Blog posts


2023

USPS incomplete address scam

Wednesday, Aug 2, 2023

How does the “incomplete address” scam work? What happens if you divulge your payment information? How can you avoid it?

Identity thieves are not sophisticated hackers, nor do they typically wear dark hoodies, but try telling that to the media.

2022

Anti-fingerprinting Configuration for NGINX

Thursday, Aug 11, 2022

Software on the web discloses a wealth of information with little prompt. Help protect your privacy by using these anti-fingerprinting options.

Fingerprinting the web.

2021

Peplink FusionHub - Looking under the hood

Tuesday, Aug 3, 2021

I decided to take a look at the FusionHub virtual routing appliance from Peplink. Here’s how to open it up and get inside.

2020

CVE-2018-10756: Transmission

Thursday, May 14, 2020

CVE-2018-10756: Transmission can crash or possibly execute arbitrary code when opening a maliciously crafted torrent file.

2019

Clean Up Your Gems

Sunday, Jun 23, 2019

In this post, I urge Ruby gem maintainers to be aware of the files they distribute with their gems. If your gem includes files which you have not consciously included for a specific reason, please consider removing these files from your gem.

2018

Unit Price Calculator

Wednesday, Mar 28, 2018

I’m at the store shopping for groceries, and I’m considering buying a thing. I’ve narrowed down my selection to two final candidates. These two options look equivalent in nearly every aspect, except for the part where they are packaged in differently-sized containers, and the price is different. So… what now?

2016

Vizio TV - "No Signal" on HDMI ports

Saturday, Nov 26, 2016

So you own a Vizio-brand television set. You’ve got the fancy keyboard remote and the video streaming apps right on your TV! But, when you plug in a device to any one of the HDMI ports, the TV merely displays, “No Signal”.

Rapidly Sunsetting FTP

Sunday, May 8, 2016

File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, is considerably insecure and should not be used anymore. Seriously.

2015

How to Set Up a Garry's Mod Dedicated Server

Sunday, Jan 4, 2015

After fights with the server browser and entirely too many buggy prop hunt servers, I decided to set up my own dedicated server for Garry’s Mod. Documentation for this does exist, but I had to start from scratch a few times in order to get everything just right. This is the information I wish I had when setting it up the first time.

2014

AT&T U-verse is Extremely Slow

Sunday, Aug 10, 2014

AT&T has done it again.

My ISP is Cheating on Speed Tests, Too!

Sunday, Apr 20, 2014

In this very inspiring blog post, Kirsle accuses Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles, CA of traffic-shaping speed tests in order to make it appear that they are delivering internet speeds as advertised (when in fact, they aren’t). My post aims to be a spin-off experiment.

How Not to Install an Operating System

Saturday, Jan 4, 2014

I hate it when software triple-checks you before performing a potentially risky operation. Operating system install tools are especially bad about this. Sometimes, they prevent you from installing the OS altogether.

2012

Borderlands 2 Compatibility Pack Pricing

Tuesday, Oct 9, 2012

Why did the Borderlands 2 compatibility pack cost -1 MSP, and then 4,294,967,295 MSP, simultaneously?

2010

Trees

Thursday, Jun 24, 2010

This picture was my desktop background for a very long time.