I may be a little full of myself, publishing two server updates and five actual blog posts. Alas, college is hard and I did not really publish anything big this fall semester (though I have worked on some fancy projects that are sitting half-completed in my drafts folder). Here are all of the small projects and other miscellaneous items that...
I swear, I'm surrounded by people who want to watch me waste my time. I was telling the Purdue Linux Users Group about the wonders of RSS and how great it is, but my friend overheard the conversation and said, jokingly, "You should do Bad Apple, over RSS". I whined, complained, claimed it would be "too easy" and that "I need a harder project"....
I walked past my server, but I noticed something amiss: the console was spitting out read errors for my hard drive. So, I shut the whole server down (which is why the server was down for the past week). I got a new Samsung 870 EVO 1TB for Christmas, then installed it and copied over the data. However, some data was unreadable on the disk. Most of...
I've spent the last week or so writing a plugin for my website to render LaTeX without any client-side Javascript. As a demo, I'm publishing my high-school paper on RSA. Cryptography is the foundation of modern online communications. Without it, online banking information, private data, and much more could be intercepted and read by anyone with...
This is meant as a tutorial on how to use a VPS to get a public IPv4 address for self-hosting reasons. Often, people want to run a server out of their college dorm that doesn't give them a public IPv4 address, or out of their house from behind CGNAT. It's a simple solution and an excellent alternative to software like Rathole or Cloudflare Tunnel...
"Behold, student, and behold the place Where you with typesetting must arm yourself." How frozen I became—and powerless then, Fear for yourself now, have you an ounce of wit, What I saw, a being of life deprived. The Spirit of College Students sorrowful Entombed within their LaTeX plight NixOS "broke" my Obsidian install. Instead of fixing the...
Radare2 (and, to a lesser extent, it's fork Rizin) are two very popular binary analysis (and more) tools. Knowing how to use one is essential for CTFs and potentially real-world applications. Industry standard tools like IDA can cost you anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars! For students (like me), that isn't acceptable. However, with...
Matrix is an open source project that publishes the Matrix open standard for secure, decentralised, real-time communication, and its Apache licensed reference implementations. I personally am super excited about a decentralised and federated real-time communication protocol. It follows the same path as email. However, as this technology is very...
I was sitting at my dining table the other day, when I took a look at the ever-present chessboard. It's a very nice board we got from an estate sale, with pewter pieces. But that's besides the point. There was a partially completed game on that board, and I started to wonder if I could figure out the game from the outcome. Naturally, that led me...
In our robotics team, we have multiple programmers all working on the same robot. The robot is controlled by a REV Control Hub, which is just an Android device at heart. We write our code in Android Studio and send it over WiFi and ADB's TCPIP feature. The robot creates a WiFi network to which the driver station (another Android device that is...
...that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler for the website to suffer The databases and complexity of CMSs Or to take arms against the sea of bloatedness And by opposing end them? To switch: to rewrite; No more; and by switching to say we end The endless debate and the thousand woes ...you get the point. In order to eke out ever-more performance...
I ran into a bug with my CMS Grav. RSS feeds just broke after an update. Going to the feed URL just gave you the blog homepage. Let's try to find out where that bug was introduced using our friend, git bisect. Let's start off by first getting the Grav git source. Luckily there are instructions for deploying from a Git repository. Let's do that. $...
It's been a crazy month for this server. It's also been a crazy one game for Purdue. I guess we all have our moments. In this edition: Wireguard magic, CMS plugins, and remembering my server! Wireguard As about two of you remember, I moved to Oracle Cloud and used Rathole to forward traffic from ✨the cloud✨ to my server. Issue was that everything...
I know I promised to put out an article every week on a Sunday. I haven't been too good at sticking to that schedule. It's now Sunday morning at around 8:50 AM. I have a thing I have to be at by 4 PM. Naturally, I'm going to pick something that will take a lot more than seven hours. Enter: Building a programming language from scratch in six hours...
