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dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Great resource, thank you for sharing! I should include it in the blog post footnotes.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

You forgot the steps of pressing your own silicon wafers in the garage, followed by soldering motherboards from zero, and of course, having a steel mill to build racks and computer cases. The only way to ensure true independence.

In all seriousness, I am a big advocate for hosting your own infrastructure as much as you can, but that requires you to be REALLY into doing it. Otherwise, it's just a completely unnecessary chore.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Totally. If I would tell 10-year-old me that I have my own website on my own domain, it would be seen as a shocking development. I find it really cool to be able to have a corner of the internet that is just mine.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

You don't even need attention - it could be a public blog where you share about the things you learn. You never know who it's going to help. That's primarily my motivation with the blog.

dendon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Spot-on - I call it out at the end of the article. Principles are broadly the same.

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

Krtek is an underrated classic!

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

I switched to the classic photo viewer because I am not a fan of the new one. You can switch with a bit of registry "hacking":

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll" /f

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell" /f

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\open" /f /v MuiVerb /t REG_SZ /d "@photoviewer.dll,-3043"

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\open\command" /f /ve /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe \"%ProgramFiles%\Windows Photo Viewer\PhotoViewer.dll\", ImageView_Fullscreen %1"

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\open\DropTarget" /f /v Clsid /t REG_SZ /d "{FFE2A43C-56B9-4bf5-9A79-CC6D4285608A}"

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\print" /f

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\print\command" /f /ve /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d "%SystemRoot%\System32\rundll32.exe \"%ProgramFiles%\Windows Photo Viewer\PhotoViewer.dll\", ImageView_Fullscreen %1"

reg add "HKCR\Applications\photoviewer.dll\shell\print\DropTarget" /f /v Clsid /t REG_SZ /d "{FFE2A43C-56B9-4bf5-9A79-CC6D4285608A}"

For HEIC photos, you might still want to use the new viewer.

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

Thank you for the shout-out, really appreciate it. Your assumption is correct - it's regular HID device!

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

I don't know about the latest Stream Deck models, but for previous models (at least the ones I have) you might be surprised that behind the scenes is just one display! See the teardown (album not mine): https://imgur.com/gallery/elgato-stream-deck-what-is-inside-...

The buttons are entirely virtual and the onboard controller ensures they are properly positioned, so you don't have to have each button carry it's own screen.

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

Yeah, I am undertaking this primarily to break free of the artificial constraints - the hardware is top-notch, but the ever-increasing push to make every piece of software connect to an account when it's not needed is absurd.

Appreciate the shout-out!

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

They do, and indeed there are libraries that are already accomplishing what I am doing! This project is mostly there to satisfy my own curiosity, as well as build a robust .NET wrapper (not Python). Love the work that python-elgato-streamdeck does, for sure.

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

Indeed, I am not the first, and I am sure not the last, to dig through Stream Deck internals. This article was mostly written to satisfy my own curiosity.

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

That would be stock Windows 10!

dendon Reverse Engineering the Stream Deck+

Yeah, the naming for these devices is not very obvious to quite a few readers. This blog post is about the control box.

dendon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://den.dev

Entirely static site built with Hugo. Blogging for a bit more than a decade now.

dendon Apollo will close down on June 30th

There's no hand to overplay here anymore - the app is shutting down, and the author made it clear that is the intention. While the verbiage could've been different, that doesn't really matter. In these kinds of conversations Reddit folks could've asked for clarification, not assume bad intent (which they did, but then misrepresented).

Apollo's leverage was "We help keep power users on your platform, and keep them happy." And, as it turns out, while their numbers are not necessarily large, they are also some of the loudest and with most influence (see how many subreddits joined the blackout). What the outcome of this will be is to be seen, but it's a very shortsighted take from Reddit, in my own humble opinion.

dendon Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

Been blogging for more than a decade on my own site (https://den.dev).

1. Got my break in the tech industry thanks to a blog post on some reverse engineering tinkering I've been doing.

2. On multiple occasions, I ended up searching online for a problem only to land on a blog post I wrote years ago, so I use it as my own reference every once in a while.

3. Connected to a network of folks in the companies I've worked at (and continue to work in) thanks to blog posts where I tinker with APIs and all sorts of random stuff ("Oh yeah - I've seen that blog post before.") that I wouldn't run into otherwise.

