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vladak

52 karma · joined January 24, 2020

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vladak··on RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3
also 1-Wire
vladak··on RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3
or in the corporate office
vladak··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
I have couple of true (and therefore more expensive) CO2 sensors around the apartment, all of them Adafruit SCD-40, each connected to its own ESP32 which broadcasts the metrics (including temperature and humidity) to MQTT broker which feeds into Prometheus. A Grafana instance running on a Raspberry Pi can then post an alert which goes into PagerDuty and also to a small speaker connected to the RPi to play a distinct tune when the CO2 threshold is breached in one of the rooms. Then on my work desk (not in a shed, unfortunately) I have a separate ESP32 with a display to provide visual-only alerting there which taps into MQTT to get the metrics (see https://github.com/vladak/workmon).
vladak··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
I knew that when the build actions started failing en masse and my newly submitted PRs did not trigger the build actions at all (besides the mandatory one in my organization), it seemed logical to me to look at HN first..

Especially troublesome in the middle of trying to fix a high score security vulnerability when the release vehicle is Github.

vladak··on NetBSD 11.0
I've been using OpenBSD on my router/firewall boxes (in various forms, mostly i386/amd64 - Soekris or PC enginers but also mips/octeon - Ubiquiti boxes) for the past 20+ years. Mostly because in that area I do not want any compromises (literally and figuratively) on security. I like the Packet Firewall philosophy and functionality. The fact it is rock solid I take for granted. Another reason is that the system is cleanly designed and simple. Quite easy to reason about with source code in hand.
vladak··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
I wonder if the booklet mentioned in the article was also inspired by the Scott McNealy booklet [1]. It would not be so surprising given the history of the Menlo Park campus.

[1] https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...

vladak··on Banned book library in a wi-fi smart light bulb
Makes me wonder if credential harvesting is a thing when all these smart bulbs and other IoT devices get thrown away with the Wi-Fi credentials stored on them.
vladak··on Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM
For the microcontroller use case with Python, the alternative might be to use actual microcontroller that runs CircuitPython/MicroPython. Personally I find it a bit better due to no need to manage/update the Linux distro.
vladak··on I hate soldering
Unrelated question but I see you're probably located in Europe. Are there any places around to get your PCBs treated with conformal paint ? And I mean tiny runs - couple of PCBs.
vladak··on Ode to the AA Battery
Cool. I have a modern (not smart) body weight scale and it regularly ruins this way at least one of the 3 GP NiMh rechargable AAA batteries I put in it, so I wanted to hear some ideas what could be done with them given they have been through only bunch of charge cycles.
vladak··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
see e.g. Who cares about the Baltic jammer ? https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-who-cares-about-the-baltic-jamme...
vladak··on Ubuntu LTS releases to 15 years with Legacy add-on
One of my colleagues (who has no beard) called this sort of job half jokingly retrocomputing. It has definitely its pros and cons.
vladak··on Cloudflare Radar: AI Insights
Naive question maybe: do these AI companies crawl/ingest video/audio yet ? if yes, is that included in the stats ?
vladak··on Global sales of combustion engine cars have peaked
I know this is not a very helpful w.r.t. protection, however there is https://bikeindex.org/ - recently I was listening to a Darknet diaries podcast https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/153/ which has a nice story about stolen bikes and what to do about it.
vladak··on Evolving my ergonomic setup (or, my laptop with extra steps)
This feels familiar. I lug my Lenovo laptop, the Logitech ergonomic mouse, aluminium laptop stand and external Keychron keyboard (thinking about buying the Q10 with Alice layout), mostly to have convenient setup on the go, not primarily for ergonomics. Carrying all this stuff plus the extra other things in the daily backpack is certainly not ergonomic, however I think about it as training for some long hikes.

I also use the LG DualUp display at home, like it very much. Similarly, my home setup has the rain design mStand next to it.

Now, if the espresso machine could be also carried with the computer setup..

vladak··on Why so many families are "drowning in toys"
This method is called "packing party" (without the moving) by the [Mm]inimalists.
vladak··on We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Concurrency Bug at Netflix
yep, the link in the "some calls to ConcurrentHashMap.get() seemed to be running infinitely." sentence points to HashMap.html#get(java.lang.Object)
vladak··on Unfortunate things about performance reviews (2021)
I have been working for a corporation for number of years however discovered the quotas thing only recently. Even though my motivation comes from elsewhere, this made a dent in it.
vladak··on F/OSS Comics: 8. The Origins of Unix and the C Language
There is also https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo (Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today)
vladak··on Code search is hard
The question is what code. In preprocessed languages there can be lots of ifdefs and such for various environments and architectures.
vladak··on Post-quantum cryptography is too damn big
It is a strange comparison indeed, esp. with some generations of engineers might not even know what a floppy disk was, let alone imagine how the 1% of the capacity translates to network protocols.
vladak··on Cinnamon: Using century old tech to build a mean load shedder (2023)
Yeah. It seems to me that the main purpose was to show the car queues meeting at the intersection however the vertigo effect is enough distraction not to notice it.
vladak··on Cinnamon: Using century old tech to build a mean load shedder (2023)
Also, the top left graph in fig8 is a snake, so bonus points for that.
vladak··on McNealy's bittersweet memo bids good-bye to Sun (2010)
I (re)found a small brochure at work that contains the company mission statement with rationale from Scott McNealy. This was long time after Sun was acquired, however I found it interesting enough to retype it:

https://gist.github.com/vladak/c0abb6856d7902291f760be467b24...

I've never had the capacity to think deeply about what is within, however I do remember the days around 2007 or so when it seemed to me that there was not a week where some new exciting technology (software or hardware) was not being released. For me as a freshman this was impressive.

vladak··on Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
In the company I work for, this is currently in the form of nudging. "Come to the office, we have prepared healthy breakfast for you" (obviously I don't work for FAANG or a startup trying to lure employees with such stuff) and more lately "we encourage you to start coming to the office for our regular team meeting".
vladak··on A confession exposes India’s hacking industry
For a project on Github I maintain, I've seen increased amount of low quality PRs in the recent months (changes where it was obvious that the submitter never ran the code or interacted with the project as a user) that seemed to be raised just for the purpose of getting some sort of cred. These create noise and extra work for the maintainers. Most of them originated from India, I believe. Had to remove those 'help-wanted' and 'good-first-issue' tags because of these void PRs.
vladak··on PC Engines EOL
Exactly. Soekris was the first thing that came to my mind after seeing this news, having used various Soekris boxes for home router for many years. Eventually got replaced by Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4 (which are now also impossible to get via common sale channels, besides ebay) running OpenBSD.
vladak··on Ask HN: What lesser-known accessories do you use with your computer?
3-color light (https://www.adafruit.com/product/5127) and associated circuitry (https://github.com/vladak/workmon/) that reminds me to change the position of the standing desk if too long in the same position (using ultrasonic distance sensor mounted underneath the table) and to take a break if working for too long without a break (using smart plug to which my display is connected) and also to alert me if I have worked for too long in total that day.
vladak··on Ask HN: Anyone using proprietary Unix at work?
Yep. Two of my local colleagues were actively working with Open Group until then, fixing UNIX compliance bugs, running the test suites, producing the reports etc.
vladak··on OpenSSL 3.0.7 fixes X.509 email address buffer overflows
One can buy premium support from OpenSSL for 1.0.x and let them supply patches and releases. This is what the company I work for does.

At one point I was managing a fork of OpenSSL 0.9.7 for an OS version and in order to communicate what vulnerabilities were fixed, we appended the list of CVEs to the version string. The line grew to hideous dimensions as you can imagine.

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