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently not. This article started off with switching from zsh to fish. Then I thought, "Might as well manage it all with Nix!", which led me to switch to home manager to manage my dotfiles which led me...
I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. Three in the morning. My brain was churning—useless ideas, sweet nothings, anything but the urge to fall asleep. Hardly is my annoyance out when a vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of my consciousness, a shape with penguin body and the head of an apple, a gaze as...
So I (mostly) stopped using GitHub a while back. Unfortunately for me, my CMS Grav requires plugins to be hosted on GitHub. As my KaTeX plugin is developed on Sourcehut, this makes publishing the plugin a little difficult. However, I have come up with an ingenious solution—mirror the Sourcehut repository to GitHub. It's really easier than it...
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create something harder, something better, faster, stronger. Like all good projects, this began with an Idea. My mind reached out and grabbed wispy tendrils from the æther, forcing the disparate concepts to...
As some of you may know, I go to college in the midwestern United States. This means that the land here is pretty flat, and my classes are like a mile from my apartment. Why would I want to walk back and forth multiple times a day when I could do it in style. Of course, I am not the only one beridden by this plight. Popular solutions include: The...
After years of yearning, longing, and pining (let's not forget pining), I finally got myself an actual server. Or rather, a friend of mine got sick of listening to me whine about my old, terrible server, and gave me a spare that he cannibalized for parts (but was still very good and usable). I am now the proud owner of an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen9....
I don't actually get asked this at all, but people ask me a lot, "why doesn't your blog have comments?" It's simple. Comments foster hostility, often provide no contributions to the article, and social media works fine for comments. Hostility Anyone who actually reads the comments section of a news article, I feel sorry for you. It often tends to...
The moon is cool. It's big, it's bright, and it's easy to take a picture of. Not with your phone camera by the way. That always ends up looking like a small black dot. I took my DSLR and made an attempt to take a picture of the moon. It wasn't too bad. Conditions Naturally, I waited until the sky was clear at night. It was clear tonight, so I...
As most of you don't know, I'm off to college soon (within a couple of months), and I'm planning on taking my server with me. Unfortunately, I doubt the tech department at the university would appreciate or allow me to poke holes in their firewall to forward 443 and 80 to my server. So how on earth am I planning on keeping my server up during...
This article has been redacted. It has come to my attention that the information in this article is inaccurate. Git hooks are not pushed or pulled. The only way a Git hook can be added is when another program adds it. The full content of the previous article has been reproduced below. Imagine this. Downloading some code on your computer (just...
As a little gift for completing all 12(!) of my exams, my boyfriend bought me Stardew Valley. Because of DRM and whatnot, I got it through GOG instead of Steam. Stardew has a multiplayer feature, so my boyfriend set up a new multiplayer game, and sent me the invite code. I loaded up the thankfully Linux-native version of Stardew, clicked the...
It's my second month in college. It's pretty cool so far. Server is running, I switched to Purelymail for my emails, and I've met a lot of cool people. EDIT: Speaking of email, I also updated my GPG key. /EDIT Rsync.net backups are still running, storage looks good. The only real issue is that the ethernet in my dorm building is very very...
Oh boy, do I have updates for y'all. A few months ago, just a scant week and a half before winter break (and a few days before finals), my SSD died. This continues a worrying trend in which I purchase hardware only for it to die fairly quickly. In this case, my year-old SSD died, well within the warranty. The RMA process was a pain, and they...
I have self-banned myself from the Orange Website. There are many reasons, but the main ones are that I was spending too much time reading that website and there is way too much toxicity and a culture of bigoted neoliberal techbro NIMBYism. As such, I have found myself with lots of free time on my hands and less of an urge to write something that...
I know I promised to put out an article every week, and I clearly haven't stuck to that (and not even one week in!). However, there is good reason for that. I have always been fairly disappointed in how this website looked. It was too much and the UX was just lacking. So, I decided to redesign the website. Major Changes Move from a Quark-based...
