Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
My trusty old smartwatch recently stopped working. It was a Garmin Vivomove HR, a minimal hybrid watch with regular watch hands and a tiny hidden screen that showed notifications and messages. It served me well for quite some time but unfortunately the hidden screen has stopped working and it would cost me as much to…
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
Self awareness, mindfulness and affirmations can help calm your inner critic when triggers arise. Check out these tips for more.
For the last 10 years or so, Arch Linux has been my Linux distribution of choice. The early years were a bit rough, and the process of moving to systemd wasn't without its challenges either, though the experience has improved dramatically since then. In spite of these improvements, certain issues persisted, such as…
The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…
Over the last few years I’ve gradually given up on Twitter. This has been a long term process because of how deeply my professional and intellectual life was embedded into the service. Not on…
Originally, the domain part of a web address was all ASCII (so no accents, no emojis, no Chinese characters). This was extended a long time ago thanks to something called internationalized domain name (IDN). Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis…
This is a fun one. I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit staring at LLM output. And there’s something that I’ve noticed: LLM-generated prose has a kind of… vibe. It’s difficult to describe,…
A function that computes to the first color if the used color scheme is light or unknown, or to the second color if the used color scheme is dark.
Two-phase commit for humans
A recent UK Channel 4 TV programme talked about the recent decline in quality of food: YouTube Channel 4
UPDATE: this post unexpectedly ended up on Hacker News and I received a lot of comments. The two most important points being made are (1) that Secure Boot on the RPi as …
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
It’s April Cools! It’s like April Fools, except instead of cringe comedy you make genuine content that’s different from your normal stuff.1 For example, last year I talked about owning a microscope. This year I debated doing another hobby but settled on a much dumber topic. Have you ever seen those lists of weird…
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…
On 26 Nov 2019 at 14:55 UTC, I logged into my server that hosts my website to perform a simple maintenance activity. Merely three minutes later, at 14:58 UTC, the domain name susam.in used to host this website was transferred to another registrant without any authorisation by me or without any notification sent to me…
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
First a round of thanks for the many people in industry and government who provided valuable links, background and insights! I could not have done this without your help! If you spot any mistakes, or have suggestions, please do contact me on bert@hubertnet.nl The EU’s new Cyber Resilience Act is admirable in its goal…
When I’m learning a new language, I tend to take a very dumb approach (and I don’t mean that in some enlightened way). I’ll usually try out a tutorial or two, but if the language is similar to another language that I know, I’ll basically just start coding without investing a lot of time learning the language features…
Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such…
I started working on Flyaway with the intention of becoming familiar with Wayland, its protocols and extensions, and the wlroots library. Instead, I ended up genuinely liking all three.
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
