The Breakthrough Junior Challenge is an annual, global science video competition for high-school students. It’s run by Breakthrough Initiatives, the same organization that runs the Breakthrough Prize events . In 2023, I discovered a critical vulnerability in the Breakthrough Challenge website. After over one year since it was patched, I am disclosing the bug for transparency. I believe this class…
Ten years after its sudden disappearance, Flappy Bird is making a comeback — but something about this revival doesn’t quite add up. Articles like this around the web published today talk about the recent ‘The Flappy Bird Foundation Group’, which supposedly “secured” the rights to the Flappy Bird trademark, and is relaunching the once acclaimed game in 2025. I’m not going to pretend to be a laywer,…
My servers: a Dell OptiPlex on the floor and a PowerEdge R720XD on an undersized IKEA coffee table. All networked together with beautiful red and yellow ethernet cables. Hi, I’m Varun. I have a server in my room. Actually, I have two of them. And I write a ton of my own code for them. And I love it. This is a story documenting my homelab’s quiet beginnings, its spiralling evolution, and its…
Make sure you are logged into a Google Workspace account (such as a school or work provided Google account) to experience this post fully. Might not work on reasonable browsers that block third party cookies! (like Safari with “Prevent cross-site tracking” enabled) This blog is trusted by… I noticed that Google Workspace gives admins the ability to set a custom logo that appears in the header of…