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Wacom tablets track every app you open
I have a Wacom drawing tablet. I use it to draw cover illustrations for my blog posts, such as this one.
Robert Heaton
Software engineer. One-track lover down a two-way lane
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Visit robertheaton.com → On Hacker News Mar 2013 – Jul 2024
Security & Privacy 12Life, Learning & Writing 8Career & Management 6Software Engineering 5Web & Frontend 4Tools & Productivity 4
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Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
This post is part of my Programming for Advanced Beginners series. Subscribe now to receive specific, actionable ways to make your code cleaner, every other week, entirely free.
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PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
The plane reached 10,000ft. I took out my laptop, planning to peruse the internet and maybe do a little work if I got really desperate.
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Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp
You and your good buddy, Steve Steveington, are in training for an arduous charity walk. You signed up together on the spur of the moment and pledged to hold each other accountable whilst you got in shape for the big day. However, you have developed reason to suspect that Steve Steveington is losing his commitment to…
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HP printers try to send data back to HP about your devices and what you print
Last week my in-laws politely but firmly asked me to set up their new HP printer. I protested that I’m completely clueless about that sort of thing, despite my tax-return-job-title of “software engineer”. Still remonstrating, I was gently bundled into their study with an instruction pamphlet, a cup of tea, a promise…
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A blogging style guide
Here are 39 ways to make your blog more entertaining to read and more pleasurable to write.
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“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
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I was seven words away from being spear-phished
Three weeks ago I received a very flattering email from the University of Cambridge, asking me to judge the Adam Smith Prize for Economics:
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Lessons from a Silicon Valley job search
This post is a fairly exhaustive summary of the things I learned during my recent Silicon Valley job search. It is really quite long, but has been edited aggressively, and I’ve tried to make sure that nearly every point is either actionable, interesting, or both. If you’re currently or may one day be looking for a job…
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A system to help you remember more of what you read
Five years ago I realized that I remembered almost nothing about most books that I read. I was reading all kinds of non-fiction - pop-psychology, pop-economics, pop-sociology, you name it - and felt like quite the polymath auto-didact. But one day, after I had finished blathering at a friend about how much I had…
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Check you're wearing trousers first
It’s easy, fun, and a catastrophic mistake to over-intellectualise. Unfortunately it also pays pretty well.
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The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm Explained
The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm teaches your computer how to riff. The algorithm takes in an archetypical input, and produces procedurally-generated outputs that look like it.
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Take pride or fuck it
The blank, unblemished untitled.txt shimmering in your code editor can mean only one thing. It’s new feature time.
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I'm a security engineer and I still almost got scammed
I was in the park with my son and his best friend. I saw 2 missed calls from a number I didn’t recognise. I Googled it - it was my bank. I told the other adults that I should call back in case it was important.
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Vulnerability in Bumble dating app reveals any user's exact location
The vulnerability in this post is real. The story and characters are obviously not.
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Code review without your glasses
You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?
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How to make Slack less bad for you
Slack claim to be in the business of "making your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive". We’re about to be cynical, so let’s acknowledge that this claim is probably at least par...
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How to date a recording using background electrical noise
Three men were accused of selling firearms to South London gangs. At their 2012 trial in Croydon Crown Court, the prosecution played the jury a recording, taken undercover, of the trio allegedly arranging a sale. But the men’s lawyers claimed that the recording was a fake, and that the police had fabricated it by…
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Migrating bajillions of database records at Stripe
There are roughly ten thousand bajillion (to the nearest bajillion) merchants registered with Stripe. We recently finished a Very Big Migration of Large Amounts Of Data between several database tables for every single one of them, without losing any of it, without any downtime, mis-reads or mis-writes, whilst running…
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HTTPS in the real world
In cryptography, trust is mathematically provable. Everything else is just faith.
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Gameboy Doctor: debug and fix your gameboy emulator
Are you building a Gameboy emulator? Are you stuck? Are you failing Blargg’s test ROMs and can’t work out why?
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How does a TCP Reset Attack work?
A TCP reset attack is executed using a single packet of data, no more than a few bytes in size. A spoofed TCP segment, crafted and sent by an attacker, tricks two victims into abandoning a TCP connection, interrupting possibly vital communications between them.
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A beginner's guide to funemployment
I recently stopped working for 5 months, and aside from writing a few blog posts and getting to Gold League in Starcraft, I achieved very little. It was wonderful.
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Coding with gumption
The first and only mention of Gumption Theory in modern writing is found towards the end of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author sets out a plain and uncomplicated approach to attaining and maintaining the state of mind required to repair a motorcycle. It takes about 20 pages. And the…
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“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it
2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…