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Why read old philosophy?
I’m going to try to explain a mystery that puzzled me for years. This answer finally dawned on me in the middle of one of those occasional conversations in which non-perplexed friends patiently try…
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How to pick a microcontroller
Revisiting some opinions on how to pick a microcontroller - as a followup to SnapEDA's post on the Top 10 Microcontrollers on their site.
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Host your own contacts and calendars and share them across devices
I'm trying to learn ways to minimize my reliance upon large companies for handling my day-to-day personal data. So I figured calendar and contacts should be on my list of things to self-host. This post is about how I migrated all my Google calendars and phone contacts to my own server without losing any features...
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How to confirm a Google user’s specific email address
I reported an issue to Google, which allows an attacker to confirm whether someone is logged in to any one of a list of specific Google accounts.
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Writing a Service Worker
This website is for sale! hacklabo.com is your first and best source for all of the information you’re looking for. From general topics to more of what you would expect to find here, hacklabo.com has it all. We hope you find what you are searching for!
967
A Mac Podcast App You Can't Have
I wasn't going to write this post because I've already said most of what I wanted to on Twitter [http://twitter.com/steve228uk]. Yesterday though, I changed my mind when I saw this Tweet from Product Hunt. > The Best Podcast Apps for Mac 🎙️🖥️ Add your favorite 👉 https://t.
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Opus 1.2 Released
For music encoding Opus has already been shown to out-perform other audio codecs at both 64 kb/s and 96 kb/s . We originally thought that 64 kb/s was near the lowest bitrate at which Opus could be useful for streaming stereo music. However, with variable bitrate (VBR) improvements in Opus 1.1, suddenly 48 kb/s became…
970
Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars
When some search for the roots of the First World War, there is a tendency to look towards the Balkans. After all, it was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian E…
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Securing a laptop for travel to China
We're all impatiently waiting on quantum-proof asymmetrical crypto algorithms to become commonplace. Until that happens, we must all live with the assumption that all currently used asymmetric crypto will be trivially decryptable once quantum computers become powerful enough. This is probably the reason why government…
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I can no longer recommend MailChimp
MailChimp doesn’t seem to think double opt-in is a good idea for mailing lists anymore.
976
Redesigning Apple Music after Being Rejected
I’d like to preface this case study by stating that my intentions behind redesigning Apple Music were in no way driven by indignation or…
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Why I’m Remaking OpenAI Universe
OpenAI Universe was very exciting when it first came out. With Universe, it was suddenly possible to train AI to play Flash games, book flights online, and perform various other real-world tasks. Unfortunately, Universe never really took off in the AI world. I don’t know why others aren’t using Universe, but I can…
980
The Minimally-Nice Open Source Software Maintainer
Being involved in open source software is rewarding, yeah? You start off contributing to your favorite project, and it feels so heartwarming when that project’s maintainers recognize your effort. Then a few years later you somehow end up responsible for that project, and maybe some satellite projects, and people are…
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Reasons not to use Skype (2012)
As of August, 2025, Skype no longer exists as a dis-service for actual use. However, this information about how it was unjust while it operated may still be interesting for comparison with other online dis-services and for understanding the wrongs that they often do to users.
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Hell is a multi-threaded C++ program (2006)
What are threads? Every modern operating system has support for threads, and most programming environments provide some level of support for...
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Deep Work: A welcome kick in the butt
Based on this tweet by Enrico Bertini: Little project I developed during the break looking back at 2016: "Quantifying and Visualizing “Deep Work”" https://t.co/s3d9Zn685Q— Enrico Bertini (@FILWD) January 3, 2017 … after having been successfully primed by this one some weeks ago (because locals!): I also recommend…
986
The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
987
Formal Verification: The Gap Between Perfect Code and Reality
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Z
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Understanding the math behind 0x5f3759df and the fast inverse square root (2012)
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
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