4. Got way better at writing and expressing my thoughts clearly, especially when it comes to more technical topics, thanks to having a public forcing function.

dendon Reverse engineering the Halo Infinite API to play experimental game modes

There have been rumors that some of the variants that I cover in the blog post are actually somewhat playable, albeit I was not able to reproduce the results. From one side, I can understand this - testing and shipping something like Forge that is bug-free takes time. On the other side - it's been a while since a groundbreaking game mode was release.

dendon Windows' Undocumented “Emergency Restart”

Indeed the feature is undocumented, but it's been known for some time - its goal is to mimic as much as possible the reset button, for those situations when your computer freezes up to a point where Ctrl+Alt+Del works, but literally no other process responds. Think "Background process locked up my OS, and I can't do anything short of unplugging the computer." Especially helpful on a laptop where the physical reset button is not available.

dendon FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

That's the wrong analogy. In your example, the former is required for the latter. FedEx wants network stability and a data store, most likely, but the success of their business does not depend on them hosting their own infrastructure.

dendon FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

This makes a lot of sense if you think through the angle that their core value prop does not come from the network/data latency optimization. It's not Netflix and Dropbox - this is FedEx. Their core business value proposition comes from logistics and being able to react to the information quickly, but extra millisecond latency is unlikely to make or break the business.

In light of this, it's easier to outsource the network and data infrastructure to a provider that actually does it day in and day out and put the limited engineering resources to something that is more impactful.

Just reaffirms that quite a few companies do not want to run their own servers unless they absolutely have to.

dendon Twitter Notes

I am an active Twitter user and I know what you mean by screenshots of walls of text. There is no endemic use of such modality across Twitter, with few exceptions.

I stand by the statement that Twitter moving into publishing long-form content puts it on the same pedestal with Medium and defeats the purpose of the platform. Which is OK - strategy evolves, and someone did the math that this is going to be more beneficial.

My other comments reflect my stance on their decision, but I am neither a product manager at Twitter, nor do I have any knowledge of the "whys" so take this with a boulder of salt.

dendon Twitter Notes

The thing is - other providers exists, it's just they are not as convenient as the walled gardens. That's a big part of the challenge. You can own your blog on your own domain and site, but you need to be able to set that up, not forget to renew your domain, potentially deal with availability issues if the site goes down, etc. Compare that to basically just putting your content somewhere where someone else worries about all those things.

It's a trade-off that folks are willing to make, and for the "average user" (definition can vary depending on service/area) that is a very straightforward choice. I just hope that more folks understand what rights they give up by becoming attached to one platform as their publishing medium.

dendon Twitter Notes

I would generally agree, _except_ with the fact then this just defeats the entire point of Twitter - it might as well become the next Medium then. Which, let's be realistic, can be a strategy too - become a content publisher rather than an aggregator of links and short opinions. But then again, that's not why I am personally on Twitter. YMMV.

dendon Twitter Notes

Yes and no. You lose exclusivity, and the ability to manage where and how your content can be used. Once you post it on Twitter, you can see from the ToS that they can basically do what they want with it - plug it into ads, print on billboards, publish alongside other content producers, etc. This is a suboptimal position to put yourself into if you care about your content.

dendon Twitter Notes

Ghost is also just one way to do it - there are others that still allow you to have ownership of your content and the portability/domain connection that allows you, the writer, to manage your content in whatever shape you want.

dendon Twitter Notes

I have the same hunch, to be honest. The core value proposition of Twitter, at least to me, is that it's short-form content - quick updates from the network that I care about. I don't go there to either write long-form content or consume long-form content directly (although I do get pointers to others' newsletter and blog pages).

My guess is that this is an attempt to replace long threads (1/n), but those have their own place and mechanics and I don't see how getting people to write Twitter Notes is in any way a 1:1 replacement or improvement for that.

Time will tell.

dendon Twitter Notes

You could also still post links to your content wherever your audience is - it's just a matter of being able to maintain control over the content itself.

dendon Twitter Notes

You can have your blog make you money if you want to, in whichever way you want to. "Donate content" is just that - when you write long-form on any platform that you have no direct control over, you're handing over the rights to said content. From Twitter's own ToS[0]:

> By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).

[0]: https://twitter.com/en/tos

dendon Twitter Notes

My earlier comment is not contradictory to this statement. Indeed, you need to be on social media sites to reach a broader audience, but you can post links to your content that is external to those sites rather than giving it up wholesale within the network.