Recently, I came across GitHub's robots.txt. There are some interesting entries in there, so I'm going to try and find out why those entries are there. At the time of writing (2023-02-12 14:53 EST), GitHub's robots.txt looks something like this: # If you would like to crawl GitHub contact us via https://support.github.com?tags=dotcom-robots # We...
Have Grafana deployed? Going crazy trying to figure out why your apps and extensions aren't working? It's an easy fix. Under the [security] section, add angular_support_enabled = true. Now for the longer explanation. I was trying to integrate the Zabbix Grafana app. For the instructions, I had to go to the "config" tab of the plugin. Issue was,...
I've been using GitHub since I was eleven years old. To be fair, I didn't really understand git at the time, but I was able to fumble my way through it (barely). I do remember getting banned because eleven year old me decided to tell the internet my age on GitHub, and the ToS prohibited me from using the service until I was at least thirteen....
I am out of ideas to write about. There, I said it. My problem is that I want to always write long-form content because I feel like anything else isn't "good enough" for this blog. So, I decided to diversify. Introducing: Ersei 'n Notes! Similar to Jim Nielsen's Notes, I want to share cool stuff I read. There's too much noise on Mastodon, and I...
This is an essay I wrote for my IB Economics final about free software and economics. It's heavily inspired by the Freakonomics movie. I've made minimal changes from the version I submitted. As always, if something is wrong or you just have an opinion to share, feel free to contact me. Shoutout to my economics teacher, Mr. Edwards. Free Software...
This is my first draft of my Extended Essay that I wrote for the IB Diploma Programme. At the time we were choosing our topics for our essays, I was getting interested in Vector Packet Processing. The maximum limit for this essay is 4000 words, and I am at 3425. If any of you have improvements I can make, please contact me. Introduction Vector...
Due to a redesign of the website, the sidebar is no longer there. Instead, RSS links are on the footer. However, tag and category filtering still work. If you did not know, I use Grav for my website. This is the first CMS that I really enjoyed using. Drupal was too much, WordPress was difficult to hack, and I did not want to bother with anything...
I went outside today and took some pictures. It was cold and wet but the pictures turned out great. NEF available on request. I looked out the window of my classroom today and saw that the wind had picked up and the leaves were falling off the trees rather quickly. I recently got tripod and found a macrophotography lens. I saw the vibrant red and...
Thank you all for the comments on the HN post! TL;DR: I've moved to Oracle Cloud. This is going to be a brief update to my previous post. So, I'm no longer using Cloudflare because I have security concerns about the SSL stripping going on at Cloudflare. So, I've moved to Oracle cloud's free tier. I spun up an Ampere (ARM) machine with as little...
Economics: the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But what if nothing is scarce? What if, on a whim, you could print whatever you want? Probably disaster. Matter printers are a constant theme throughout science fiction[citation needed]. Imagine a 3D printer that can make anything. Yes, anything. Not just out of plastic, but fully-formed...
At the behest of a friend of mine, I decided to get myself a Privacy.com account. I filled it out with my personal information, activated the account, and proceeded to not use it for a couple of months. There were no suspicious charges (or charges whatsoever) on this account. Just a few days ago, I decided that I finally had a use for...
So I've been on the fediverse for about a year now. I started on mastodon.social but held off on self-hosting until just a few weeks ago. I thought it was gonna kill my poor server to federate so much (I've heard things about Ruby on Rails, not all positive), so I just didn't. Eventually, I was pushed over into running my own instance literally...
Yeah, so, there has been a lot of buzz about Minecraft mods carrying viruses. Let's go ahead and isolate Minecraft from our system. I wrote a script that ought to do everything for you. Download it from Sourcehut. To use it, set it as the "wrapper command" in PrismLauncher. Yep. That's it. It wasn't too difficult to make this program. All I did...
I meet a lot of nerds—some are even of the Computer Variety! Since I'm obsessed with RSS, my first1 question boils down to "do you have an RSS feed I can subscribe to?" You know what they say about assuming. Time Building a website is time-consuming! Doing anything more than slapping together something in HTML and throwing it on GitHub pages in...